Key Takeaways
- Having more money and feeling that you have enough are not the same thing. Psychological research on materialism examines people’s values and priorities, not simply their income or net worth.
- Higher materialism and dispositional greed have been associated with lower well-being and life satisfaction, although much of the evidence cannot establish cause and effect.
- Higher income has also been associated with greater emotional well-being. The evidence does not show that wealthy people are generally unhappy or that having less money makes people happier.
- Voluntary simplicity is associated with greater well-being in observational research, but choosing to consume less is fundamentally different from poverty or involuntary deprivation.
- A useful question may therefore be not simply “How much do I have?” but “What would allow me to recognize when I have enough?”
Introduction
Having more money and feeling that you have enough are not necessarily the same experience. Research distinguishes financial resources from materialistic values and their relationship with well-being.
Imagine two people.
One possesses more money than they could reasonably spend but experiences life as an endless contest to acquire more.
The other has a modest income, enough to meet their needs, and little desire to turn life into a financial competition.
Which person feels richer?
Their bank accounts answer one question. Their experiences may answer another.
Calling the first person “poor” would obviously be inaccurate in any economic sense. Yet there is a philosophical point inside the contradiction: someone who never experiences enough may live with a persistent sense of insufficiency, regardless of how large their fortune becomes.
That observation should never be confused with actual poverty. Someone unable to afford food, housing, healthcare, or other necessities faces material hardship that cannot reasonably be equated with a wealthy person’s dissatisfaction.
Psychological research does, however, allow us to examine part of the underlying idea through studies of materialism, greed, income, life satisfaction, and the pursuit of material goals.
What Psychology Means by Materialism
Materialism generally concerns the importance people place on money, possessions, status, and related material goals.
It cannot be inferred simply from income.
Someone may build a successful company, accumulate retirement savings, own an expensive home, or earn a high salary without making material acquisition the central measure of personal success. Conversely, a person does not need to be wealthy to hold strongly materialistic values.
One of the most comprehensive examinations of this subject was a meta-analysis that included 753 effect sizes from 259 independent samples. Stronger materialistic orientations were associated, on average, with lower personal well-being. The size of the relationship varied according to how researchers measured materialism, with broader measures of materialistic values and goals generally showing stronger associations than measures focused primarily on money (Dittmar et al., 2014).
That distinction matters.
Wanting money for security, caring for a family, retirement, education, or meaningful projects is not necessarily equivalent to organizing one’s identity around acquiring more.
The findings also describe statistical relationships across groups. They cannot tell us whether a particular financially ambitious person is happy, unhappy, generous, greedy, fulfilled, or dissatisfied.
Is Greed Associated With Lower Life Satisfaction?
Research on dispositional greed gets closer to the idea of never feeling that one has enough.
Dispositional greed is a psychological construct that captures individual differences in wanting more and being dissatisfied with what one already has. It should not be assigned to someone simply because that person is wealthy.
A 2024 study involving 373 participants found that higher dispositional greed was associated with lower satisfaction with life and greater social-comparison orientation. These relationships remained after the researchers controlled for an index of anxiety and depression (de Lira et al., 2024).
The role of social comparison was more complicated than the familiar idea that comparing ourselves with others simply makes us miserable. Among people high in dispositional greed, lower social-comparison orientation was associated with lower life satisfaction than a medium level of comparison orientation.
That unexpected result illustrates why psychological research rarely fits neatly into popular slogans.
More importantly, the study does not show that greed causes unhappiness. Nor did it examine billionaires as a distinct population.
The evidence supports an association between measured dispositional greed and reported life satisfaction. It does not allow us to diagnose wealthy strangers, infer someone’s motives from their net worth, or conclude that acquiring wealth inevitably produces dissatisfaction.
Can Changing Materialistic Priorities Improve Well-Being?
Cross-sectional studies can identify relationships between variables, but they generally cannot establish which came first.
Longitudinal and experimental research can provide additional information.
Kasser and colleagues conducted three longitudinal studies spanning 12 years, two years, and six months. Across them, placing relatively less importance on materialistic goals over time was associated with improvements in well-being, while movement toward relatively greater materialistic priorities was associated with declines in well-being.
The researchers also conducted an intervention involving highly materialistic U.S. adolescents. Those receiving an intervention that decreased materialism subsequently showed improvements in self-esteem over the following months compared with a control group (Kasser et al., 2014).
This provides more information than a single cross-sectional correlation, but its boundaries matter.
An intervention affecting self-esteem among highly materialistic adolescents does not demonstrate that reducing materialism will make every adult happier, much less that it would have the same effects among extremely wealthy people.
It does provide evidence that changing materialistic priorities may influence aspects of well-being under certain circumstances.
Does Living With Less Make People Happier?
Another relevant body of research concerns voluntary simplicity and minimalism.
A systematic review identified 23 empirical studies examining voluntary simplicity and well-being. Overall, the studies showed a consistent positive relationship between the two. Possible explanations included greater control over consumption desires and greater satisfaction of psychological needs (Hook et al., 2023).
There is an important limitation.
Almost all of the studies included in the review were cross-sectional, and none were experimental. That leaves the direction of the relationship uncertain.
Simplifying one’s life might contribute to well-being. People who are already relatively satisfied might also be more attracted to simplicity. Other characteristics could influence both.
And one word in “voluntary simplicity” deserves special emphasis: voluntary.
Choosing to buy fewer things while having secure housing, adequate food, healthcare, and financial stability is fundamentally different from being unable to afford necessities.
Research on minimalism should not be used to romanticize poverty or imply that people experiencing deprivation would be happier if they simply wanted less.
More Money Can Also Be Associated With Greater Well-Being
This is where an important distinction becomes essential.
Income and materialism are not the same variable.
In 2023, Killingsworth, Kahneman, and Mellers revisited apparently conflicting findings about income and emotional well-being. Their analysis used experience-sampling data from 33,391 employed U.S. adults ages 18 to 65.
On average, emotional well-being increased with income. A flattening pattern appeared primarily among the least happy portion of the sample, whereas well-being continued to increase with income among happier participants. The authors analyzed income on a logarithmic scale, meaning the results should not be interpreted as every additional dollar producing the same increase in well-being (Killingsworth et al., 2023).
The study also tells us relatively little specifically about the ultrawealthy. More than 90% of participants reported household incomes below $200,000, while incomes above $500,000 represented only a small fraction of the sample.
These findings do not contradict the materialism research because the studies measure different things.
Income describes financial resources.
Materialism concerns the importance assigned to material goals, possessions, and related forms of success.
Greater financial resources can provide security, choices, comfort, and opportunities. At the same time, making continual acquisition disproportionately important may be associated with poorer well-being.
Both patterns can exist.
Neither tells us how a particular rich or poor person feels.
The Difference Between a Financial Goal and an Endless Requirement
Consider someone saving enough money to leave an unsafe home.
Their desire for more money has an identifiable purpose: safety.
Someone else might reach one financial milestone only to immediately redefine success as the next milestone, then the next.
At some point, a useful question arises:
What would count as enough?
This is not a psychological diagnostic test.
Ambition can arise from countless motives, including security, creativity, competition, responsibility, enjoyment, status, family obligations, philanthropy, or enthusiasm for building something. An outside observer cannot reliably determine those motives from someone’s net worth.
But people can ask themselves useful questions.
What is my next financial milestone supposed to provide?
If I reach it, will I allow myself to enjoy what I have achieved?
Would the next goal meaningfully improve my life, or has pursuing the next number become the goal itself?
What am I exchanging in time, relationships, attention, or health to obtain it?
Wanting more is not inherently pathological. Neither is ambition.
The more useful question is whether the pursuit remains connected to a life someone actually wants to live.
Should We Start a GoFundMe for the Poor Billionaires?
Perhaps satire makes the philosophical point more efficiently than another statistical table.
Imagine the campaign:
Help a Billionaire Finally Have Enough.
There would be an immediate logistical problem. What fundraising target do you enter for someone whose hypothetical problem is that no number ever feels sufficient?
A million dollars?
A billion?
Another billion?
If the target moved every time the donations arrived, contributors might discover the world’s first fundraiser with no possible funding goal.
Of course, no such fundraiser is being seriously proposed. Billionaires are not financially poor, and none of the research discussed here establishes that billionaires as a group are unusually greedy, dissatisfied, or unhappy.
That is why the joke works only as a thought experiment.
It reverses the normal meaning of poverty to illustrate the difference between having little and experiencing what you have as perpetually insufficient.
It also raises another question.
A person can recognize psychological suffering in someone who possesses vastly more wealth without pretending that their circumstances are equivalent to poverty. Compassion for dissatisfaction does not require ignoring privilege, material circumstances, or responsibility for one’s actions.
Understanding why someone might continually pursue more also does not excuse exploitation or harm.
So the imaginary fundraiser is probably best left unfunded.
But the joke leaves behind a serious question:
If someone possesses extraordinary wealth and still experiences life primarily through what they do not yet have, what exactly would another dollar provide?
Psychology cannot answer that question for a particular billionaire.
What it can show is that the relationships among income, materialistic priorities, greed, and well-being are considerably more complicated than either “money buys happiness” or “money can’t buy happiness.”
Contentment Is Not the Same as Giving Up
Contentment does not require abandoning ambition.
A person can appreciate what they have today while still working toward something better tomorrow.
The distinction is between pursuing a goal because it serves something meaningful and requiring the next achievement before permitting oneself to experience satisfaction.
Financial ambition may fund a home, education, retirement, travel, a business, charitable giving, or security for future generations.
Those are concrete purposes.
The concern raised by the research is not simply wanting more. It is the possibility that material acquisition can become disproportionately important relative to other sources of meaning and well-being.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are rich people less happy than poor people?
The research reviewed here does not support that conclusion.
Income and materialism are different variables. Higher income has been associated with greater emotional well-being, while stronger materialistic orientations have been associated with poorer well-being on average.
Neither finding determines how an individual person feels.
Are billionaires more greedy than other people?
The studies discussed here do not establish that.
The dispositional-greed research examined individual differences in greed within a general sample. It was not a comparison of billionaires with the wider population.
Net worth alone is not a psychological measure of greed.
Is wanting more money necessarily greed?
No.
People pursue money for many reasons, including security, housing, healthcare, education, retirement, family responsibilities, business development, philanthropy, and other personal goals.
Does materialism cause unhappiness?
Not as a universal rule.
Cross-sectional research shows associations between materialistic values and poorer well-being. Longitudinal studies indicate that changes in materialistic priorities can accompany changes in well-being, while limited experimental research provides some evidence that reducing materialistic priorities can improve particular well-being outcomes in specific populations.
That evidence is more informative than correlation alone, but it does not establish that materialism inevitably makes everyone unhappy.
Does living with less make people happier?
Voluntary simplicity has been associated with greater well-being, but much of the research is cross-sectional.
Choosing to consume less is also fundamentally different from experiencing poverty or being unable to afford necessities.
Does money buy happiness?
There is no scientifically useful yes-or-no answer.
Higher income is generally associated with greater emotional well-being in the research discussed here. Separately, placing disproportionate importance on material acquisition has been associated with poorer well-being.
Having financial resources and experiencing a sense of enough are related questions, but they are not identical.
Can someone be content and still be ambitious?
Yes.
Being satisfied with what one has now does not prevent someone from pursuing worthwhile goals. Contentment and ambition are not necessarily opposites.
Final Thoughts
Perhaps wealth has at least two dimensions.
One can be measured externally through income, assets, property, investments, and purchasing power.
The other is experienced internally: whether a person can recognize when something is sufficient.
Psychological research cannot tell us the amount of money anyone should want. Nor can it tell us whether a particular billionaire, entrepreneur, worker, or neighbor is greedy.
What it can tell us is that materialistic priorities and dispositional greed have been associated with poorer well-being, while higher income can also be associated with greater emotional well-being.
Those findings are not contradictory.
Resources matter. Security matters. Poverty creates real hardship.
But once necessities and meaningful financial goals enter the picture, another question becomes possible:
What is the money for?
If every achievement merely creates another requirement, accumulating more may never provide the experience that accumulation was supposed to deliver.
Maybe we don’t need that GoFundMe for the poor billionaires after all.
Perhaps the more useful contribution is a question that costs nothing:
If you got everything you’re currently working toward, would you know when you had enough?
This article provides general educational information about psychological research. It does not diagnose any individual or group and is not a substitute for individualized mental-health care.
References
de Lira, M. D. N. S., Loureto, G. D. L., Alexandrino, K. E., Freires, L. A., da Costa, J. C. A., & Vione, K. C. (2024). Dispositional greed and life satisfaction: The role of social comparison for well-being. Psychology, Health & Medicine, 29(8), 1425–1436. https://doi.org/10.1080/13548506.2024.2331494
Dittmar, H., Bond, R., Hurst, M., & Kasser, T. (2014). The relationship between materialism and personal well-being: A meta-analysis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 107(5), 879–924. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0037409
Hook, J. N., Hodge, A. S., Zhang, H., Van Tongeren, D. R., & Davis, D. E. (2023). Minimalism, voluntary simplicity, and well-being: A systematic review of the empirical literature. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 18(1), 130–141. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2021.1991450
Kasser, T., Rosenblum, K. L., Sameroff, A. J., Deci, E. L., Niemiec, C. P., Ryan, R. M., Árnadóttir, O., Bond, R., Dittmar, H., Dungan, N., & Hawks, S. (2014). Changes in materialism, changes in psychological well-being: Evidence from three longitudinal studies and an intervention experiment. Motivation and Emotion, 38(1), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-013-9371-4
Killingsworth, M. A., Kahneman, D., & Mellers, B. (2023). Income and emotional well-being: A conflict resolved. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 120(10), e2208661120. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2208661120
