VC Deedy Das’ tweet on San Francisco vibes in May 2026 went viral. Paraphrasing a few parts:

“Over the last 5yrs, a group of ~10k people – employees at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Nvidia, Meta TBD, founders – have hit retirement wealth of well above $20 million.

Everyone outside that group feels like they can work their well-paying (but <$500k annual salary) job for their whole life and never get there…

Why even work at all for ‘peanuts’?… It’s hard to focus on doing good work when you think ‘man, if I joined Anthropic 2yrs ago, I could retire.‘”

It got A LOT of heat — perhaps best summed up by this reply:

This post is why people hate SF.

"Boo hoo my ~$500k a year job doesnt have me keeping up with Dario, Jensen, Elon and Mark 🥲🥲"

Dude, this is like a decade of the average American's salary for moving a few buttons around and going on Macha coffee dates.

This is a lifetime of… https://t.co/1q8wfJIGml

— Tom Dunleavy (@dunleavy89) May 16, 2026

I’ve never been to San Francisco, but think I know what’s going on:

• The top 1% are comparing themselves to the top 0.1%. And feeling weird.
• The unhappy ones are measuring their lives using the wrong metric (money).

I’ve previously written about the art of comparison, so today, we’ll focus on the money-as-a-metric angle. Why do we measure our lives using money? Why can’t even wildly-rich and successful people be satisfied? If money isn’t the best way to measure your life, then what is?

Let’s start by considering what money is really good at.

Money Is Amazing To Cover Basic Needs

Money buys food for when you’re hungry. Warm clothes for when you’re cold. A secure place to stay so you can sleep well at night.

If we refer to Maslow’s classic Hierarchy of Needs, everything at the Physiological (base) level and much at the Safety (second-from bottom) level can be paid for with money.

Sure, it’s possible to get food, warmth and shelter without money (hi Mom), but it cannot be done as efficiently and effectively as using money.

Money is life’s most useful tool for solving basic human needs.

Money Is Helpful To Support Higher-Level Needs

What about higher-level human needs — like Love & Belonging and Self-esteem? A couple of examples:

• Money cannot buy friends, but it can pay for pizza and fuel to drive to your friend’s house.

• Money cannot buy love, but it can pay for gym/grooming/clothes that make you look attractive, and a Eurotrip with your partner.

• Money cannot buy meaning in life, but it can pay for all the above, while you try tiny career experiments to search for your life’s purpose.

Beyond the things that keep us alive — for the things that make us feel alive, money is a great supporter.

At this point, you might be thinking “well, obviously,” 🙄

But have you ever met someone who tried to meet their higher-level needs mainly using money? Like the stereotypical rich kid who can’t find true love even though he throws money at girls. It doesn’t work because you can’t solve for higher-level needs the same way as lower-level needs. “I give money. You give what I want,” fails for human connection.

And if we continue down this line of thinking — investigating how money intersects with life’s greatest opportunities — we will discover more interesting things.

Like, why do we measure success in life using money?

We Measure Our Lives in Money Because Our Lives Are Supported by Money

First, because it directly pays for our base-level needs, we can falsely think that money is always a good measure of success. It goes like this:

I want good food, comfortable clothes and a safe home >> Money can buy me all of this >> Therefore, the more money I make, the more successful I am.

When we consider higher-level needs though, money does not directly cause success. Rich people can feel unloved, low on confidence, and worry their lives are meaningless. Money may help to fix those things, but money alone cannot solve them.

In other words, money is a good measure of success for some things in life. But not all things.

I believe you’re especially susceptible if you grew up without lots of money and luxuries. When you have some disposable income, you suddenly realize how amazing money is. It can be natural to keep focusing on base-level needs. A bigger house. Nicer clothes.

And it gets harder because of what society tells us about money and success.

We Measure Our Lives in Money Because Other People Tell Us To

Several ways modern-day society — directly or indirectly — encourages you to measure your life in money:

1. If you work at a for-profit company, in finance, or just love studying business and investing: Money is the ultimate measure of success. When your daily work conversations involve “how much revenue will this make?”, when Forbes releases its annual “World’s billionaire list” — it’s easy to have that kind of thinking creep into your personal life.
   
   Even if you don’t, what’s the most important number on your employment contract? Right, it’s your salary. You can’t escape money being left, right and center at work.
   
   Even in a field as “noble” as education, many universities nowadays market the average starting salaries for their degrees. Great marketing hook. But food for thought: is education primarily a means for making money?
   
   
2. If you live in a place where consumerism is strong: Luxurious things and experiences are constantly shoved in your face, telling you that success = having nice things. There’s always a special offer to drive urgency too: “Mid-year sale. Buy now!”
   
   And because we get used to nice things (i.e. the hedonic treadmill), we can lust for more. When you’re 23, you might think you’ll get a TAG Heuer Carrera one day and that’ll be enough. But after you’ve gotten your TAG, your dealer starts talking to you about Rolex Submariners.
   
   
3. Social media amplifies our fundamental human nature to compare: “Hey honey, did you see the Jacksons’ latest vacation stories? How the hell are they making enough money to travel business class?”
   
   Yes, comparison and status games have existed for eternity. But social media has exacerbated this. Your parents might have stared at the house down the road with a perfectly-manicured garden, wondering how nice the china was inside. You — on the other hand — get to see FHD clips of Mr. & Mrs. Jackson sipping Moët in their business class suite. And that’s just from “Day 1 – Italy 2026.” 😒

Interestingly, all three points above affect you — no matter how much money you have. Because of human nature, it’s difficult to escape societal pressures for money — even if you have billions.

We’re complicated creatures. Now let’s take a deeper look into human needs.

Money Is a Great Supporter of Needs, but Human Needs Aren’t So Simple

Earlier, we spoke about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. It has been criticized for several things, including:

1. The hierarchical approach. If you look at the pyramid, it would seem like you need all your physiological and safety needs met before you need the higher-level ones. This is not true. You can be hungry for both food and love at the same time.
2. Self-actualization being the ultimate human goal. Whereas in more collectivist (e.g. Asian and Latino) cultures, community goals are the priority.

A more modern take is ERG theory — proposed by psychologist Clayton Alderfer. Here, human needs are classified into three categories (which can also be mapped to Maslow’s original five): Existence, Relatedness and Growth.

Professor Alderfer also introduced a progression and regression theory: When needs in a lower category are satisfied, a person will invest more effort in the higher category. And vice versa: When needs in a higher category are frustrated, a person will invest more effort in the lower category.

If I extrapolate this to the world of money, with oversimplified examples:

• A rich person can easily pay for food and housing. So they spend more time thinking about work satisfaction + next week’s dinner party.
• A poor person spends more time thinking about food and rent. So they don’t have as much capacity to think about their life’s purpose + expressing their creative energies on a blog.

The important thing to remember is human needs are fluid. It’s not a simple checkbox where once my Existence needs are met, I will only ever think about Growth needs. Instead, think about your human needs as multiple apps on a phone with limited battery. They will always be running in the background, but depending on your season in life — some require more attention than others.

The key is to be mindful of what needs you’re focusing on.

Despite the term “lower-level,” I don’t want it to seem like I’m devaluing lower-level needs. They’re important. There are seasons in life where you need to focus on making more money and upgrading your house. I believe in reasonable lifestyle creep. Just be careful not to neglect the higher-level needs, and switch focus when it’s time.

Okay, I’ve gone on and on about how money is an imperfect measure of success. What are the other critical measures?

The Other Types of Wealth in Life

In Sahil Bloom’s bestseller “The 5 Types of Wealth,” he mentions four other types of wealth in life:

• Time wealth – How much freedom you have to choose how, when, and with whom you spend your time.
• Social wealth – How strong your relationships and reputation are.
• Physical wealth – How healthy you are and feel.
• Mental wealth – How aligned you are to your life’s purpose, with space to reflect and grow.

These are much harder to quantify and measure. It’s not like financial wealth, where you can easily calculate your net worth.

Even the most trackable of these four — physical wealth — involves subjectivity. Your BMI, blood pressure, cholesterol and every other blood marker can be within range, but sometimes you just feel “off.”

How do you even attempt to measure things like “How much does my family love me?” or “Am I living life according to my values?”

These go well beyond the scope of this article. But for today, what I want to emphasize is this: don’t lose sight of these other powerful ways to measure your life. They’re not as convenient as money to measure — hence we tend to forget — but they can be much more rewarding.

Going through life focusing only on money is like going to college and focusing on just getting the highest GPA. Yes, your grades are important. But what are the best parts of college life? Making true friends, searching for a life partner, learning deeply about yourself, and creating lifelong memories.

Use Money Less as a Scorecard, More as a Tool To Buy Happiness

The simplest way to measure success is money.

But there’s another simple measure that most people think about: happiness.

So let’s consider what we’ve discussed today through the lens of happiness. What do the happiest people in the world have in common?

From research¹, a few things: Strong relationships with family and friends. Meaningful purpose — Ikigai, the reason you get out of bed every morning. Good physical/mental health. And living in high-trust societies where people have freedom, fair systems, and stability (many of which are in rich countries).

Where does this leave money? Sahil Bloom calls it the enabler. I think it’s the base of the pyramid. It’s still freaking important. But once you get to a certain point, I hope you think about it less and less, and more and more about the other things.

Finally, if you’ve made it this far, you’re probably what happiness expert Dr. Arthur Brooks calls an “ambitious striver.” Someone who’s a high achiever, yet constantly striving to improve and chase more success. You likely already do well with money, or are on your way there.

Now you know the secrets of what makes a wonderful life beyond money. Money is not the best way to measure your life, but it’s still one of life’s most useful tools. Money is a great accelerator of things. Money is leverage.

Imagine how beautiful a life it could be, if you channel your money to support and accelerate the things that make life truly rich.

– – –

Footnotes:

1. Not exhaustive. I pulled these insights primarily from: Harvard Study of Adult Development, Blue Zones and World Happiness Report.

Pic from Pexels: Jonathan Cooper