Thought of the day by Stoic philosopher Epictetus: "Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants"

I have moved between Ireland and Southeast Asia year after year for a while now, and one thing has crept up on me quietly. My wants have shrunk. Not because I decided to want less. They just receded on their own, and the strange part is they receded most not in the cheaper country but in the Irish countryside, where a walk and a bad coffee and nothing scheduled started to feel like plenty.

And this brings me to the quote in the title of this post. Epictetus, the Greek Stoic born into slavery and later teaching in Rome, does something sneaky with the word wealth. He turns it into a fraction. You can raise the top, the possessions you own, or you can lower the bottom, the things you want. Both make you wealthier by his math. Only one of them is really under your control.

A note before I go further: I am not a psychologist or an economist, and this is one reader’s reading of an old line, not advice. The studies I mention below come from particular groups of people, not settled laws about you or anyone.

The path of great possessions

The obvious way to feel wealthier is to get more. Chase the top of the fraction. I have done this, and I suspect most people have.

Years ago I bought a new motorbike and spent weeks looking forward to the day it would arrive. The day arrived. It was fine. Within about two weeks it was just the thing I drove to the shops, and the feeling I had bought it for had quietly packed up and left.

There is a name for that flattening. Psychologists call it the hedonic treadmill: the lift from a gain fades as we get used to it and expect a bit more. Kennon Sheldon and Sonja Lyubomirsky point to the often-cited finding that lottery winners were no happier some months on. They also note something odder; average happiness in the US barely moved, from around 7.5 in 1940 to 7.2 in 1990, over a stretch when real income more than tripled.

It gets sharper when possessions become the whole point. Tim Kasser, who has spent much of his career studying money and well-being, summed up the research plainly. He told Behavioral Scientist that “the more that people prioritize materialistic values, the less-happy they are, the less satisfied they are with their lives, the less vital and energetic they feel.” He is describing a pattern across many studies, not proof that a new sofa will make you miserable. But the direction is hard to ignore.

The path of few wants

Now the other end. Lowering what you want does something that buying more cannot, because it changes the thing you measure everything against. If you need less to feel complete, the gap between what you have and what you want closes without you buying a thing.

This is the part I have felt firsthand. Moving between two lives with a couple of bags has made me aware of how little I actually need, and I find it easier and easier to let things go. Not as a discipline. It just turned out that most of what I thought I wanted was scenery.

Kasser has a useful way of picturing why the two ends pull against each other. In his model, your values behave like a set of connected balloons. As he puts it, “As one set of values goes up, the others ones tend to decrease in size.” Fill up on wanting more, and the room left for the things that reliably feed people, connection, purpose, a bit of ease, tends to shrink.

Where the two paths actually diverge

I do not want to pretend money is nothing. It clearly matters, especially lower down. The link between income and happiness has been genuinely argued over. Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton famously found day-to-day happiness rose with income but leveled off above roughly $75,000 a year. Matthew Killingsworth, drawing on over 1.7 million real-time reports, later found happiness kept climbing with income, with no such ceiling.

They then did the sensible thing and worked it out together. Killingsworth said of it that “the two findings that seemed utterly contradictory actually result from data that are amazingly consistent.” Together they found that on average, happiness keeps rising with income. But for the least happy people in each income band, it climbs to about $100,000 and then flattens. 

The treadmill is the trap: get more, get used to it, want more, run again. Fewer wants tend to arrive on their own if you let them, and they do not need topping up.

If any of this is pressing on something heavier than idle curiosity, a chronic sense that nothing is ever enough, that is worth talking through with a good therapist rather than an old quote.

What Epictetus is not saying is that you should give everything away, or that having things is a moral failing. What he is saying, as far as I can tell, is that you can improve the sum from either end, and only one end answers to you. You cannot fully control what arrives. You can, slowly and imperfectly, notice what you actually want. The math runs from the bottom up.