Something that many of us have suspected for a long time is that material possessions don’t provide long-term happiness. While it is true that up to a certain point people with more money report higher levels of life satisfaction, after you have most of your basic necessities covered, further increases aren’t likely to make you any happier.
Apparently, according to psychology professor Dr. Thomas Gilovich from Cornell University, what’s even more important is how you spend your money.
At the end of the day, experiences will always trump material spending.
In his paper, published in the Experimental Social Psychology academic journal, he and coauthor Amit Kumar argue that while purchasing material items like a new iPhone or car will definitely provide an immediate boost of happiness, after the newness wears off, we are likely to be right back where we started.
We then have to keep making more and more purchases to try and chase that next dopamine boost.
“We buy things to make us happy, and we succeed. But only for a while. New things are exciting to us at first, but then we adapt to them,” Gilovich told Fast Company.
You see, it turns out that there is something called the Hedonic Treadmill, which states that there is a “tendency of humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or life changes.”
That means that even if we are super excited about our big house when we first buy it, once we’ve lived in it for a few weeks, we quickly adapt and the big house then becomes our new normal. Pretty soon, we no longer appreciate it as much as we did originally.
A better investment, Gilovich says, is experiential purchases — things like going to a concert, taking cooking lessons, participating in outdoor activities, or traveling.
“Our experiences are a bigger part of ourselves than our material goods,” says Gilovich.
“You can really like your material stuff. You can even think that part of your identity is connected to those things, but nonetheless they remain separate from you. In contrast, your experiences really are part of you. We are the sum total of our experiences.”
Memories we make while participating in novel experiences become a part of our true identity, and we can also look back and appreciate them indefinitely.
While the happiness hormones derived from physical purchases go down over time, our memories keep on providing us with dopamine and serotonin hits for much much longer.
This is something that people living the backpacking travel lifestyle have been saying for pretty much forever, but many of us just thought they were using that logic as an excuse for why they can’t fit into normal society like the rest of us.
Looks like they might have been right all along.
Gilovich says that another important factor is that experiences have a tendency to connect us more with other humans than material purchases do.
“We consume experiences directly with other people,” says Gilovich. “And after they’re gone, they’re part of the stories that we tell to one another.”
So there you have it folks… finally an excuse to book the tickets for that big trip you’ve been wanting to go on forever. That new Fitbit is just going to have to wait.
It really does seem logical thinking about it all with an open mind. You’re much more likely to bond with someone taking a trip together than you would over the fact that you both own Apple Watches.
Other prominent research teams seem to largely agree. This study published in the World Leisure Journal states that leisure activities seem to play a large role for many in their pursuit of happiness.
The key point they are trying to get across is that experiences bring greater happiness than material possessions.
If society starts taking all this research to heart, it could mean a huge shift in how people are spending their money in the future. In fact, it seems that many young people have already caught on. A study by the Harris Group states that 72% of millennials prefer to spend their money on experiences versus material things, and it is likely only a matter of time before loads of other people start to follow suit.
Please SHARE this with your friends and family.
