American billionaire Charlie Munger thinks we should all be a lot happier, CNBC reported.

Munger, a longtime investment partner and friend of billionaire Warren Buffett, says he doesn't understand why people today aren't happy with what they have, especially compared to the hard times throughout history.

“People are less happy about the state of affairs than they were when things were way tougher,” Munger said earlier this year at the annual meeting of the Daily Journal, the newspaper company where he’s a director.

The 98-year-old billionaire noted that he came of age in the 1930s, when Americans were struggling for everything. “It’s weird for somebody my age, because I was in the middle of the Great Depression when the hardship was unbelievable.”

Munger complained that envy is the driving force behind too many people today. There were thousands of years before the early 1800s when “life was pretty brutal, short, limited and what have you. [There was] no printing press, no air conditioning, no modern medicine,” he said.

Recent studies show that about 75 percent of people are jealous of someone. Social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are particularly effective at fomenting feelings of envy or jealousy, often connecting us with people who present only carefully chosen pictures of positive events in their lives.

Munger pointed to the work of Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, who argued that quality of life around the world has improved dramatically over the past century or two, citing increases in life expectancy and reductions in global poverty.

Critics of Pinker's work say his views are oversimplified and ignore the negative aspects of modern life, from rising property inequality to ongoing violence and political instability, factors that can still cause real suffering.

In 2019, Munger downplayed the impact of wealth and income inequality and said that politicians who screamed about it are idiots.

Some politicians, such as Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, have called for higher taxes on the super-rich in recent years.

The billionaire has been skeptical of higher taxes on the rich in the past, arguing last year that some inequality is a necessary aspect of a free market economy. This year he added that most people's concerns about wealth inequality and criticism of the extremely wealthy are "motivated" by 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,” Munger said.