Why "I got rich and it didn't make me happy" feels weird
or: a practical lesson in contrapositive proof
I saw this clip of Matt Damon come across the internet recently where he talks about when he won an oscar at 27 years old. That he realized it didn’t fulfill him and how he was grateful he learned that lesson then, and not at 80 or 90 years old.
It’s a good message. Money and awards won’t fulfill you. You can see the same trope while searching for “money didn’t make me happy”.
I think it’s a good message. But there’s an undercurrent to how it’s delivered and to whom. Most people who hear that are just not really at risk of becoming super wealthy or famous. Over half of the US couldn’t handle a surprise $1k expense.
The subtext of these messages is twofold:
Don’t worry too much about money or fame. That’s not what will fill the hole in your heart/soul/etc. This good insofar as that’s what people hear.
But the second part is insidious:
If you are suffering from not having money or status, not having money isn’t why you are suffering.
And that’s often bullshit. Having too little money/status sure as hell does cause suffering. If you have no money or status, it does cause suffering. The average age of death for homeless people is almost twenty years less than standard.
Why is “contrapositive” in the title? It’s a little nerdy math tangent:
In logic, the contrapositive of a conditional statement is formed by negating both terms and reversing the direction of inference. More specifically, the contrapositive of the statement "if A, then B" is "if not B, then not A." A statement and its contrapositive are logically equivalent, in the sense that if the statement is true, then its contrapositive is true and vice versa.[1]
Why does this matter to the above bit about money and status?
The explicit statement is “money didn’t make me happy”, or “not(money → happy)”
What’s being smuggled along is “don’t complain about not having enough money if you’re poor, that won’t make you happy”, or “not(not(money) → not(happy))”
And linking those is a misapplication of the contrapositive.
When you don’t examine that smuggling, the well-intended message is used to punch down on those hurting from depravation.