Charlie Munger says stop complaining and life will be that much better

Investment billionaire Charlie Munger has something to say to the world. Stop complaining!

Munger is a long time friend and investment partner of billionaire Warren Buffet. Munger said he doesn’t get why people today aren’t happier with what they have especially if one looks back at history.

“People are less happy about the state of affairs than what they were when things were way tougher,” said Munger in an interview with the Daily Journal earlier this year.

Charlie Munger and struggling

Charlie Munger who is 98 said he grew up in the 1930’s when Americans were really struggling.

“It’s weird for somebody my age, because I was in the middle of the Great Depression when the hardship was unbelievable. Before the early 1800’s there were thousands of years where “life was pretty brutal, short, limited and what have you [There was] no printing press, no air conditioning, no modern medicine,” he said.

Munger just may be right as research shows that roughly 75% of people are envious of someone else in any given year. A lot of this envy is set off from social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Unfortunately people don’t realise that that content is highly curated to only show the positive in their lives.

In fact Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker has put forth that the quality of life around the world has improved dramatically over the past century or two, citing evidence such as longer life expectancies and reduced global poverty.

However many fail to see the downside of this study which is ignorant wealth inequality. Munger himself downplayed the effects of this in 2019 stating that politicians who were “screaming about it are idiots.”

High Taxes

The billionaire Charlie Munger is also not in favour of the proposal by some politicians to impose high taxes on the ultra wealthy (he undoubtedly would be one of them).

His argument? That inequality is a necessary aspect of a free market economy. He also added that people’s criticisms of the ultra wealthy were often the result of envy.

“I can’t change the fact that a lot of people are very unhappy and feel very abused after everything’s improved by about 600% because there’s still somebody else who has more,” said Charlie Munger.