The two fundamental issues are:

Issue 1: That every supplement has:

-a chance of harmful interactions with other drugs/supplements (and as you take more and more, the number of potential interactions grows quadratically – like supplements squared)

-a chance of contamination (e.g., with lead, or with compounds not mentioned on the label), which is not as rare as one may think

-a chance of negative interactions with your biology (e.g., nearly every studied medication is found to cause some side effects more often than a placebo)

Issue 2: That almost all supplements, when eventually *rigorously* tested on general healthy populations (i.e., they are not populations with a specific disease or going hungry etc.) show no health benefits. So the risks from Issue 1 are unlikely to be compensated for.

Of course, this does not mean that ALL supplements don’t work. For instance, creatine likely helps build muscle mass for those trying to bulk up, most strict vegans should supplement with vitamin D and B12, and people with darker skin living in less sunny climates are at elevated risk for vitamin D deficiency. Omega-3s are likely not harmful and may even give you some benefits. If you test low in an essential vitamin or mineral, that’s, of course, a good reason to supplement it. And there are some impoverished areas of the world where basic nutrition is routinely not met, in which case supplementation with vitamins/minerals can be life-saving. Multi-vitamins from reputable companies that undergo third-party testing are at least very unlikely to harm you much unless they include mega doses. But once you start taking large doses, or compounds your body doesn’t normally encounter, and especially when you start taking many at once, supplementation becomes riskier.

One other caveat: some of the “all in one” kinds of supplements put so little of many of the compounds in the supplement that while, thankfully, they aren’t likely to hurt you, it also pretty much rules out the benefit as well. Dose-response cuts both ways.

Overall: my point is not that all supplements are useless, but about the risk/reward profile of taking *tons* of them at once: that ordinary people end up worse off (unless the dosages are too small to realistically get any benefit).

This piece was first written on December 6, 2025, and first appeared on my website on December 22, 2025.

My hypothesis is different. I think that the effects of social media are extremely heterogeneous based on app, population, and dosage: that in some subgroups, some social media apps (when used in high doses) have substantially negative effects on mental health, but in other subgroups, using other social media apps in moderate doses has no negative effect on mental health.

For instance, 13-year-old girls in the US using TikTok or Instagram for 4 hours a day may be very differently impacted than 25-year-old men in Denmark using Twitter/X or WhatsApp for 30 minutes per day.

The current studies may be like trying to answer the generic question: “Do non-prescription drugs have a negative mental health effect?” This question can’t be answered because it combines too many dissimilar things. In particular, the answer hinges on which drugs we’re talking about (cannabis vs. fentanyl), the age of the person doing the drug (teenagers vs. adults), and the quantity of drug use (occasional vs. extreme usage).

If my hypothesis is true, then getting to the bottom of the true impacts of social media on mental health will require carefully designed studies that subdivide by app and by population (ideally after preliminary research is done to figure out what apps and which populations are reasonable to group together – for instance, it may be essential to segment by gender and rough age group and even by culture, but it’s important to get these segmentations right if the research is going to make progress).

Another thing that makes this research so tricky is that social media literally adapts itself to what you pay attention to. So if you tend to click on upsetting things, it will show you more upsetting things, which can create a self-reinforcing cycle, whereas if you click on things that are interesting and pleasant, you’ll get more of those instead. So even at the level of the individual, social media can provide highly varied experiences. It’s instructive to compare your social media feed to a friend’s (on the same app). When I’ve done this, it’s been remarkable to see just how different our experiences on that app are.

Overall, my best guess is that most people’s social media use would be found to have little or no negative causal link to mental health. But I would predict that there is a moderately sized causal negative link to mental health for:

• teenage girls scrolling Instagram a large amount (e.g., checking it >25 times daily)
• teenage boys playing video games (but not with friends), very large amounts (e.g., > 5 hours per day)
• people who are already predisposed to worry a lot about the state of the world, scrolling Twitter a large amount (e.g., > 3 hours daily)
• I also would predict a negative impact on attention or focus for those who use TikTok a lot (>5 hours daily)
• But I would predict little to no average negative mental health effects for apps that a person uses only 20 minutes per day or less, since I think that’s unlikely to be a high enough dose to cause problems for many people

Another hypothesis is that insofar as social media causes negative mental health impacts, it’s because it changes the situation for everyone at once. For instance, if all teenagers in a school are on social media, that can change the way that they socialize (or how much people socialize) and how they interact (e.g., how much bullying or social comparison occurs). By this view, studying what happens to individuals when they use more or less social media misses the important effects. If this is the case, it makes the phenomena even harder to study!

This piece was first written on August 29, 2025, and first appeared on my website on November 2, 2025.

Below is my attempt to summarize patterns across many anecdotal reports. I’d be curious to hear what you think, especially if you currently or have ever suffered from a painful or unpleasant chronic condition that modern medicine doesn’t have good solutions for.

While the evidence on this topic is extremely preliminary, what I say here could turn out to be wrong, and high-quality randomized controlled trials are desperately needed before we can be confident in these approaches being useful, anecdotally, there appears to be a pattern where people with these conditions are reporting substantial benefits (and sometimes even full recovery) from a combination of psychological and behavioral strategies – sometimes even people who have suffered for a decade or longer.

For those who have already tried all the obvious things, ruled out dangerous medical conditions, exhausted all the options presented by knowledgeable doctors, and don’t know what to do next, these ideas may be worth a try.

Important Note: none of what’s below implies that the person in question was never suffering from a disease, or that their pain is any less “real” than any other pain. Additionally, even if this approach works for some people, it will, of course, not work for everyone, and it may even make some people worse, so please explore with caution.

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From what I can tell, the often-repeated common threads reported in anecdotal accounts of those who recover from these conditions (that they attribute their recovery to) appear to have three major elements:

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Element 1: Foundation (this part is boring but important)

A focus on getting the healthy life basics in place, to set yourself up for potential recovery and to help you feel as good as you can (despite the pain). This often includes elements like:

• cutting out junk food and excessive sugar and replacing them with healthy, whole foods, and drinking sufficient water

• focusing on getting enough, high-quality sleep

• daily stress reduction, such as through a daily meditation practice, progressive muscle relaxation, deep breathing, a yoga routine, or massage

• reduce or cut out drugs and alcohol

• daily sunlight through some spent outdoors, ideally in the morning

• whatever daily movement or exercise feels manageable (even if just a short, slow walk outside)

• scheduling enjoyable activities regularly and aiming to find joy in ordinary pleasurable moments

• regular social connection with people you care about or find interesting

• If you are dealing with a mental health challenge (such as depression or anxiety, which are both common for people suffering from painful chronic conditions), seeking treatment from an expert (e.g., a well-trained therapist who specializes in the condition you’re grappling with)

• find ways to explore and process your difficult emotions, whether it be talking with a therapist, a daily journaling habit, just taking a few minutes daily to sit and let yourself fully feel your emotions, or speaking regularly to a trusted friend who is happy to listen

• if you tend to be hard on yourself or engage in a lot of negative self-talk, explore developing self-compassion (treating yourself at least as kindly as you’d treat a friend, and showing yourself compassion like you would to someone you care about)

• getting yourself out of psychologically unhealthy situations to the best of your ability (whether it be an unreasonably demanding work situation, a person in their life who treats you very badly or makes you feel bad all the time, or a people-pleasing mentality of never saying ‘no’ even though you are carrying a huge burden already)

These items in 1, above, are not designed to cure your chronic pain or even to reduce the pain; they aim to set you up for the maximum chance of feeling better, and so are important. Also note that 1 doesn’t involve taking a boatload of supplements or eating a highly unusual diet.

It’s 2 that is the more novel, potentially critical piece:

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Element 2: Reframing and Reprocessing

Completely reframing your perception of the painful and unpleasant bodily sensations. The goal is to:

i) See these sensations as your body attempting to send you a helpful signal (e.g., some people like to start thanking their body for giving them this signal because they know it’s trying to protect them)

ii) Perceive these sensations as a false alarm. The idea is that the symptoms do not actually mean you are in any danger, nor do they indicate a life-threatening disease (since we’re assuming that has already been ruled out). The symptoms also don’t mean that you are destined to feel bad all day, or that the activity you’re doing when the symptoms emerge is going to cause any lasting harm to you.

The attitude to bring here is not one of bracing against the pain, and not one of trying to fix the feeling.

The concept is that these unpleasant bodily signals (which probably began as signals connected to an injury or disease) have somehow become detached from any injury or disease. Unfortunately, the signals persist – whether due to misfiring in your nerves, your brain misinterpreting benign signals as being dangerous, associative learning (X has preceded Y enough that now X causes Y), or some kind of accidental signal reinforcement (e.g., by responding to the signal as if it’s a sign of danger, the signal gets perpetuated).

Here’s my metaphor for this way of seeing things:

Imagine that your pain or unpleasant bodily sensations are like the barking of a very loyal guard dog. You brought this dog into your home to protect you back when you used to be in a very dangerous area, and the dog was very helpful at that time, barking at the very real danger that was frequently around you.

Now you live in a safe area, with nothing important for the dog to bark at. But the dog desperately wants to be helpful, and only knows one way to do so. Due to his extreme overeagerness and an unrelenting focus on potential danger, the dog ends up barking constantly. Whenever it barks, despite the now safe environment, you subconsciously still interpret this as a sign of genuine danger (since that’s always what it used to mean). This constant barking leaves you constantly anxious, on edge, or in a heightened state, and may have downstream consequences on your body (such as impacting your ability to sleep well or digest food), and generally makes you miserable. Due to the well-meaning dog’s misguided attempt to keep you safe, the barking is ruining your life.

The idea, therefore, is to retrain yourself to view the chronic pain and unpleasant bodily sensations as completely safe. You can facilitate this by noticing when you’re having negative thoughts about the pain and gently letting them go, and by practicing observing the sensations neutrally, without judgment. You can even practice accepting the painful feelings exactly as they are (and when your brain jumps in to label the feeling as “awful” or tells you “you can’t handle it” you can acknowledge those thoughts, gently let go of them, and return to observing the feeling non-judgmentally. As many people (including myself) have experienced exploring this way of viewing pain during meditation, shifting our attitude toward pain can immediately reduce the suffering the pain causes us.

Redirecting to something positive after doing so is also something that people report as a useful addition (whether that’s some other part of your body that feels good right now, a humorous re-interpretation of the event, a pleasing visualization, or an activity that’s pleasant that you’d like to do now instead of focusing on the pain, etc.)

Importantly, for many people, their bodily signals really ARE indicating imminent bodily danger (e.g., if you have a broken bone in your foot, you may actually need to stay off it for a while to let it heal) – that’s typically how pain works. So if you’re considering trying these techniques, it’s important to first rule out that you’re in that group.

Additionally, it’s important to distinguish a bodily signal indicating true danger vs. one merely indicating “you need to rest”, which is not inherently dangerous, but is important to heed and not ignore. It’s not that you should learn to ignore bodily signals – many such signals provide us valuable information, and ignoring our bodies is a recipe for potential problems down the road. It’s instead about changing the relationship to our chronic painful bodily signals, such as experiencing them non-judgmentally with peace and acceptance, viewing them as our bodies attempting to give us useful information, and not responding to them as though they are dangerous.

For those interested in trying this approach, here’s the final piece of the puzzle:

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Element 3: Practicing and Expanding

• While adopting the points from 2, above, gently and at a manageable pace, challenge yourself with whatever triggers your immediate (acute) symptoms. That is, test the waters with things that would normally make your symptoms immediately feel worse. Do so while maintaining the perspective that the symptoms are safe, they are there in an attempt to help you, and that they do not indicate any actual harm to you. Aim to view the symptoms neutrally and objectively without judgment and keep trying to accept them as they are, without needing them to be different. Then, once that becomes a bit easier, gently push the limits further toward somewhat more intense potential triggers and toward things you’ve been avoiding out of the fear of their impact on your symptoms. An important note: the idea here is NOT to push yourself more and more in an attempt to build up tolerance, strength, fitness, or resistance to fatigue (as one might try to do in Graded Exercise Therapy) – the idea, instead, is to practice reframing and reprocessing symptoms in progressively more challenging situations, while being careful to avoid overdoing it (which can lead to crashes). Many report that pushing yourself too hard, too fast, can backfire. So go slow, be gentle with yourself, and treat yourself with self-compassion.

Expect some setbacks along the way – progress is not likely to be linear, with lots of random daily variation. Be consistent, working at this daily but at a pace that feels comfortable, and track symptoms at the end of each day (e.g., pain level, fatigue level, stress level), which you can check over time to see whether there is a longer-term trend towards progress.

Part of the long-term goal with this is to end up paying less and less attention to your symptoms – since (in this case) they are not indicative of any actual problem, eventually you can learn to ignore them.

Note: gently pushing your boundary on symptoms doesn’t mean blowing past your limits. For instance, if you know that a 15-minute walk will leave you feeling fine at the time but cause you to crash for the next 2 days, then walking for 15 minutes would not be an example of what I’m describing.

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What’s the point of this whole process? It’s really two-fold:

A) It can simply make it substantially easier to deal with the chronic condition, and mean that you suffer less despite all the pain, and live a happier life even as you have the pain. It may cause the pain itself to feel less bad (through a reframing of the pain), cause you to have less intense negative emotions about the pain (which means reducing the second-order pain and other consequences caused by these negative emotions), and expand the range of activities you engage in that make your life worth living.

This could be a good enough reason to try this approach. And that’s part of why I like this approach. While there’s always a risk of it backfiring, even if it doesn’t cause any huge change, I think it has a pretty good chance of making life more manageable and leading you to suffering less from the pain (i.e., even if the pain is not itself lessened, changing your perception of the pain can mean you suffer less from it).

But, here’s where things get weird and much more speculative:

B ) Some people find that after weeks or a few months of following processes similar to what’s described here, they are completely or nearly completely cured. These reports are still very much anecdotal, and much more rigorous research is needed to be confident in the cause of improvement for such folks (so this should all be taken with a big grain of salt), but it’s quite striking how many people who were sick for years or longer have reported rapid progress with approaches similar to what I’ve described here. Though the exact approaches they use differ, and have a variety of names, and a variety of distinct elements, I’ve included here aspects common to many of them.

Many people will only get benefit A) from this approach, and that alone may make it worth it. So it may be best to think of B) more like a speculative bonus that (based on many anecdotal reports) seems to happen for some people.

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Obviously, there are other major caveats here: people could be wrong about this being the cause of their improvements, and even if this approach does cure some people, it’s unclear what percentage of people would be cured if they were to fully take on such an approach. Additionally, there are lots of people this is not appropriate for, such as people who have a life-threatening medical condition, people who have not yet had a thorough medical workup, people experiencing rapid weight loss or fevers, and so on. The evidence here is not strong, and could turn out to be wrong. Just because modern medicine doesn’t have a good understanding of a disorder doesn’t mean that it’s connected to psychology and behavior. And some people even report having tried this approach and had it backfire, where it left them worse off, so please be careful.

If this method does work, though, why does it work? It seems like one or more of the following explanations may be at play (which may vary depending on the individual):

• Pain signals and negative bodily sensations can occur in the absence of injury or disease (for instance, due to misfiring in the nerve, the brain misinterpreting signals, or other causes). A proof of concept where we know this happens is Phantom Pain Syndrome, where a person who has had a limb amputated may experience intense chronic pain that feels to them to be coming from that (now absent) limb, which, of course, it can’t actually be coming from.

• It may be that pain signals or unpleasant bodily sensations can become reinforced by our reactions to them (though this is not well understood). If so, the way we react may inadvertently cause pain signals to persist even past the point of the injury or disease that originally caused them to start. Perhaps somehow our attention to the signals, or our viewing them as dangerous, convinces our brain that the signals are worth sending.

• Or, a subtly but importantly different mechanism may be at play: our negative reactions to pain signals or unpleasant bodily sensations may leave us in a highly elevated state (e.g., anxiety or cortisol), and this elevated state may generate new pain signals or exacerbate existing signals (e.g., increase tightness in the stomach or an inflamed feeling in joints) or new unpleasant bodily sensations (e.g., trouble with digestion, difficulty breathing) which then generate more negative reactions, in a self-perpetuating cycle

• Or, a related possibility, is that your brain has somehow learned associations that are now triggering reactions. Perhaps your brain learned that when X happens, then the proper response is Y, and your brain is now triggering Y in response to X, despite that reaction being useless now and generating negative side effects for you.

• In some cases, behaviors we engage in to avoid pain may actually increase or perpetuate it – e.g., avoiding using a joint because it hurts may actually cause it to be stiff and painful from lack of use, which may cause us to continue to avoid its use.

Pain can be completely real, disabling, and have a biological origin, even in the absence of damaged or diseased tissue.

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One important thing you may wonder: Is there actually evidence that psychological and behavioral approaches can improve the lives of people with these conditions? Well, while this field is, overall, woefully under-researched, there’s quite a bit of evidence that psychological and behavioral strategies can help (even though the nature of these strategies differs, and may only be partially overlapping with what I’m describing in this post). Here is a quick recap of some of that evidence:

(1) IBS: A meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials of psychological treatments for Irritable Bowel Syndrome looked at 15 studies. It found greater improvement in the psychological treatment groups compared to the control group on symptom severity, quality of life, and abdominal pain, but no difference in diarrhea or constipation. Another meta-analysis on psychological therapies for IBS looked at 41 randomized controlled trials and found that CBT and gut-directed hypnotherapy outperformed education and routine care.

(2) Functional Dyspepsia: A meta-analysis of psychotherapy treatments for people with Functional Dyspepsia. It looked at 5 studies and found that those receiving psychotherapy improved in gastrointestinal symptoms.

(3) ME/CFS: A 2011 meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials of treatments for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome looked at 16 studies on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and concluded overall that those receiving CBT had greater symptom improvement than control groups. As a commenter pointed out, those studies used an earlier definition of ME/CFS that didn’t require post-exertional fatigue. A later 2020 Systematic review of randomized controlled trials looked at 12 studies on CBT, and found that 4 showed it to be effective, 2 ‘Partially significant’, and 6 found no effect.

(4) Chronic pain: a Cochrane meta-analysis looked at 75 studies on psychological treatments for chronic pain conditions, including fibromyalgia and chronic low back pain. A number of types of psychological treatment were included, such as CBT, behavioral therapy, and ACT. They conclude: “On average, compared to people who receive no treatment for their pain, people treated with CBT probably experience slightly less pain and distress by the end of the treatment and six to 12 months later (moderate-quality evidence). They may also experience slightly less disability on average (low-quality evidence).”

So the evidence overall quite strongly indicates that psychological and behavioral strategies can help people with these conditions (though, unfortunately, there is little research that has been done directly testing the specific strategies I’m describing here, and there is a lot of heterogeneity in results, especially with ME/CFS).

The most direct evidence of a technique very similar to what I’m describing (that I’m aware of) comes from just one randomized controlled trial on a method known as “Pain Reprocessing Therapy” (PRT) for chronic back pain. It showed promising results (though more studies are very much needed). PRT has many common elements with what I’ve described in this post.

Of course, if you’re suffering from one of these chronic conditions, you may simply want to try Cognitive Behavioral Therapy if it seems promising to you or (if it’s a gut disorder) gut-directed hypnotherapy as there’s reasonable evidence (as described above) that they improve many people’s quality of life who suffer from chronic conditions, even if they don’t provide a cure for most people.

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The best source I know of to learn about these many anecdotal accounts of people improving from these conditions is the YouTube channel of Raelan Agle. She had ME/CFS for 10 years and eventually recovered, and on her channel, she interviews people who have recovered from ME/CFS and Long Covid. These three videos in particular were very influential for what I wrote in this post:

• What Raelan says she learned from conducting 75 interviews with people who recovered from Long COVID or ME/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

• Raelan’s recovery themes from 200 Interviews:

• What Raelan says about why recovery experts disagree and what they agree on.

There are also interesting books related to this topic, such as “The Way Out” by Alan Gordon and Alon Ziv (which teaches a specific method known as “Somatic Tracking” that’s very related to, but not identical to, what I discussed in this post).

This piece was first written on October 30, 2025 and first appeared on my website on November 10, 2025.

Antioxidants -> reduced free radicals -> less DNA damage -> less cancer

Unfortunately, these biologically plausible-sounding claims usually don’t work when rigorously tested.

Are mechanistic arguments useless?

No. They are a great source of *hypotheses*. While most of these hypotheses fail, some eventually lead to important new treatments.

Unfortunately, health gurus, podcasters, and even sometimes (though they should know better) doctors and scientists use mechanistic arguments to convince the public about treatments for which we have little evidence.

Mechanistic arguments in health sound scientific and impressive. They make the speaker seem authoritative and knowledgeable. And they *seem* very hard to argue with. However, there is one general argument that works for most of them: “That sounds nice, but let’s look at randomized experiments in humans to check if it works.”

Why is it so common that health-related mechanistic claims don’t work when rigorously tested in randomized trials?

What goes wrong with X->Y biological thinking?

1) Causality: The first issue is that an X->Y claim may be true in terms of associations, without the links being *causal*. It’s typically a lot easier to establish that when people have higher X, they also have higher Y than to show that increasing X causes higher Y.

Alzheimer’s research seems to be experiencing this problem in a major way. The hypothesis:

Amyloid plaques -> Alzheimer’s

Seems to be oversimplified or perhaps mostly associational (rather than causal), as drugs that reduce brain plaques have had disappointing results.

2) Multiple mechanisms: even if it’s true that X is in the causal chain for Y, it may also be true that Y is also highly influenced by other mechanisms, and so changing X may not change Y that much, even if you control X completely.

3) Other effects: even if the mechanism is completely correct, there may be alternative effects of the treatment. These could undermine the original benefit through other pathways, or cause other forms of harm that mean the benefit is not worth it.

4) Equilibrium: even if mechanistically X->Y, the body may work hard to maintain a balance of Y (much as it does to keep your core body temperature roughly constant regardless of whether you’re drinking a hot beverage or standing outside in the cold). Hence, the effects of intervening on X may not create lasting impacts on Y because your body works to restore a homeostasis.

5) Evaluability: unlike arguments based on empirical evidence (we gave patients this treatment in a study and here’s how their outcomes differed from the control group) and logical arguments, which a reasonably knowledgable non-expert can understand and assess to at least some degree, biological mechanism based arguments can’t be evaluated at all by non-experts. Take this claim, for example. Is this sound? See if you can tell:

“Subcutaneous WPP9 injections activate orexinergic neurons via Gq-coupled receptor agonism in the lateral hypothalamus, which increases daytime cortisol rhythm, leading to increased alertness.”

So, is this a valid mechanistic argument about human biology? Well, no, but I only know that because I had an LLM AI make this argument up by prompting it to generate a biologically plausible sounding but made-up argument. An expert on the topic may immediately identify it as implausible, but anyone else is going to have no realistic way of evaluating its soundness without help.

So, what’s the takeaway here? Well, when a podcaster or health guru tells you that we know a treatment works because [insert biological mechanistic argument here], remember that it isn’t strong evidence, no matter how impressive it sounds. We need careful randomized experiments (or other high-quality evidence) to be confident it’s true. Mechanistic arguments are for generating hypotheses; they give us a reason to collect more data and run studies to see if an idea pans out – they don’t themselves serve as strong evidence for what’s true.

Of course, we don’t always need strong evidence to try a treatment if it is worth it. If a treatment isn’t expensive and is low risk, we would be able to tell if it is working, and we don’t have more evidence-backed alternatives, then experimenting with the treatment (even if it only has weak evidence) can still be a good idea. But we shouldn’t mistake “worth experimenting with” for “having strong evidence for”.

This piece was first written on May 8, 2025, and first appeared on my website on May 15, 2025.

At what step do you stop agreeing with this logical argument relating to animals? For each step, I’m also showing the percentage of disagreements on social media that involved this step (either direct disagreements with the step or disagreements with its premise). (There were a total of 63 such disagreements described across my posts on Facebook and X.)

Note: any time the argument mentions something being wrong or immoral, you can treat it either as referring to something being (a) objectively wrong (if you believe in objective moral truth) or (b) wrong according to your own personal moral values (if you don’t believe in objective moral truth).

Step 1: Mammals (like dogs, cats, and pigs) and birds (like parrots and chickens) are capable of suffering.

1.6% of disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

Step 2: It’s wrong to cause suffering to dogs and cats if the reason you do it is just because it leads to you getting a small amount of pleasure relative to the suffering caused (e.g., if someone finds it fun to kick dogs and cats, it’s immoral for them to do so merely for pleasure).

11.1% of disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

Step 3: It’s wrong to cause suffering to pigs and chickens if the reason you do it is just because it leads to you getting a small amount of pleasure relative to the suffering caused (e.g., if someone finds it fun to kick pigs and chickens, it’s immoral for them to do so merely for pleasure).

None of the disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

Step 4: It’s wrong to cause suffering to pigs and chickens if the only reason you do it is a small amount of convenience relative to the suffering caused (e.g., if kicking a dog or pig in the face is more convenient because it causes it to go into its pen a little faster, it’s immoral to do so merely for this convenience).

6.3% of disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

Step 5: It is wrong to cause suffering to pigs and chickens merely for pleasure and convenience, even if the mechanism by which you cause this suffering is by paying someone else who then creates the suffering (e.g., if you pay someone to kick an animal because you enjoy seeing an animal be kicked, or you pay someone to kick an animal because the animal is in your way, that is still immoral even though you didn’t cause the harm with your own body).

4.8% of disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

Step 6: On large factory farms in the U.S., most of the pigs and chickens suffer a great deal and experience more pain than pleasure (i.e., net negative utility) throughout their lives (e.g., most egg-laying hens live in tiny cages where they can barely move most of their lives, and pigs are often kept in crowded barns with concrete floors and no ability to roam).

11.1% of disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

Step 7: The vast majority of egg and (non-fish) meat products sold at stores in the U.S. come from large factory farms.

None of the disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

Step 8: By purchasing egg and pork products from stores that use large factory farms as the suppliers for these products, throughout your whole life, you increase the number of chickens and pigs raised on factory farms (in an expected value sense – just as predicted by standard economic theory regarding what happens to production when demand increases).

1.6% of disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

Step 9: The vast majority of people in the U.S. could switch to a diet that doesn’t involve eating factory-farmed pork and eggs without increasing the amount of money they spend on food (e.g., most could find an egg-free vegetarian diet that is as cheap or cheaper than their current diet, or a diet that otherwise avoids factory-farmed pork and eggs).

12.7% of disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

Step 10: The vast majority of people in the U.S. could switch to a diet that doesn’t involve eating factory-farmed pork and eggs without sacrificing their health (e.g., most could find an egg-free vegetarian diet that’s as healthy or healthier for them than their current diet, or a healthy diet that otherwise avoids factory-farmed pork and eggs).

19.0% of disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

Step 11: Something having been done naturally by our ancient ancestors, or being a tradition, or being a result of evolution, does not make something morally okay (e.g., even if it was common for humanity’s ancient ancestors to commit rape, or if a group had a tradition of committing rape, or if human evolution favored those who raped, that would not make rape any less immoral).

3.2% of disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

Step 12: For most Americans, the only sacrifices they’d be making to switch to a well-thought-through diet free of factory-farmed pork and eggs would be a reduction of some pleasure (if they enjoy factory-farmed pork and eggs) and a loss of some convenience (when alternative food is not as convenient to obtain).

22.2% of disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

Step 13: In most cases (e.g., when there aren’t overriding health concerns, dietary restrictions, or a lack of availability of alternative foods), it is immoral for Americans to buy most pork and egg products from most stores in the U.S.

3.2% of disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

Step 14: The majority of Americans are acting immorally in their current purchasing behaviors regarding pork and eggs, but most of them could switch their behavior without excessive difficulty so as to have more ethical food purchasing behaviors (e.g., by adopting an egg-free vegetarian diet, or by avoiding buying animal products that come from factory farms, etc.).

3.2% of disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

This piece was first written on November 9, 2024, and first appeared on my website on January 22, 2025.

1) Diagnosis Error: It’s a non-standard presentation of a known disease or a rare (or frequently missed or misunderstood) disease, making it hard to get properly diagnosed. In this case, seeking out fantastic doctors (especially those with relevant expertise) may lead to a solution.

For instance, one time, I started presenting with strange symptoms and was getting sicker every week. It turned out to be due to mold! I had just moved into a new home, and there was mold hidden behind a wall about 3 feet from where I was sleeping. Once we located the mold and removed it, I recovered completely in a few weeks.

While it sometimes happens that people misattribute issues to mold exposure, I’m pretty confident that mold actually was the cause in this instance. This was due to the timing of the symptoms starting and stopping and due to the fact that I’ve never had symptoms like that prior to the event or since the event.

As another example, I know more than one person who had a fairly common disorder that doctors tend not to understand very well for some reason. In each case, it took these people quite a lot of time to get the right diagnosis from doctors.

A third example is a friend who has an unusual dietary sensitivity. For some time, nobody could figure out why they had the odd symptoms that they did. Luckily, they discovered that when they remove certain items from their diet, their symptoms completely disappear, leaving them feeling dramatically better.

2) Psychological: It’s a physiological reaction to a psychological phenomenon (such as due to stress or anxiety), or it’s a psychosomatic condition. In such cases, a psychologist may be life-changing. Note that psychosomatic does not mean that the experiences are not really felt. If you feel pain in your stomach, then you have pain in your stomach. The question is, “What is generating that pain?”

To give an example, at one point in my life, when I was going through a tremendous amount of stress, I thought that I had some kind of mysterious medical problem because of strange and intense physical symptoms (e.g., chronic nausea, random tingling in my arms, tightness in my chest). But it turned out to be all just caused by the stress and went away when I improved my coping strategies and the stressful events receded further into the past.

Another example is from someone I know who had bad pain for years. He would try to carefully work around the pain, only to eventually discover that the key to eventually ending the pain was to use his body naturally and not let the pain constrain his behaviors.

3) Unknown to Science: it’s a type of medical issue that medicine hasn’t yet discovered. All currently known disorders were at one time not known about. While there are fewer and fewer of these as science progresses, and it would be nice to think that medicine has figured it all out by this point, the reality is that there are still some things that are mysterious to science. In such cases, symptom management and lifestyle changes (that make it easier to live with the issues) may be the only option.

As an example, I have (for as long as I can remember) had trouble with my sleep, and despite going to numerous doctors, getting numerous tests, and trying numerous remedies, I’ve never resolved it. I’m still open to the possibility that whatever my sleep issue is, it’s of type (1) or (2), but I’ve come to think it’s increasingly likely to be in category (3).

My best guess is that fairly common conditions that end up grouping patients together by their symptoms (without medicine understanding the underlying causes), with myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome being the classic example, typically end up being a mix of (1), (2) and (3) depending on the patient. Some such patients probably have a known disease that has been misidentified, others may have a psychological origin of their fatigue (such as from anxiety or depression), and others may have a medical problem that is not yet known to science.

If you or a loved one has been ill for a while, and you still don’t have a helpful diagnosis despite seeing a number of doctors, I definitely recommend staying open-minded to all three of the above possibilities. I think that people often jump to conclusions too quickly because they assume it can’t have psychological origins (because they think it wouldn’t “feel so real” if it was psychological), or they assume if doctors say they are healthy, that there really isn’t a medical explanation for their symptoms.

It’s also very worthwhile to be careful in these situations because there are numerous peddlers of fake treatments who make their living on people in exactly these kinds of situations (especially after desperation sinks in). Most (but not all) of those peddlers actually believe in their own cures, which makes them even more convincing salespeople for their useless (and sometimes actively harmful) “remedies.”

This piece was first written on September 27, 2024, and first appeared on my website on October 27, 2024.

This piece first appeared on ClearerThinking.org on February 28, 2024, was edited on February 29, 2024, and appeared here with minor edits on March 27, 2024.

Does money buy happiness? Intuitively, the answer is yes: common sense tells us that poverty and hardship make people unhappy. We can use money to buy a lot of things that might make us happier – things like a nicer home, fancier vacations, education for our children, or just the opportunity to have more free time. On the other hand, it’s a cliche that “money can’t buy happiness.” Many admire and aspire to the lifestyles of multi-millionaire celebrities, yet rich and famous people often seem desperately unhappy. 

But what does science say about this question? The answer is relevant for all of us as individuals: how important is it for our happiness to strive to make a high salary? It’s also relevant for states: if policy-makers want citizens to be happy, should they prioritize increasing their wealth, or other things?

So, what’s right? Does money make you happier, or is happiness something money can’t buy? In this article, we tell the tale of scholars’ attempts to find out whether money makes people happier, and why they ended up disagreeing on such an apparently simple question. We think you’ll find the results surprising — particularly the recent saga of how some scientists set out to understand the link between income and happiness.

As usual, we’ll discuss the studies’ methodologies and results in detail throughout this piece. However, if you’re short of time and/or just want to know what are the key takeaways, you jump to the “key takeaways” section, at the end of this article. 

Does money increase life satisfaction?

There’s a clear, cross-cultural relationship between income and ‘life satisfaction’ (or ‘life evaluation’). This is broadly how well someone thinks their life is going, relative to what’s realistic for them. For example, in the Gallup World Poll (a large survey, run in over 160 countries), surveyors measure life satisfaction by asking participants in their native language:

“Please imagine a ladder, with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?”

This is known as the ‘Cantril ladder’. Participants with higher incomes tend to place themselves higher on the ladder than those with lower incomes. This is true both across countries and within countries. In poorer countries, people rate their life satisfaction as lower than in richer countries:

Source: Our World in Data

Citizens of poorer countries, where the GDP per capita is less than $5000, have low average life satisfaction (3-5 out of 10), whereas in richer countries like Switzerland, Singapore or the US, the average life satisfaction rating is higher (6 or 7 out of 10). Results are typically similar for other measures of life satisfaction, such as answers to the question “In general, how satisfied are you with your life?”

To complicate things somewhat, the relationship between income and life satisfaction is logarithmic. This means that every time you double someone’s income, their life satisfaction doesn’t double, but increases by a fixed amount (in this case, roughly 1 point on the life satisfaction scale that ranges from 1 to 10). 

Note that the chart above is a “log plot” – you’ll see that on the x-axis, income roughly doubles at every division, going from $1000 to $2000 to $5000 to $10,000. So a straight line on this plot means that every doubling of income is associated with an increase in happiness of a fixed number of points. On a regular (not logarithmic) scale, the graph instead looks like this:

Source: Our World in Data

This means that though an increased income is associated with greater life satisfaction, this is proportionate to how much a person is already making. Let’s say you start making an extra $1000 a year in income: this will impact your happiness a lot if you were originally making $2000 a year, but it won’t make a big difference if you were already making $100,000 a year. To put it another way, for those who are poor, life satisfaction will typically increase quite a bit as they make an additional $10,000, but for those who are rich, this amount of money has far less impact. .

The charts above show the relationship between income and life satisfaction across countries, but higher-income countries and lower-income countries differ in many ways other than wealth. For instance, lower income countries tend to have worse healthcare systems, so it’s hard to tell if they have lower average life satisfaction due to lower incomes or due to worse healthcare systems (or due to a myriad of other differences between wealthy countries and poorer countries). So it’s hard to be confident from this data alone that higher incomes cause greater life satisfaction, rather than some other factors increasing both income and life satisfaction.

That’s why it’s useful to bring in evidence from within countries, to see if the effect holds within a single country as well.

Source: Our World in Data

Each country in the chart above is represented by a line, connecting the average reported life satisfaction of people in five income quintiles within the country. The chart is messy, but in general, the story is the same: most of the lines trend upwards, with richer citizens reporting a higher life satisfaction than poorer citizens.

Source: “Subjective Well-Being and Income: Is There Any Evidence of Satiation?”, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, NBER Working Paper 18992, April 2013. Reformatted in the Economist

The chart above shows a more limited sample of countries. This data is older, from 2013, but it shows a similar trend: if we look at the US line, we can see that average life satisfaction ranges from about 6.6 (out of 10) at the lowest incomes, to around 7.5 at the highest incomes. Compare this to the India line: average life satisfaction is lower in India overall, but just as in the US, poorer Indians on average report lower life satisfaction (about 4.2) than richer Indians (about 5.8).

Other ways of measuring life satisfaction also show within-country differences in life satisfaction depending on income. For example, in the chart below, participants in the US were asked whether they were ‘very satisfied’, ‘somewhat satisfied’, ‘somewhat dissatisfied’ or ‘very dissatisfied’ (rather than being asked to rate their satisfaction on a scale). The proportion of ‘very satisfied’ people is higher in higher income bands, and the proportion of dissatisfied people is lower. Although the number of participants is not high in the lowest and highest bands, on the right hand section of the table (Panel B) we see a fairly steady increase in the percent of people who are very satisfied as income rises. 

Source: “Subjective Well-Being and Income: Is There Any Evidence of Satiation?”, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, NBER Working Paper 18992, April 2013. 

Note that even this within-country data doesn’t prove that income causes greater life satisfaction: all these polls show is a strong association between income and life satisfaction. Perhaps even within countries, other factors (such as the quality of infrastructure in richer vs poorer areas of a single country) cause people to feel more satisfied with their lives and to earn more money. However, given that across-country and within-country evidence agree, and it’s reasonable to assume a priori that money can contribute to life satisfaction by enabling people to buy things they want and need as well as to have more control over their time, it stands to reason that there is probably a causal link. But we should keep in mind that the data don’t provide absolute proof that an increase in income causes an increase in life satisfaction. 

An additional complicating factor is that this data measures averages. Even if on average it’s the case that greater income causes greater life satisfaction, for any given person, income and life satisfaction could be more or less closely related than average. This means that two people of the exact same income may be impacted very differently by the same increase in income: perhaps the extra money allows one person to leave a career they hate and pursue one they love, whereas the other just puts the additional income into their savings and doesn’t end up using it for anything important. So we have to be careful not to make confident generalizations about individuals, based on the average. 

So, if more money is associated with greater life satisfaction, is it right to say that the wealthier tend to be happier? Not exactly: it depends what you mean by happiness. 

Does more money make you happier day-to-day?

The Gallup polls, and many other studies related to happiness, measure life satisfaction: participants are asked to reflect on their lives holistically and think about how things are going. However, life satisfaction is only one way to measure a person’s happiness. We might also consider how emotionally happy people feel day to day: whether they tend to feel joyous, content and calm, or stressed, depressed and anxious. This is sometimes known as ‘hedonic wellbeing’ or ‘experienced happiness’.

Psychologist Daniel Kahneman and economist Angus Deaton wondered if there was a relationship between this moment-to-moment hedonic wellbeing and money, just as there was with life satisfaction. In a 2010 experiment, they analyzed more Gallup data, this time from 1000 U.S. residents. This survey, rather than asking participants to rank themselves on Cantril’s ladder, instead asked them whether they had experienced specific emotions for a lot of the previous day (for example ‘enjoyment’ ‘sadness’ or ‘worry’).

The researchers then grouped these emotions together into ‘positive affect’ – happiness, laughter and enjoyment – and ‘blue affect’ – sadness and worry. They also measured stress. People with higher incomes were more likely to report experiencing positive emotions the previous day, and less likely to report sadness, worry or stress.

Source: “High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being”, Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton, PNAS 107, September 2010

As with life satisfaction, the relationship between hedonic wellbeing and income was logarithmic in Kahneman and Deaton’s data for lower incomes, meaning that doubling a person’s income was associated with a fixed increase in their hedonic wellbeing. However, unlike with life satisfaction, this experiment seemed to show that increases in emotional wellbeing taper off at around $75,000 per year (in the U.S.); after that, extra money didn’t seem to increase wellbeing anymore.

On the graph above, ‘ladder’ refers to Cantril’s ladder, the life satisfaction question asked in other studies. You can see that this line continues to go up while the hedonic wellbeing lines flatten out. Again, note that this x-axis is on a log scale, with income doubling every division.

This provides an interesting contrast to the life satisfaction studies: it seems that if you already make $75,000 a year in the U.S., you might become more satisfied with your life if you made more money, but you’d be unlikely to have more positive emotional experiences day-to-day. This makes some intuitive sense: money helps us meet our basic needs and can solve a lot of problems, but there are other problems that it’s much harder to solve with money and that even billionaires have to face — for example relationship conflict, bereavement, or mental and physical illness. Maybe once you’re making $75,000 a year, you can solve all the problems that are soluble with money, leaving only those trickier problems.

But it turns out that story is wrong! 

Questioning the taper 

It makes intuitive sense that day-to-day, hedonic wellbeing would taper off at higher incomes. However, Kahneman’s and Deaton’s result did not hold up to scrutiny. A decade later in 2021, economist Matthew Killingsworth tried to replicate their conclusion on new data. He found something different: in his analysis, hedonic wellbeing did continue to increase with income, even above $75,000 a year. It didn’t taper off or plateau. The slope of the graph was also the same below $75,000 a year and above $75,000, meaning that on average, a doubling of income from $15,000 to $30,000 a year and a doubling from $75,000 to $150,000 a year are associated with the same increase in emotional wellbeing.

What was going on here? Kahneman (the author of the first paper), Killingsworth (the author of the second paper) and psychologist Barbara Mellers, keen to get to the bottom of this, acted like ideal scientists: they embarked on an adversarial collaboration, all working together to try to work out why Kahneman’s and Killingsworth’s experiments had got such different results.

They discovered a few important differences between the 2010 and 2021 studies. First, the 2021 study used more accurate data collection methods. In Kahneman’s 2010 study, surveyors had asked participants to recall whether they’d felt certain emotions the previous day. But in Killingsworth’s experiment, participants instead received smartphone notifications several times per day that asked them to rate how they were feeling at that moment, on a scale of ‘very bad’ to ‘very good’. Since they asked participants multiple times and asked them to describe their feelings in the moment, rather than relying on memory, they got a more accurate measurement of each participant’s general hedonic well-being. There were also many more data points in the 2021 study: over a million data points from 33,000 people (vs 1000 people in the 2010 study, which when separated into different income buckets makes it a bit thin). Killingsworth’s experiment also surveyed more high-income people and had more different income bands, rather than lumping together all participants who made over $120,000 a year.

However, despite this, Kahneman and Killingsworth (when working together) did find some evidence for a plateau in hedonic wellbeing above $75,000 a year in income. So why didn’t it appear in Killingsworth’s study? Why did Killingsworth find that emotional wellbeing didn’t seem to plateau even at high incomes, up to $500,000 a year and beyond?

When the authors re-examined the data from the 2021 study, they discovered that the plateau did exist — for the 20% of the population with the lowest emotional wellbeing. That is, if you experience lots of negative emotion to begin with, additional income is not associated with increased hedonic wellbeing once you make over $75,000 a year, but if you have average or high hedonic wellbeing, additional income is associated with an increase in day-to-day positive emotions, even if you are already wealthy.

As they investigated, they realized that they had missed this because their methods of measuring wellbeing worked better as measures of unhappiness, or negative wellbeing: they couldn’t easily differentiate between people who were pretty happy, moderately happy, and very happy (in terms of their day-to-day emotions). This made it more difficult to spot that the plateau only existed for the 20% of the population with the lowest day-to-day wellbeing. 

So does that mean day-to-day wellbeing does increase the richer you get?

Well, yes…and no. Media discussions of this story focussed simply on whether happiness increases with income, since that was the main focus of the research. 

But another relevant question — probably more relevant for most people — is how much happier does more money make you? Let’s look at the data (on a regular, non-log scale):

Source: our reanalysis of data from Kahneman, Killingsworth and Mellers’ 2022 adversarial collaboration.

Does it look like average wellbeing increases in the higher income categories? It basically looks like it doesn’t! If you squint, you can just about notice that the bar in the $625,000-a-year band is a tiny bit higher than the bar in the $15,000-a-year band. 

You can only see that logarithmic upwards line if you zoom way in:

Source: our reanalysis of data from Kahneman, Killingsworth and Mellers’ 2022 adversarial collaboration.

Look at the y-axis. In this zoomed-in version, you can see that the lowest point of the curve — the average wellbeing of people making $15,000 a year — is at about 60.9, on a 100-point scale. The highest point — people making $400,000 a year — is 65.8. That is, the difference between the poorest and the wealthiest is only about 5 points, on a 100-point scale!

The takeaway from these hedonic wellbeing studies is often ‘more money makes you happier’. While this isn’t wrong, a more relevant lesson from this research might be that people with vastly different levels of wealth have surprisingly similar levels of emotional wellbeing. 

To put this another way, even if we assume this entire effect is causal (that is, that income is causing all of this increase in emotional well-being), then if you made 25 times more money, taking you from the bottom 10% to well within the top 10% of US incomes, you should only expect to get half a point happier on a 10-point scale (from 6 to 6.5). 

We suspect that many will find the small size of this effect surprising. 

To be fair, the authors of the adversarial collaboration did mention this, but it wasn’t the focus of the paper, and we suspect that many people who looked at the paper briefly would have missed it:

‘[Kahneman and Deaton] reported that the effect of an approximately fourfold difference in income is about equal to the effect of being a caregiver, twice as large as the effect of being married, and less than a third as large as the effect of a headache.’

What is the more interesting finding — that emotional wellbeing goes up logarithmically with income, or that emotional well-being goes up very little with income? We think that the second finding is likely to be the more important one for most people.

Now, of course this result doesn’t mean that you yourself wouldn’t have much higher emotional wellbeing if you were to increase your income substantially — but the link seems weak enough that we should be wary about assuming we’ll feel much happier moment to moment if we make more money. 

Life satisfaction varies much more than hedonic wellbeing 

If hedonic wellbeing varies so little, what about life satisfaction, the variable we discussed at the beginning of this article? The data show that people with greater incomes have higher life satisfaction, on average, but is this difference equally tiny? 

No: if we look again at the within-country data on life satisfaction, we can see that the US line spans more than 1 point on the 10-point scale. What’s more, the difference is even greater if we compare countries: the poorest in India are about 3.5 points less satisfied, on average, than the richest in the US.

Source: “Subjective Well-Being and Income: Is There Any Evidence of Satiation?”, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, NBER Working Paper 18992, April 2013. Reformatted in the Economist

So, life satisfaction, in general, seems to vary much more with income than hedonic wellbeing. 

–

To make a more direct comparison, looking at US data, every doubling in income is associated with an increase of 0.6 on 10-point scale in life satisfaction, and an increase of only 0.1 on a 10-point scale in hedonic wellbeing (or equivalently, 6 points on a 100-point scale for life satisfaction, and just 1 point for hedonic wellbeing).

Another way to understand this difference is to measure the variance from the mean of each measurement, which Killingsworth did in his 2020 study. 

Source: ‘Experienced well-being rises with income, even above $75,000 per year’, Matthew Killingsworth

Note that the x-axis here is logarithmic (with incomes doubling at each division), and the y-axis uses not absolute scores but z-scores, which measure how many standard deviations each participant’s score is from the mean. The blue “life satisfaction” line slopes up more sharply than the red hedonic wellbeing line, meaning that as income goes up, life satisfaction rises faster than experienced well-being (it increases by a greater number of standard deviations).   

This is counter-intuitive: if people’s day-to-day feelings are middling (as they seem to be, on average), shouldn’t this lead to a middling level of life satisfaction? Are people bad at remembering their day-to-day emotions, so that when they answer life satisfaction questions, they overestimate or underestimate how good their life is?Perhaps. But more plausibly, life satisfaction and hedonic wellbeing are different elements of happiness, rather than two different ways to measure a single, unitary trait. Most people value positive emotions, but they also value other things, including career, family, status, material goods, achieving their goals, and money itself. And sometimes, striving to achieve something you aspire to — something that would increase your life satisfaction — will cause more negative emotions in the short run — for example, when you overwork yourself and take on lots of stress to hit a work milestone. 

Key takeaways – Are people, on average, happier when they make more money? 

We’ve learned that:

• Making more money is associated with moderately greater life satisfaction 
• Making more money is associated with a very small increase in hedonic wellbeing 
• …unless we’re talking about is the unhappiest 20% of people who already make $75,000 a year or more in the U.S., in which case additional income was not associated with greater hedonic wellbeing
• In both cases (life satisfaction and hedonic wellbeing), extra income has a greater effect when you start off with less money – or, more precisely, each doubling of income is associated with the same effect.  

So, the link between income and happiness  depends on what you mean by happiness, and how much money we’re talking about. Ultimately, you can make some predictions about the way you might feel if you had more or less money, but like so many scientific questions, the answer is messy, and you’re unlikely to know for certain how things will turn out. Perhaps this is why our cultural clichés give us such mixed signals about this question! 

Building Happiness Habits

You’ve learned how income is related to happiness, but if you’re interested in exploring habits that could help you improve your day-to-day hedonic wellbeing, we encourage you to test Clearer Thinking’s “Building Happiness Habits” interactive tool.

It works by pairing certain happiness techniques – namely mindfulness and gratitude – with everyday activity triggers such as walking or checking social media, thereby cultivating happiness-improving mental habits. 

We tested each technique on hundreds of users and found that they made a positive difference for those who practiced them, in just 3 days.

Each technique is:

• Easy to learn – there’s no need for long, difficult training in order to be able to perform them.
• Simple to apply — there’s just one main thing to do, not a bunch of steps.
• Time-efficient — it takes just a few minutes a day to practice them.

Ready to make your days a little brighter?

According to YouGov polling, 41% of people in the United States think that it is the greatest country in the world. Others see the U.S. as a place full of arrogance, violence, and inequality. So, what’s the truth? 

The truth is that there isn’t a single notion of what makes something the “best.” To explore how great (or not) America is, we’ll start by looking at the question from multiple angles. We’ll see how the U.S. stacks up according to a number of important factors before we decide how great it really is:

 1. Technology 

The U.S. is among the best countries in the world for technology and business innovation. It currently ranks 3rd in the United Nations’ Global Innovation Index. It has the most startups worth over $1 billion (the 3rd most startups per capita) and is the originator of many technologies used globally. It is also considered by many to be the best place to create a tech startup. 

2. Violence

The U.S. is a violent place, given its level of wealth, with the 2nd highest number of gun-related deaths in the world and the 2nd highest rate of firearm-related suicides per capita. Among high-income countries with at least 10 million people, it has the highest number of homicides per capita.

️3. Prisons

The U.S. is a country of many prisoners, with the most people in prison of any country in the world and the 6th highest incarceration rate in the world (and the single highest rate among wealthy countries).

Violent crime charges are the number 1 reason people are locked up in the U.S. (though in some cases, the definitions for “violent” can include actions that don’t cause immediate physical harm, such as purse snatching and drug manufacturing). 

4. Wealth

It’s an extremely wealthy place with the highest nominal GDP in the world, as well as the highest GDP per capita (both nominal and PPP) of any country with over 10 million people. California’s economy alone is large enough that, if California were a country, it would rank 6th in the world by some metrics. And by some metrics, Texas’s economy is larger than Russia’s and would rank 8th.

About 9% of U.S. adults are millionaires, and 39% of ALL millionaires are in or from the U.S. 

5. Inequality

The U.S. is a fairly unequal place in terms of wealth and income, with inequality higher than 63% of countries (the Gini coefficient is 39 vs. a world average of 38). It’s the 5th most unequal among the 37 OECD countries, and the average income of the top 20% of earners is 9.4 times the bottom 20% (though note that inequality figures can be dependent on how taxes and social benefits are handled in the calculations).

The wealth gap in the U.S. is especially pronounced across racial lines, with the median Black household having $24,000 in savings vs. the median white household with $189,000 in savings (almost 8x more). 

6. Science

The U.S. is a very scientifically innovative place, with the most Nobel prizes of any country (the 15th highest per capita). It also has the 2nd highest annual patent applications (which is the 4th highest per capita), many of the world’s top universities, and the most clinical trials worldwide. 

7. Health

The U.S. is an unhealthy place relative to its level of wealth. It has the 10th highest prevalence of obesity (the highest of any wealthy country) and the highest rate of death from illicit drugs of any country where such data is known. Life expectancy in the U.S. is 79 years, which places it 47th highest out of 193 countries (so, it’s roughly in the top 25th percentile). 

8. Entertainment

The U.S. is arguably the most influential country in the world in terms of entertainment production, with the most movies made each year of any country, as well as the largest box office sales and the largest music market size. 

9. Healthcare

Many Americans feel let down by U.S. healthcare despite the U.S. spending the most per capita on healthcare of anywhere in the world. Roughly 48% of Americans rate the healthcare system as excellent or good, 31% as fair, and 21% as poor, which are worse ratings than surveys found in the 2010s.

The U.S. has exceptional top hospitals but bad price transparency (so it’s hard to know what you will end up paying) and inflated prices relative to a lot of the rest of the world. 

10. Desirability

The U.S. is rated the single most desirable place to move to for people worldwide looking to emigrate, though its ratings have declined somewhat. In terms of Americans wanting to leave, during the Bush and Obama eras, about 10% of Americans said they’d like to move to another country, and this jumped to 16% in the Trump era. 

11. Military

The U.S. spends a shocking amount on its military, with about 39% of ALL worldwide defense spending being by the U.S. At times its military power has been a stabilizing force worldwide (e.g., against the Nazis). On the other hand, the U.S. has also initiated a number of disastrous wars. 

12. Happiness

The U.S. is a pretty happy place. When Americans are asked to rate their “general satisfaction with life on a scale from 0 to 10”, the average score is a 7 (compared to an OECD average score of 6.7), which places the U.S. 14th highest among 41 OECD countries.

When asked to imagine a ladder, with steps numbered from 0 to 10 at the top, with the top representing the best possible life for you and the bottom the worst possible one,

Americans place themselves at 6.9 on average, which is 16th highest out of 167 countries (i.e., 10th percentile). According to the World Happiness Index, which attempts to evaluate countries’ happiness by combining factors like GPD per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, generosity, and perceptions of corruption, the U.S. is 16th out of 142 countries (i.e., 11th percentile). ️

13. Ideals

The U.S. has high ideals, some of which are reflected in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

It sometimes lives up to these (e.g., through its strong personal freedoms), and sometimes has dramatically failed to live up to them (e.g., in its use of slavery and treatment of Indigenous Americans). 

Reaching a verdict: How great is the U.S., really?

So, is the U.S. one of the greatest countries? One approach to this question is to simply say that it can’t be answered because different countries differ in too many ways to make such comparisons possible. Another approach is to say that just one of the factors above trumps all the others.

Our preferred view, however, is to think of it in terms of your values: depending on what your values are, you will weigh the factors above differently. By some sets of values, the U.S. may arguably be the best country, whereas, by others, it doesn’t even come close.

At our organization, Clearer Thinking, we conducted research to figure out what it is that people value intrinsically (that is, what people value for its own sake – not as a means to other things). We’ve organized the results of that research into 22 different categories of common values:

Once you have a list of your own intrinsic values (which you can find out with our Intrinsic Values Test), then you can start to answer the question of how great the U.S. is.

For instance, if you have strong values related to protecting those who are less fortunate, you may give the U.S. lower marks due to its relatively high levels of inequality, whereas if you place more value on achievement, the U.S. may get higher marks due to being highly innovative in technology, business, and science.

It can be easy to base your judgments, including those about how good the U.S. is, on group identity rather than based on careful consideration of the facts and what you value. As political scientists Patrick Miller and Pamela Johnston Conover have said:

“The behavior of partisans resembles that of sports team members acting to preserve the status of their teams rather than thoughtful citizens participating in the political process for the broader good.” 

Employing a framework like the one outlined above, where you:

1. first attempt to impartially consider the facts,
2. then consider your values, 
3. and use the facts to inform how good or bad the thing is according to your values, can help you ensure that you’re deriving your conclusions thoughtfully and carefully, rather than simply deriving them from a desire (conscious or not) to conform to the expectations of group identities.

Ultimately, whether you conclude that the U.S. is great or not, we suggest basing your judgment on an evaluation of the facts plus careful consideration of your own values, not based on other people’s expectations.

This piece was first published on the Clearer Thinking blog on January 3, 2024, and first appeared on my website on January 10, 2024.

People like to think of things as “good” or “bad,” such as:

• Trans fats are bad for you, and broccoli is good for you.
• Lethargy is bad, but exercise is good.
• Being cowardly is bad, and having courage is good.

A problem with putting something in the “good” bucket of your mind, though, is that this can lead to the belief that the more of it there is, the better.

But most goods don’t work that way. It’s far more common for goods to diminish in value as you get more of them, or to be good up to a certain point and then stop being good at all, or even to harm you when you have too much!

By understanding the different ways that value can change with quantity, you can make more rational decisions. By grasping these concepts, you can optimize the way you allocate resources and efforts, avoid wastefulness, and strike a balance that promotes both personal well-being and efficiency – regardless of what decisions you have to make.

The next time you think about something being good, you can remember this article to add some nuance, go one step further, and think about what type of good it is.

Understanding Different Types of Goods

To help you make more rational choices, in this section, we’re going to give you a rundown of 4 types of goods that it can be helpful to know. They can be represented graphically like this:

You might find it useful to keep looking back at this chart as you read about the concepts below.

1️⃣Satiating Goods

Once you have a reasonable amount of these goods, there is no additional benefit to having more, but it also won’t hurt to have more (in realistic quantities). Although it is well-known that many goods have a point at which you will get no value from any more of them, there doesn’t appear to be a widely-used term for such goods. We like the phrase ‘satiating goods’ because your desire or need for them can be satiated.

For example, consider broccoli. Sure, it is probably healthy to swap 3% of what you eat for broccoli if you’re low in some of the nutrients it provides, but you will actually get no additional net benefit if you go from 20% of your diet being broccoli up to 30%. (Unless, of course, that final ten percent was substituted in place of something unhealthy, like trans fats or mercury-laden food.)

Satiating goods come up quite a bit. They are anything that you only need a certain amount of, and any excess won’t be used, such as:

• Healthy foods: Once you get a certain amount of any healthy food, eating more has no benefit. Yet, people tend to treat healthy foods as though they are unequivocally good.
• Seating in a venue: In a theater or conference venue, having enough seating for the expected audience is essential. But once there are enough seats for everyone, adding more seats doesn’t enhance the experience for attendees, though it doesn’t detract from it either (as long as the extra seating doesn’t spread people out too much).
• Life jackets on a boat: A boat requires enough life jackets for all passengers and crew. Once this number is met, additional life jackets do not enhance safety, as they are unlikely to be used.

2️⃣Diminishing Goods

It’s always good to have more of these goods, but the amount of value each additional unit gives you diminishes as you get more and more, but never reaches zero (for realistic quantities). 

One example is money: evidence suggests that the amount of life satisfaction you would get from doubling your income is fixed, regardless of what your income was before the doubling. This means that the extra life satisfaction you’d experience when going from $30,000 to $60,000 is equal to the extra life satisfaction you’d experience when going from $500,000 to $1,000,000. But the first one of those increases in life satisfaction is much cheaper than the second ($30k vs. $500k). So, the value of $30k to someone whose income is $30k is much higher than the value of that same amount of money to someone whose income is $500k. 

Of course, there’s a sense in which the value of money doesn’t diminish: each $1 you own is worth $1, no matter how many other dollars you have. But we’re talking about a more subjective value here; we’re talking about the value goods bring you in terms of your happiness or how important they are to you. When it comes to money, that kind of value diminishes as you get more of it. 

Diminishing goods are probably the most common. Other examples include: 

• Recreational travel: The initial trips and experiences can be highly rewarding, but over time, the novelty and excitement may diminish, even though they still offer enjoyment.
• Loving relationships: If you’re at 0 loving relationships and then you get to 1, you’ll be getting a much greater amount of value than if you’re at 100 and then you get to 101. However, your 101st loving relationship isn’t of no value at all.
• Hours of practice: If you’re starting a new hobby, you’ll find that your first hours of practice give you a large amount of value (in the form of improvement), but that value drops off over time as you have less to learn and make smaller and smaller improvements.

3️⃣Overdosable Goods

Like satiating goods, these are beneficial up to some amount, but, unlike satiating goods, further amounts of overdosable goods actually become harmful. Examples of this include:

• Medicines: Medicines are helpful in appropriate doses but typically harm you at higher dosages.
• Stretching: Some stretching, especially of body parts with low mobility, may be beneficial, but if you stretch an excessive amount, you might actually significantly increase the chance of injury.
• Courage: It’s good to have courage so that you can get yourself to do difficult things that are valuable – but past a certain point, courage yields no additional benefits and could lead to foolhardiness or getting into danger unnecessarily.

4️⃣Linear Goods

Finally, there are linear goods, so-called because the benefit you get from them increases at a constant (linear) rate as you get more of them. Every additional unit provides the same amount of extra happiness or utility; the marginal benefit does not change as more is acquired or consumed.

These are actually quite rare, and there is often disagreement over whether something counts as such a good. For example, they might include:

• Justice: If you value justice intrinsically, then you might think that more justice is always good, and the value of justice never diminishes or changes as more is acquired. 
• Happy lives: There is a debate over the moral value of bringing happy people into the world. Some people think it is morally good to do so (for example, see here). Other people think it’s morally neutral, while still others think it’s morally bad. Those who think it’s morally good to bring more happy people into existence typically also think that each new person is as valuable as all the others, and their value does not diminish or change as additional happy people come into existence.

The thing we want to point out here is that linear goods are quite uncommon, and their status is often controversial, despite the fact that people tend to think of ‘goodness’ as being linear all the time. But now you know better! Goodness more often gets satiated, diminishes, or even overdoses.

Of course, these are not the only types of goods out there! There are some more complicated goods with more complicated utility functions, but the ones discussed in this article are a great place to start, and reflecting on them will help you make more rational choices.

What should you do with this knowledge? 

Now that you know about different ways that goodness behaves, you can think more rationally about your goals and sources of happiness and avoid the trap of thinking that more of a good thing is always better. 

We suggest that you take some time to consider how these insights might affect your goals. Studies show that goals are more effective if they are approach goals (aiming for something you want) rather than avoidance goals (which focus on the negative), but if your goal is to acquire more of something (e.g., money) or do more of something (e.g., exercise), then you should ask yourself: “What kind of good is it that I’m after?”

• If you’re aiming for an overdosable good: It’s crucial to recognize the limit and avoid crossing it. This means being aware of and respecting recommended dosages, limits, or guidelines, whether it’s for physical activities, medical intake, or emotional states like courage.

• If you’re aiming for a satiating good: It’s not as crucial to know when to stop, but you can save yourself a lot of wasted effort by paying attention to when this good will stop being of value to you. Avoid wasting effort and missing opportunities for other value in your life.

• If you’re aiming for a diminishing good: These goods don’t have points at which they stop providing value, so it’s worth thinking even more carefully about when to call it quits. You should focus on noticing when the additional time, effort, or cost begins to outweigh the enjoyment or benefit you receive.

• If you’re aiming for a linear good: Remember that while they may seem straightforward in providing consistent benefits, they are rare and often subject to debate. It’s important to critically assess whether your pursuit really is a linear good for you and to be aware of the potential complexities. If you’re confident that the good really is a linear one and it has a high value for you, then you might just have found something worth dedicating your life to!

If you want to know more about what makes you happy so that you can better figure out which goods you might want to aim for, you could try our Clearer Thinking tool, Your Greatest Sources of Pleasure.

The next time you notice yourself thinking of something as being good, it may be worth considering what kind of good it is and asking, “When would I have enough?”

This piece was first published on the Clearer Thinking blog on December 20, 2023, and was published on my website on December 27, 2023.

Below is my attempt to list all human needs ranked according to their typical importance (from most important to least). Thanks for the idea, Maslow!

I’m defining a “need” here as something non-replaceable (i.e., you can’t just substitute it for something else), which, if substantially unsatisfied, would inhibit well-being for the vast majority of people.

You might say that you “need an iced tea” on a hot day, but it could be easily replaceable with lemonade or iced coffee, so iced tea is not a “need” in the sense that I mean. On the other hand, water (if you haven’t had any in a couple of days) really is irreplaceable, and a lack of it greatly reduces well-being. I’m using well-being here in a broad sense, to include everything from not dying to not feeling miserable to feeling happy.

Someone might say, “I need X if I’m going to achieve Y,” but that’s also not the sort of need I mean here (unless Y is “well-being” and X is something non-fungible).

My organizational scheme is to place needs into five levels, from highest to lowest average importance:

NEEDS

Level I: Immediate Survival

Level II: Extended Survival

Level III: Mental Health

Level IV: Relationships

Level V: Satisfaction

Immediate Survival needs come first because if you don’t satisfy them, you will quickly die. So all other needs usually take a back seat. Extended Survival needs are usually next in importance when they are not met (most of the time) because if you don’t satisfy them, you eventually die. The categories after that are harder to rank strictly, but in acute states of poor mental health, it is a lot harder to focus on relationships and higher forms of satisfaction, so I place mental health third. After that, I put relationships because they seem to create stronger needs for most people most of the time than the final level (satisfaction needs).

Beyond Level V there is another level, “Intrinsic Values,” but I do not include them as “needs,” per se, because while they are things people want, they differ a lot from person to person, and having them be poorly met often is not sufficient to inhibit well-being. For instance, someone may have an intrinsic value of people all around the world being happy, but they may not have their own day-to-day well-being limited by the lack of happiness of strangers around the world.

Note that it is definitely possible to attain higher-level needs while not having all the lower-level needs met. For instance, someone who is a prisoner could build meaningful relationships with other prisoners despite not having privacy or enough food to eat.

While most people have all or almost all of the needs listed below, the degree to which people experience the needs differs. Hence the order here should be taken as only very approximate. Moreover, some people fully lack some of these needs, especially items later in the list, so these should not be thought of as universal.

An additional factor is that how much people seek a need depends both on the importance of that need and on the perceived difficulty of satisfying it. For instance, someone who has not had any water in a day will likely be very focused on finding water if they believe it is attainable, but if they believe it is not attainable, they may be focused on other (higher up) needs.

List of Human Needs

Level I: Immediate Survival

1. Oxygen – an open airway (between our lungs and the outside world) and a constant supply of air that is at least 19.5% oxygen (and partial pressure of oxygen of less than 1.4 atm)

2. Functioning – freedom from severe/acute injury, bodily damage, and organ failure

3. Safety – no immediate threats from the environment, including from dangerous human or nonhuman animals

4. Temperature – protection from hypothermia or hyperthermia (i.e., one’s core body temperature needs to stay within 95-104 degrees Fahrenheit at all times)

5. Hydration -at least a few liters of water every three days

Level II: Extended Survival

6. Noncontamination – no more than trace quantities of poisons, radiation, and toxins

7. Lack of infection – the absence of severe infection with dangerous viruses, bacteria, fungi, protozoans, helminths, and prions

8. Dryness – a sufficiently dry environment at least every few days (or else our skin will macerate)

9. Sleep – at least ~28 hours of sleep per week

10. Energy – at least ~25,000 calories every three weeks

11. Macronutrients – sufficient quantities of the three macronutrients each month (varieties of carbohydrates, fats, and proteins) plus fiber

12. Macrominerals – sufficient quantities of the essential macrominerals every so often (sodium, chloride, potassium, calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, sulfur)

13. Microminerals – at least a tiny bit of the microminerals every so often (which probably include iron, zinc, iodine, selenium, copper, manganese, fluoride, chromium, molybdenum, nickel, silicon, vanadium, cobalt).

14. Vitamins – sufficient quantities of the 13 essential vitamins every few months (vitamins A, C, D, E, K, B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B7, B12, Folate)

Note: these nutrients/minerals/vitamins may not all be truly essential for survival, and there could be other nutrients, vitamins, or minerals that are essential that science doesn’t yet know about or that I just haven’t heard of.

Level III: Mental Health

15. Comfort – freedom from intense pain or discomfort (e.g., due to a pinched nerve, migraine, having to pee extremely badly, or a kidney stone)

16. Urge Satiation – freedom from an intense addiction or urge that can’t be satiated (e.g., a heroin user who is in the throes of a very strong urge to use again or someone who is very hungry when there is food just out of reach that they can’t get to)

17. Rest – the ability to stop exerting yourself once you have been engaged in a strenuous physical or mental activity for a long time

18. Cleanliness – a body and environment that doesn’t feel extremely dirty, contaminated, or infested

19. Understanding – not being confused about what is happening around you and being able to make sense of events.

20. Choice – the ability to make choices about what we do and don’t do (including freedom from imprisonment, enslavement, and extreme coercion or control)

21. Calmness – the sense that most of the time we, and the things that matter to us, are sufficiently safe (or else we are likely to have chronic anxiety)

22. Self-esteem – the sense that we have value and are capable of doing things that are worth doing

23. Hope – the sense that there will be value that we can create in the future and that the future will contain at least some good things (or else we are likely to be depressed)

24. Privacy – the ability to do things without being monitored and to have time to yourself without other people there (e.g., when showering, using the bathroom, or just when wanting to be alone)

Level IV: Relationships

25. Trust – a sense that the people in our immediate environment will not manipulate us, trick us, steal from us, use us, or hurt us.

26. Social interaction – social interaction with people we like and care about, and the sense that there are people who like and care about us

27. Community – the sense that we are accepted socially in at least one community, and ideally also that we are valued and have a role to play in that community

28. Sex – at least one partner we can engage in sexual activity with

29. Romantic love – a romantic partner we have a strong emotional bond with, who loves us and whom we love

30. Non-romantic love – family members or friends that love us and that we love back

31. Children – either children of our own, a partner we plan to have children with, or children of our relatives to help care for. Note: not everyone feels a need to have children, though many people do.

Level V: Satisfaction

32. Stimulation – sufficiently novel stimuli to keep us interested, or engaging tasks that bring us into a flow state (or else we become bored)

33. Enjoyment – the availability of activities that we enjoy

34. Meaning – goals, relationships, causes, or activities that feel important or meaningful to us, or that we feel we “live for” (or else our lives lack a sense of purpose and meaning)

35. Authenticity – the ability and confidence to behave as our authentic self without facing severe negative consequences

INTRINSIC VALUES

Beyond needs (i.e., non-fungible inhibitors to well-being), there are “intrinsic values,” which are things you desire for their own sake (not as a means to other ends) and which you would want even if they brought you nothing else. By definition, the things we intrinsically value, we want there to be more of.

Some intrinsic values are things we want for ourselves, others we want for our friends, family, or community, and still others we want for the world or universe.

Intrinsic values can be organized into something like 22 categories. Our categorization of them includes longevity, legacy, reputation, virtue, loyalty, justice, fairness, diversity, respect, caring, protection, nature, beauty, purity, spirituality, truth, learning, achievement, and freedom. Normally I would also include happiness, pleasure, and non-suffering in that list, but those bleed into needs, and so I would leave them out in this case to make the distinction between needs and intrinsic values clearer.

To learn more about your own intrinsic values, you can take our Intrinsic Values Test.

This essay was first written on July 28, 2021, and first appeared on this site on September 16, 2022.