buy experiences not things essay

The Three Types of Happiness

Things can make people happier than experiences, a study finds, depending on the kind of happiness being measured

Stuff has gotten a bad rap of late—mostly for its incompatibility with other lifestyle trends. It won’t fit in your tiny house . Marie Kondo thinks it should be eschewed entirely unless it sparks joy. And there won’t be any need for all your whisks and woks once you switch over to Soylent for sustenance.

Minimalism is hot, culturally, and for years, science has assured us that it was also the path to maximal bliss. The prevailing wisdom is that people who want the most happiness for their buck should buy experiences, not things . The idea is that the joy of an experience begins before it even starts, and continues when you look back on the fancy dinner/vacation/afternoon of LARPing fondly. Experiences provide, in other words, both more anticipatory happiness and afterglow happiness.

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But a recent study complicates that picture, suggesting that sweaters and iPhones might make you just as happy, in a way, as cruises and concerts do. There is a third type of happiness—momentary happiness—and it tends to last longer with material goods because people use them for more time than they typically experience their experiences for.

For the study, published in Social Psychology and Personality Science , researchers Aaron Weidman and Elizabeth Dunn from the University of British Columbia gave 67 participants $20 to spend on either an experiential or material purchase of their choice, and then to report one experiential or material gift they had recently received. Then they quizzed them about their happiness levels through text messages and questionnaires.

They found that the study subjects derived more frequent momentary happiness from material goods, but more intense momentary happiness from the experiences. In other words, they enjoyed their material goods on a greater number of occasions than they did their experiences, even though the happiness felt from the experiences was slightly more intense.

“Material purchases have an unsung advantage, in that they provide more frequent bouts of momentary happiness in the weeks after they are acquired,” Weidman and Dunn wrote.

This isn’t the only evidence suggesting that material possessions aren’t as bleak as they’re made out to be. This study somewhat echoes earlier work by Dunn and others finding that lots of small purchases make people happier than one big one. Because we psychologically adapt to the things we have, new things provide a positive jolt—which matters in the short run, if not in the long run. Five trips to H&M serve as tepid, but nevertheless welcome, distractions from the daily grind.

And another study found that things that help us do activities, like tennis rackets and musical instruments, can also generate happiness. But the difference between tennis rackets and jewelry is slight: Part of the fun of shopping, after all, is imagining the places you’ll go with the stuff you get.

So should you splurge on the latest iThing or on Hamilton tickets? It depends on whether you are “seeking an intense but fleeting form of happiness that is accompanied by a rosy afterglow,” Weidman and Dunn write, “or a more subtle, frequent form of happiness that will endure for weeks or months.”

As someone who had a flip phone for far longer than was hip, I can only add that my feelings toward my smart phone every day for the first year I owned it were nothing short of the praise-hands emoji .

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Why you should spend your money on experiences, not things.

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When you work hard every single day and there’s only so much money left after your regular expenses, you have to make certain it’s well spent. Spend your limited funds on what science says will make you happy .

The Paradox Of Possessions

A 20-year study conducted by Dr. Thomas Gilovich, a psychology professor at Cornell University, reached a powerful and straightforward conclusion: Don’t spend your money on things. The trouble with things is that the happiness they provide fades quickly. There are three critical reasons for this:

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• We get used to new possessions. What once seemed novel and exciting quickly becomes the norm.

• We keep raising the bar. New purchases lead to new expectations. As soon as we get used to a new possession, we look for an even better one.

• The Joneses are always lurking nearby. Possessions, by their nature, foster comparisons. We buy a new car and are thrilled with it until a friend buys a better one—and there’s always someone with a better one.

“One of the enemies of happiness is adaptation,” Gilovich said. “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.”

The paradox of possessions is that we assume that the happiness we get from buying something will last as long as the thing itself. It seems intuitive that investing in something we can see, hear, and touch on a permanent basis delivers the best value. But it’s wrong.

The Power Of Experiences

Gilovich and other researchers have found that experiences—as fleeting as they may be—deliver more-lasting happiness than things. Here’s why:

Experiences become a part of our identity. We are not our possessions, but we are the accumulation of everything we’ve seen, the things we’ve done, and the places we’ve been. Buying an Apple Watch isn’t going to change who you are; taking a break from work to hike the Appalachian Trail from start to finish most certainly will.

“Our experiences are a bigger part of ourselves than our material goods,” said 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."

Comparisons matter little. We don’t compare experiences in the same way that we compare things. In a Harvard study, when people were asked if they’d rather have a high salary that was lower than that of their peers or a low salary that was higher than that of their peers, a lot of them weren’t sure. But when they were asked the same question about the length of a vacation, most people chose a longer vacation, even though it was shorter than that of their peers. It’s hard to quantify the relative value of any two experiences, which makes them that much more enjoyable.

Anticipation matters. Gilovich also studied anticipation and found that anticipation of an experience causes excitement and enjoyment, while anticipation of obtaining a possession causes impatience. Experiences are enjoyable from the very first moments of planning, all the way through to the memories you cherish forever.

Experiences are fleeting (which is a good thing). Have you ever bought something that wasn’t nearly as cool as you thought it would be? Once you buy it, it’s right there in your face, reminding you of your disappointment. And even if a purchase does meet your expectations, buyer’s remorse can set in: “Sure, it’s cool, but it probably wasn’t worth the money.” We don’t do that with experiences. The very fact that they last for only a short time is part of what makes us value them so much, and that value tends to increase as time passes.

Bringing It All Together

Gilovich and his colleagues aren’t the only ones who believe that experiences make us happier than things do. Dr. Elizabeth Dunn at the University of British Columbia has also studied the topic, and she attributes the temporary happiness achieved by buying things to what she calls “puddles of pleasure.” In other words, that kind of happiness evaporates quickly and leaves us wanting more. Things may last longer than experiences, but the memories that linger are what matter most.

What makes you happier, experiences or things? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below as I learn just as much from you as you do from me.

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