Imagine working towards a number for ten years. Perhaps it is five million euros, perhaps twenty. The figure was never arbitrary. It stood for something concrete: independence, selling a business, a life without financial pressure, or simply proof that your work had been worthwhile. Eventually, the number is there on paper. The pleasure is real. Shortly afterwards, you notice that another ten million would be rather nice, too.
At first, that sounds unsurprising. People with money can usually imagine things they could do with more. There are bigger houses, new business ideas, greater security and people they would like to help. The interesting point comes when the next sum seems important even though it is becoming difficult to say what it would actually change about their life.
I think it is too easy to assume greed. People get used to their options, compare themselves with others and need goals. Sometimes these ordinary processes create a remarkable cycle. As soon as one threshold is reached, the next replaces it. The question then is whether the new goal still serves a personal wish, or whether counting has become an occupation in its own right.
A target can do a great deal
A concrete financial goal deserves some credit. It can focus decisions, clarify priorities and sustain effort over years. People building a company or saving for independence often need some way to tell whether their approach is working.
In 2002, psychologists Edwin Locke and Gary Latham summarised decades of goal-setting research. Their work explains how goals can direct attention and effort, and under which conditions they relate to performance. A clearly defined target can be more motivating than a vague intention to become successful someday. The research does, however, cover many tasks and work settings. It does not establish that a continually larger personal fortune is automatically a more meaningful goal.
Numbers are useful partly because they seem unambiguous. Selling a company at a certain valuation or reaching a particular level of wealth is easier to establish than whether you have gained enough freedom, peace of mind or time. Money is measurable. Your relationship with life is, inconveniently, less straightforward.
A financial target can therefore begin with a sensible purpose and later acquire a life of its own. You keep pursuing the figure although the circumstances that produced it have changed. Sometimes the difference only becomes clear when you remember why you started.
Why the original threshold moves
One explanation lies in our aspirations. What we consider appropriate, secure or desirable rarely stays unchanged for decades. As income rises, our idea of the income we need may rise too.
In a study published in 2004, Alois Stutzer examined income aspirations and life satisfaction. Other things being comparable, higher aspirations were associated with lower satisfaction. Aspirations also tended to be higher where people's own income and average local income were higher. A later international study by Matti Hovi and Jani-Petri Laamanen likewise found a negative relationship between higher income aspirations and subjective well-being. The authors also observed that higher incomes could remain associated with higher life satisfaction despite rising aspirations.
We should distinguish those findings carefully. Both papers primarily examine income and aspirations concerning it, not the wealth of entrepreneurs following a successful sale. They describe a mechanism that seems plausible for a shifting target measured in millions. They do not, by themselves, tell us how often it works that way among very wealthy people.
The idea is nevertheless familiar. An achievement becomes a prerequisite. The new house eventually becomes your ordinary home. The financial cushion no longer feels like a major success, but a minimum balance you would rather not fall below. Attention shifts from what has been achieved to what might be missing next.
How much is enough? explores how a personal sense of sufficient wealth develops. Here, I am interested in what happens afterwards: why an achieved goal so readily becomes a new starting line.
Other people change what a number means
Five million can be an extraordinary sum in one setting and barely attract attention in another. The number stays the same; its social meaning changes. Someone surrounded by wealthy entrepreneurs, investors or heirs may constantly encounter people whose balance sheets are larger than their own.
In a 2008 review, Andrew Clark, Paul Frijters and Michael Shields describe how people assess income relative to others and to their own past. Erzo Luttmer's 2005 study found that, holding people's own income comparable, higher neighbourhood earnings were associated with lower self-reported happiness. These findings concern income comparisons. They establish neither that all affluent people compete for rank nor that a particular wealth target must therefore move.
They do help explain the logic of such a competition. Imagine an entrepreneur with twelve million euros after selling a company. They could be content with that. If several acquaintances are celebrating sales worth thirty or fifty million, however, their own success may suddenly seem smaller. The twelve million has objectively lost nothing. The benchmark has changed.
Such comparisons need not even feel consciously envious. They may feel motivating, reflect entrepreneurial interest or seem like ordinary conversation between people doing similar things. Difficulties arise when somebody else's result quietly becomes your next obligation. In a competition for the biggest number, there is almost always somebody ahead.
Enjoying the game, and the force of habit
There is another explanation I would take more seriously than some moral commentary on wealth: achieving goals may simply be enjoyable. A difficult negotiation, a successful investment or a growing business can provide a sense of mastery. The next million may be interesting less for its purchasing power than for the challenge of reaching it.
There is nothing inherently objectionable about that. Some people enjoy building businesses. Others solve complex mathematical problems, collect rare objects or train for years to improve their sporting performance. Wealth makes success visible in a particularly clear unit. Nobody needs to debate whether eight million is more than seven.
Motivation research does suggest, however, that the kind of goal matters. Across three longitudinal datasets in 1999, Kennon Sheldon and Andrew Elliot examined how closely personal goals matched people's interests and values. These self-concordant goals were associated with more sustained effort and greater benefits to well-being when achieved. This was not a study of millionaires. It does offer a useful thought: two people can pursue the same number for completely different reasons.
One wants to start another company and looks forward to the work involved. The other lost enjoyment in business long ago but clings to the next wealth milestone because they do not otherwise know how to measure success. From outside, they may look equally ambitious. Their relationship with the goal could hardly be more different.
Habit matters, too. Someone who has spent twenty years checking figures, growth and returns every morning does not shed that way of thinking with a completed transaction. Without another target, a familiar part of the day may be missing. That is a plausible explanation from everyday life. It does not establish a scientific prevalence among people with eight-figure fortunes.
When achieving matters more than the achievement
In 1993, psychologists Tim Kasser and Richard Ryan examined the centrality of financial success in relation to psychological adjustment and well-being. A stronger emphasis on financial success relative to other personal goals was associated with less favourable well-being measures. Parts of the research involved students; another study used a more varied sample. These are associations, not proof that pursuing money makes people ill.
Christopher Niemiec, Richard Ryan and Edward Deci took the question further in a 2009 longitudinal study. They followed young adults after college and compared attainment of different life goals. Achieving intrinsic goals, such as personal growth and meaningful relationships, was associated with better psychological outcomes. Attaining extrinsic goals, such as money, image or fame, did not show the same positive relationships and was sometimes associated with less favourable measures.
These studies call for particular care. Recent graduates live in different circumstances from people who have built substantial wealth over decades. The data also do not establish a simple causal direction. They do not show that another million harms its owner. They remind us that successfully reaching a goal and benefiting personally from it are separate questions.
You can become exceptionally good at achieving something that means less and less to you. It almost sounds like a bad joke about hard work. But it is a possibility worth examining occasionally.
Why the next million is not automatically a problem
It would be convenient at this point to claim that people get used to every success and will never be satisfied anyway. The research is too nuanced for that. In 2006, Ed Diener, Richard Lucas and Christie Napa Scollon challenged the idea of a rigid hedonic treadmill, on which everybody inevitably returns to the same starting point after positive or negative events. Adaptation differs between people and areas of life. Longer-term changes in well-being are possible, too.
The next million really can create new possibilities. It can fund a venture, build reserves or make major decisions easier. Someone wanting to build another business may have good reasons for pursuing more capital. A financial target can also express genuine enthusiasm. Already being rich does not deprive the next project of meaning or legitimacy.
Nor must growing wealth make someone unhappy. Research on adaptation and financial aspirations does not support such sweeping claims. The mechanisms described here are possible influences whose importance varies with circumstances.
I am more interested in whether the goal can be explained without merely replacing the last number with a larger one. "I want to expand the company and keep capital available for it" is different from "Twenty million looks better than fifteen." Both answers are allowed. They say very different things about what someone expects from their money.
A goal is allowed to be finished
There is something peculiar about how we treat successful people. We praise persistence, but hardly anyone asks whether a goal has eventually served its purpose. With money, that question feels particularly unfamiliar because the score can always keep rising. There is room for another million after the next. Mathematics has, regrettably, no sense of tact.
A journey may offer a useful comparison. You set out to reach a particular place. On the way, you have experiences, meet people and change. At your destination, you can decide to travel further. Or you can arrive and do something else. Nobody would seriously call the journey a failure because you did not immediately plan the next stretch.
Why a major achievement sometimes feels surprisingly little like the turning point you expected is a question of its own. When you reach the big goal and surprisingly little changes explores that. Getting used to luxury and consumption experiences also deserves separate consideration. Here, it is enough to note that a completed financial goal does not automatically need replacing with a larger one.
Some people will want to keep working and accumulating. Others may want to use some of their wealth differently or simply devote less energy to it. Tired of Wealth and its underlying idea offer a deliberately unusual way to think about voluntarily giving money away. A particular bank balance creates neither an obligation nor a psychological need to do so.
The next million is a pleasingly clear number. It tells us how much additional wealth is being pursued. Whether it deserves to be a goal in its own right remains to be established. It may still be very appealing. Or reflection may reveal that the interesting question has long since changed: now that I have reached my earlier goal, what do I want to do?
Sources
Clark, Andrew E., Paul Frijters and Michael A. Shields (2008). “Relative Income, Happiness, and Utility: An Explanation for the Easterlin Paradox and Other Puzzles”. Journal of Economic Literature, 46(1), pp. 95 to 144. https://doi.org/10.1257/jel.46.1.95
Diener, Ed, Richard E. Lucas and Christie Napa Scollon (2006). “Beyond the Hedonic Treadmill: Revising the Adaptation Theory of Well-Being”. American Psychologist, 61(4), pp. 305 to 314. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.61.4.305
Hovi, Matti, and Jani-Petri Laamanen (2021). “Income, aspirations and subjective well-being: International evidence”. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 185, pp. 287 to 302. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2021.02.030
Kasser, Tim, and Richard M. Ryan (1993). “A Dark Side of the American Dream: Correlates of Financial Success as a Central Life Aspiration”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65(2), pp. 410 to 422. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.65.2.410
Locke, Edwin A., and Gary P. Latham (2002). “Building a Practically Useful Theory of Goal Setting and Task Motivation: A 35-Year Odyssey”. American Psychologist, 57(9), pp. 705 to 717. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.57.9.705
Luttmer, Erzo F. P. (2005). “Neighbors as Negatives: Relative Earnings and Well-Being”. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 120(3), pp. 963 to 1002. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/120.3.963
Niemiec, Christopher P., Richard M. Ryan and Edward L. Deci (2009). “The Path Taken: Consequences of Attaining Intrinsic and Extrinsic Aspirations in Post-College Life”. Journal of Research in Personality, 43(3), pp. 291 to 306. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2008.09.001
Sheldon, Kennon M., and Andrew J. Elliot (1999). “Goal Striving, Need Satisfaction, and Longitudinal Well-Being: The Self-Concordance Model”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76(3), pp. 482 to 497. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.76.3.482
Stutzer, Alois (2004). “The Role of Income Aspirations in Individual Happiness”. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 54(1), pp. 89 to 109. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2003.04.003