A few weeks ago I was watching the draw of a lottery with a jackpot that had climbed past $100 million. I was not particularly invested — I rarely play. But something about that number made me have an exciting thought. Not the greed of it. Something more interesting. I found myself genuinely asking: what would I actually do? And what surprised me was how long it took me to answer. And how much I learned about myself and my deeper life’s Purpose in trying.

I suspect you know the feeling. The jackpot gets announced. You let your mind go there — just for a moment. The house. The travel. The freedom. The relief of never worrying about money again. It feels like clarity. Like if only that one thing would happen, everything would finally make sense. But I want to do something different with this post. I want to follow that thought all the way to where it actually leads. Not the fantasy version. The honest version. Because when I did that — when I really sat with the question of what $100 million would change and what it would not — I found something I was not expecting.

The science had something to say about it too. And what the science says is simultaneously more comforting and more challenging than most people realise.

The Thought Experiment — Give Yourself Permission to Really Go There

Before we get to the research, I want you to actually do this. Close the other tabs. Sit with the question properly. Not the first-response version of the question — the car, the house, the holidays. Go further. Assume those are done. Assume it is two years later. The shock has settled. You have bought the things you wanted to buy. You have taken the trips. Your family is secure. You have set up the foundation or made the donations you always said you would. Now what?

What do you do on a Tuesday morning when there is nothing you have to do? What do you pursue when the pursuit of financial security — which has quietly organised most of your adult decisions — is no longer the organising principle? What fills the space?

I sat with this for a while. And what I noticed was that most of the things that came up — the things that genuinely excited me, not the things I thought I was supposed to want — were not things the money would actually produce. They were experiences. Feelings. States of being. The deep satisfaction of doing work that matters. The warmth of specific relationships. The particular quality of a morning when you are fully present to it. The sense of being aligned — of living in a way that reflects what you actually believe.

The money would remove obstacles to those things. But it would not create them. That is a subtle but enormous distinction — and it is one that the science of happiness has been circling for decades.

What the Science of Money and Happiness Actually Says — The Honest Version

For years, the most-cited finding in happiness research was a 2010 study by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and economist Angus Deaton, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Their finding: emotional wellbeing — the quality of your actual day-to-day experience — did not improve beyond an annual income of approximately $75,000. Life satisfaction kept rising with income, but the felt texture of daily life — whether you actually felt good moment to moment — appeared to plateau. More money could make you think your life was going better. It did not appear to make you feel it was going better, at least not beyond that threshold.

That finding became one of the most repeated statistics in popular psychology. But the story did not end there. In 2021, Wharton’s Professor Matthew Killingsworth ran the study again — using a real-time smartphone experience-sampling method across over 1.7 million data points — and reached the opposite conclusion. Killingsworth found that happiness continued to rise with income well beyond $75,000, with no plateau in sight. Two carefully conducted studies by respected researchers, directly contradicting each other.

Rather than spend a decade trading academic rebuttals, Kahneman and Killingsworth did something remarkable. They proposed what is called an adversarial collaboration — pooling their raw data, reanalysing it together with a neutral third party. Their joint paper, Income and Emotional Well-Being: A Conflict Resolved, was published in PNAS in March 2023. And what they found was that both had been right — just about different people.

What Actually Happens to Lottery Winners — The Research Is Fascinating

The most comprehensive study of large lottery winners was conducted by Swedish economists and published in The Review of Economic Studies (Oxford Academic) in 2020. They surveyed lottery winners 5 to 22 years after a major lottery event — a time horizon long enough to see what actually persists versus what fades.

There is also a striking finding from a Ghent University study published in Judgment and Decision Making that examined how people imagine lottery wins of increasing size. Across five studies with 1,504 participants, expected happiness followed an inverted U-shaped curve — rising with jackpot size up to a point, then actually declining as the imagined win became very large. People instinctively sensed that an enormous windfall might come with complications — changed relationships, loss of purpose, unwanted attention — that would offset the gains. The imagination knows what the fantasy tries to hide.

We climb toward summits we imagine will change everything. The view from the top is real. But we still have to decide what to do next. Photo: Unsplash

Fifty principles for a life that feels genuinely good — not just one that looks good from the outside. 50 Golden Rules for a Happy and Fulfilled Life — the audiobook for anyone who suspects that what they are really searching for is not what they think they are searching for.

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We Dream About Things We Are Not Really Ready to Receive

Here is the observation that stopped me most during my $100 million thought experiment. I was not ready. Not in a practical sense — in a psychological and philosophical sense. I had not done the internal work to know what I would actually do with the freedom. I had a list of things I thought I wanted. But when I examined that list honestly, a lot of it was about escape rather than arrival. Escape from financial pressure. Escape from constraints. Escape from the feeling of not having enough time, not having enough resources, not having enough options.

Freedom from is not the same as freedom to. And it turns out that most of us, when we dream about wealth, are primarily dreaming about the removal of what is painful rather than the construction of what is meaningful. We are dreaming about relief. And relief — as genuine and valuable as it is — is not the same as fulfilment.

The Swedish lottery data speaks directly to this. The winners experienced lasting improvements in financial life satisfaction. They stopped worrying about money. And that is real and important. But the texture of their days — their relationships, their health satisfaction, their sense of purpose and meaning — did not significantly improve. Because those things were never actually about the money. They were about choices, habits, priorities, and investments of attention that the money alone cannot make for you.

What We Are Really Searching For When We Dream About Wealth

When I pushed past the first layer of my $100 million fantasy, I found something that I think is more commonly true than people admit. What I was actually imagining was not the money itself. I was imagining what the money would allow me to feel. Time. Ease. Meaning. The ability to focus on what matters without the constant pressure of what is urgent. The freedom to be generous without calculating the cost. The experience of full presence — of not being partially elsewhere, worried about something financial, even while doing something I love.

Those are not financial goals. They are experiential ones. They are about the felt quality of being alive — and here is the genuinely important observation: most of them are at least partially available right now, without $100 million, if you are willing to pursue them directly rather than through the proxy of wealth.

The Deeper Question — This Is Really About Your Purpose

Here is what I want to name directly, because I think it is the most important thing this thought experiment reveals. The question “What would you do with $100 million?” is, at its deepest level, not a question about money at all. It is a question about your purpose. It is asking: when all constraints are removed — when you have the resources, the time, the options, the freedom — what would you actually choose to do with your one life?

This is precisely what we explored in our post on finding your purpose — the purpose audit. Because purpose is not something that arrives with a windfall. It is something you uncover by paying close attention to what genuinely matters to you — what lights you up, what you would pursue even without applause or payment, what you feel called toward when the noise settles.

The $100 million question is the purpose question in disguise. And it is worth taking seriously — not because you are about to win the lottery, but because the answer tells you something essential about how you are currently living versus how you deeply wish to live. When you imagine having all the choices, all the resources, all the freedom — and you picture yourself spending your days in a particular way, pursuing a particular kind of work, being present with particular people — that picture is not a fantasy. It is a signal. It is your deeper self pointing at what it actually wants, unfiltered by the practical constraints that dominate most of your daily decisions.

The most useful thing you can do with that signal is not to dream more vividly about the lottery. It is to ask: what is one step I can take toward that picture, with the resources I actually have, right now? Purpose does not require $100 million. It requires attention, honesty, and the willingness to begin — at whatever scale is currently available to you — in the direction your heart is pointing.

📚 Two Books That Help You Answer the Real Question

Destined for Greatness — The 10 Pillars of Life

If the $100 million question revealed something about the life you want to build — this is where to start building it. The 10 Pillars of Life is the complete framework for constructing a life of meaning, health, relationships, and lasting fulfilment. Not the life that looks good from the outside. The life that feels genuinely great from the inside. This is the book I would hand to anyone who just sat seriously with the question of what they actually want their life to be.

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50 Golden Rules for a Happy and Fulfilled Life

Fifty principles distilled from decades of clinical practice, life coaching, and deep personal reflection. 50 Golden Rules speaks directly to the question this post has been circling: not how to be wealthier, but how to be genuinely fulfilled — in the way that does not depend on a jackpot, does not fade after the psychological high, and does not require you to be someone other than who you already are. If you are looking for the book about meaning, purpose, and the art of living well — this is it.

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After the Psychological High — What Is Actually Left?

When the novelty fades, the purchases are made, and the world stops reacting to your news — what remains is the only question that ever really mattered: Who are you, and what are you here to do?

Every major windfall comes with a psychological high. This is well-documented. The novelty of the new reality — the purchases, the reactions of others, the sheer strangeness of the number in your account — produces a sustained elevation in mood and life evaluation. But the research is clear that hedonic adaptation eventually operates even on very large wins: the extraordinary becomes the new ordinary. The brain recalibrates its baseline. And then you wake up one morning — still $100 million richer — and the question that was always waiting for you is still there.

What now?

That question is not a crisis of ingratitude. It is a feature of being human. Viktor Frankl wrote, from the most extreme circumstances imaginable, that the deepest human need is not pleasure or the absence of pain — it is meaning. The sense that one’s life is in service of something worth serving. That who you are and what you do matters — not because of what you own, but because of what you contribute and how fully you live.

We covered this dimension of human fulfilment in our post on why people say money cannot buy happiness — and what the science actually says. And we explored the architecture of purpose in our purpose audit post. The consistent finding across decades of wellbeing research is that the deepest contributors to lasting happiness are not financial. They are relational, purposive, and experiential: the quality of your close relationships, your sense of meaning and direction, your engagement in activities that produce a state of flow, your physical health, and your feeling of contributing something worthwhile to the world around you.

Money can support all of these. It can remove obstacles to all of these. But it cannot substitute for a single one of them. And this is the realisation I kept returning to as I sat with my $100 million thought experiment. The things that would make my life genuinely magnificent are not behind a jackpot. They are behind a series of decisions, commitments, and investments of attention that I could begin — and in many cases have begun — right now.

The moments that stay with us longest are rarely about what we owned. They are about who we were with and what we felt. Photo: Unsplash

The foundations of a truly great life are not financial. They are structural, psychological, relational, and purposive. Destined for Greatness: The 10 Pillars of Life — the complete framework for building a life that feels as good as it looks.

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What to Do With This Realisation — The Physician and Life Coach’s Practical Framework

I do not want to leave you with a beautiful philosophical insight and no practical direction. So here is what I took from my $100 million thought experiment — and what I believe is genuinely actionable for anyone reading this.

The life you imagined in your $100 million fantasy is a goal. And every goal needs a system. Make & Keep Your Goals — 10 proven steps to create and achieve any goal in life. Because the best version of your life does not require a lottery ticket.

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