Matt Killingsworth

After which, additional income produces diminishing and eventually negligible improvements in daily emotional experience, even though people's global life satisfaction, their evaluation of how their life is going overall, continues to rise somewhat with income well beyond that point.

Later research, including work by Matthew Killingsworth, has complicated the precise shape of this curve, suggesting the plateau may be less sharp than the original study found.

But the broader pattern across this research consistently supports something like Aristotle's natural limit.

Money that removes genuine material insecurity does an enormous amount of work for well-being.

Here's the proof.

A 2023 study by Daniel Kahneman and Matthew Killingsworth found that for most people, more money keeps nudging happiness up.

But for the unhappiest 20%, it flattens out.

More money stops helping.

And then hopefully we can provide maybe a little bit of a discussion about what we could do within this community to benefit from that methodology.

Yeah, I'll describe a couple of studies that I've done with my colleague, Matt Killingsworth.

So Matt Killingsworth developed a tool called Track Your Happiness.

He was an academic.

He did his PhD at Harvard University in psychology with psychologist Dan Gilbert, wrote the book Stumbling on Happiness.

We're going to dig into some more listener questions.

Jeremiah, let's start off with a couple from Matt Killingsworth here.

Yes, let's do this first one.

If you could drop any MLS player of all time into this, and I assume that we are picking a point in their career when they were playing in MLS and we're getting an age range.

So maybe that's some of my predisposition toward those guys, but just like it would make so much of a difference for this Austin FC team right now.

Yeah, absolutely.

One other quick one from Matt Killingsworth.

On game days, do y'all wear Austin FC stuff all day or just for the game? I wear

46.9%.

In 2010, Harvard psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert studied something remarkably simple.

Where is your mind when you're doing something else? They use a system that contacted people randomly throughout the day and asked them questions like, what are you doing? What are you thinking about? How happy are you? More than 2000 people participated.

Thousands of moments were recorded and the headline finding was startling.

That specific finding has actually been debunked.

So Danny Kahneman did an adversarial collaboration with another researcher named Matt Killingsworth.

And together, they actually found evidence that more money does continue to provide more happiness.

You just need to have enough data on really rich people to be able to see that.

I'm gonna start today with a piece of research that floored me the first time I read it, and that was in 2010.

Two psychologists at Harvard University, Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert, asked a few thousand people to report at random moments throughout their day what they were doing, what they were thinking about, and how they felt.

And they found that people's minds were wandering away from what they were doing close to half of the time.

So nearly half of our waking life is spent somewhere other than where we are.