Why We Need Vitamin M
- Christopher Han
- 8 hours ago
- 7 min read
Why the people who tell us money does not matter are almost always solvent, and what the post-2021 wellbeing data actually says.
There is a particular line you hear from a particular kind of speaker on a particular kind of stage. It goes something like this. Money is not what makes you happy. The richest people I know are the most miserable. What you really need is purpose, presence, and gratitude. Then a slow inhalation through the nose and a microphone glistening with affirmation.
I want to tell you why I find that line, however well-meant, dishonest. Or at least incomplete.
The Stage Speech That Quietly Lies
The first reason is that the people who say it are almost always solvent. They are usually, in fact, well above solvent. They are speaking from a stage that requires a fee, an agent, a publishing deal, and a green room with charcuterie. They have outsourced money to such a degree that they no longer think of it the way most of their audience does. They think about meaning because the prerequisite has long since been handled. To stand on that stage and tell a room full of people, half of whom are quietly carrying credit card debt, that money is not what makes you happy is a little like a person with a full tank lecturing on the unimportance of petrol. It is technically true. It is also unhelpful.
The Lie of Survivorship
The second reason is the lie of survivorship. We hear about the rich miserable man because the rich miserable man writes books and the broke miserable man writes nothing. The man who is poor and lonely and ill does not get a podcast tour. The mother of three who quietly skipped meals to feed them and whose teeth fell out at fifty does not appear on the panel about money and meaning. We sample the unhappiness of the rich because they are the only unhappiness we can hear. The other unhappiness is muted by the very deficiency we are pretending is not a problem.
What the Data Actually Says
The third reason, and the one I want to spend the most time on, is that the data does not support the cliche. The famous Kahneman and Deaton study from 2010 suggested that emotional well-being rose with income but plateaued around 75,000 US dollars a year. That study was repeated, more carefully, by Matthew Killingsworth in 2021, with a much larger sample and continuous experience sampling, and the result was different. Well-being kept rising with income. There was no clean ceiling. The two researchers later collaborated on a joint paper in 2023 and found that the original plateau held for a small minority who were already deeply unhappy, but for everyone else, more money correlated with more daily well-being, and the curve did not flatten anywhere close to where the cliche says it should.
I am not saying money buys happiness. I am saying the people who declare with confidence that it does not are arguing against a study that no longer holds. The current evidence is far more uncomfortable. It says that money is correlated with more or less every dimension of human flourishing we can measure: less chronic stress, better sleep, lower mortality, better educational outcomes for children, longer relationships, better mental health, more leisure, more self-reported sense of meaning. Not because money is meaning. Because the conditions for meaning are easier to assemble when you are not exhausted.
Why We Actually Need It
Why do we need Vitamin M, then. Let me try to answer it without the cliches.
We need it because every other thing we want depends on a baseline level of agency, and agency is purchased.
Agency is the ability to say no to what diminishes you, and yes to what compounds you. The single mother working two jobs and a cleaning shift on weekends does not have agency in any meaningful sense. She has obligation. She has bills. She has the dignity of carrying her family across a deficit. What she does not have is the freedom to say no to a boss who undervalues her, no to a relationship that drains her, no to an industry that is killing her back. That kind of no is paid for in money. Anyone who tells you otherwise has not met enough single mothers.
We need it because a brain in financial scarcity is not the same brain in financial sufficiency. I will spend more time on this tomorrow, but the short version is that the cognitive cost of being broke is measurable, large, and largely invisible to those who have never been there. Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir documented this. Money worries reduce IQ-equivalent performance by something like thirteen points, the same kind of degradation as a sleepless night. We need Vitamin M because without it, the very faculties we would use to escape its absence are dulled.
We need it because care has a price. A friend of mine spent six months managing his mother's stage three cancer. He took unpaid leave. He could afford to take unpaid leave because his wife earned well and they had savings. He told me, without irony, that being able to be there at the end was the most important thing he had done with his money. Not bought it. Cleared time for it. The deepest expression of his love had a price tag, and the price tag was the savings account he had spent ten years building while telling himself it did not matter.
We need it because the alternative is dependency, and dependency at scale is the architecture of most unhappiness. Read any honest account of a violent relationship and somewhere in the middle there is a sentence about not having the money to leave. Read any honest account of a quietly miserable marriage and somewhere there is a sentence about the joint mortgage. Read any honest account of a person trapped in the wrong career for twenty years and somewhere there is a sentence about the cost of starting over. We need Vitamin M because without it, we are forced to remain in arrangements that do not nourish us, and we call this maturity, and we call this commitment, and we call this realism, and what we are actually doing is paying for our choices in years.
Who Profits From the Confusion
The people who will not tell you any of this are the people who profit from your continued embarrassment about money. Some of them sell vague spiritual content. Some of them sell expensive education. Some of them sell hustle. Some of them sell renunciation. The product changes. The structure does not. They benefit from your confusion. The clearer you are about why this nutrient matters, the less likely you are to buy what they are offering.
I do not believe money is the meaning of life. I think the meaning of life is something more or less impossible to articulate, and I am not sure the question is well-formed in the first place. But I believe, and I will defend this, that money is one of the conditions of a life in which the question can even be asked. A poor mind cannot ask rich questions. It is too busy carrying a stone.
We need Vitamin M because we are animals with bodies and dependents and time, and all three demand resources. The romance of the empty pocket is a romance written by people who never had to fill one.
Tomorrow I want to look at the deficiency itself, in all its forms, including the ones we do not call by that name.
Key Takeaways
- The data has moved on. Killingsworth's 2021 study and the 2023 Killingsworth-Kahneman joint paper show wellbeing keeps rising with income, well past the old 75,000 dollar plateau.
Survivorship bias filters our intuitions. We hear from the rich and miserable because they have a microphone. The poor and miserable are silent for the same reason.
Money is the price of agency. The freedom to say no is paid for in money, not in mantras.
A brain in scarcity loses bandwidth equivalent to a night without sleep. The faculties needed to escape the deficit are the first ones taxed by the deficit.
Money is not the meaning of life. It is one of the conditions in which the question can even be asked.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does money actually buy happiness, according to current research?
The most current research, the 2023 Killingsworth and Kahneman joint paper, finds that emotional well-being continues to rise with income for the majority of people, with no clear plateau at the previously cited 75,000 US dollar threshold. The exception is a small minority who are already deeply unhappy, for whom more income does not lift wellbeing.
Why does Day 2 say agency is purchased?
Because the freedom to say no, to leave a job that diminishes you, to refuse a relationship that drains you, to walk away from an industry that is harming you, requires a financial floor. Without that floor, the no is not available. Agency is the ability to choose, and choice in modern life almost always carries a price tag.
What is the cognitive cost of financial stress?
The research by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir suggests that money worries reduce IQ-equivalent cognitive performance by roughly thirteen points, comparable to the impairment caused by a night without sleep. The faculties most affected are planning, impulse control and judgement.
Is the Vitamin M series saying money is the meaning of life?
No. The series argues the opposite. Money is not the meaning of life. It is one of the conditions in which a meaningful life can be assembled. The meal is the life. The vitamin is what makes the meal nourishing.
Who profits from telling people money does not matter?
People who sell spiritual content, expensive education, hustle programmes or renunciation philosophies all benefit when audiences remain confused about money. The clearer the audience becomes about why money matters, the less compelling those products become.
Yesterday, Day 1: What Vitamin M Means. Tomorrow, Day 3: What Happens When We Have a Lack of It.