Thus, while those who are very wealthy like to believe that they are worthy of the financial rewards they have accrued, many poorer people don’t want to mess with the dream that they too might achieve such riches if only they work hard enough. For them to concede that perhaps the system was stacked against them—that money had become far better at begetting more money than working long hard shifts—would be tantamount to abandoning their sense of agency and their cherished beliefs that what made their countries different was that anyone who worked hard enough could be whatever they wished to be.

The point is that your brain’s reward system is influenced directly by emotions and less directly by what society labels as “good” and “bad.” As humans, we are deeply wired for emotions, which is why most of us are a mixed bag of habits—some we want and plenty we don’t.

But money, achievement, and status all have a tendency to overtake other priorities. This, too, is a function of our ancient brains: we focus on what is most visible, and most immediate. The value of relationships is ephemeral and hard to quantify, but money can be counted.

In 2010 Angus Deaton and Daniel Kahneman at Princeton University tried to quantify the relationship of money to happiness using a year-long Gallup survey that resulted in a massive dataset of 450,000 daily responses from a nationally representative sample of one thousand people.

Deaton and Kahneman showed that in the United States, $75,000 seemed to be a kind of magic number at that time. Once a household income was more than $75,000 per year, which was close to the average family income in the U.S. at the time of the study, the amount of money that people earned showed no clear relationship to daily reports of enjoyment and laughter, which were used as indicators of emotional well-being.

For some people in the study, making the economics work proved relatively easy, whereas for others it proved much more difficult. Family wealth served as a significant means to pursue a hedgehog in only six of the 34 lives we studied, whereas in ten of 34 cases people endured at least one significant phase of scarcity while in pursuit of a hedgehog. Yet whether easy or difficult (or somewhere in between), they committed to focus their inner fire in line with their encodings and they figured out how to make the economics work.