I came across this paper a decade plus ago and it stuck with me. Specifically, there were a few things:
1. We derive pleasure from anticipation, so ensure there are a number of things to look forward to.
2. Likewise we derive pleasure from looking backwards -- so the above is a two-for-one.
3. When making decisions in realtime, we tend to slip into "reptile-thinking" and that in turn leads to unhappy-decisions. They cite a snickers bar versus an apple. So try to make more decisions upfront, aligning them with your goals. e.g. bulk cook versus figure out lunch daily.
4. Day-to-day life has a huge impact on our happiness but we often architect it in ways that make us unhappy. e.g. moving into a big house in the burbs and therefore having a long commute. Think about our goals and design daily life so they flow more readily.
Edit to add my own twist on the paper and a challenge:
I wholeheartedly concur with the gist of this sentiment.
An example from my own life.
I’m an avid coffee drinker, and consume 2 doppio espressos a day.
I’m often asked why I don’t just buy an espresso machine and save some money.
To which I respond:
- I look forward to the small interactions when I order coffee
- I build a sense of community where I live/work
- I enjoy the opportunity to tip and give back( albeit in a very small way)
- I’m buying something I like everyday, and this leads to a sense of fulfillment
- I don’t accumulate anything that I need to lug around/maintain
I love this reasoning about the espresso machine because it highlights how easy it is to label humans as being irrational when you're just focused on one or two dimensions (cost), but it turns out that humans are generally very rational if you just don't evaluate them on a crappy, limited model of rationality.
I roughly agree with all the recommendations in the abstract, but I think 5 should come with a warning. For all the spendthrifts out there who live paycheck to paycheck, there are savers who go to the other extreme, and that ascetic frugality is hard to grow out of even when it's no longer needed.
The best way around this I've found is to give to charity early in the year, and for whatever reason that somehow makes it easier to spend on myself.
> there are savers who go to the other extreme, and that ascetic frugality is hard to grow out of even when it's no longer needed
How common is this? You're saying that someone, in the pursuit of frugality, begins to pursue wealth accumulation instead, and never lets go of that goal to instead take advantage of their wealth and freedom over what they choose to do with their time?
Not quite. I think the best example I have is someone who was scarred by hardship early in life and doesn't 'loosen up' when their circumstances change for the better later in life. Those people can wind up very well off, but still overly frugal.
Not GP, but: yes, exactly. The old story about the Mexican fisherman and the American businessman on holiday. How else would we get billionaires? These people work to the bone on wealth accumulation far beyond a fortune that they could ever spend on themselves.
This is me, I think. But I don't accumulate wealth for the sake of it, I am just very scared of being old and poor. I live VERY frugally now (I am in my forties) saving every penny for when I get old. In my country pension is really low, so I cannot reliably count on it to be my "source of income".
What does "no longer needed" mean?
I think most people who encourage the exchange of money for 'happiness' don't fully grasp the subjectivity of this judgement.
A person's preferred strategy for expending and conserving resources is an emotionally-charged choice. Who am I to say anything about their choices?
When i say it's 'no longer needed' I'm talking about behaviors which were previously useful for survival that have out grown their usefulness.
There is a certain point where one crosses into being grossly over conservative with their spending. I'm not casting any judgements of course, but when you reach that point you should probably stop and draft a will defining what should happen with your money. If you're unwilling to either spend it or give it away in life, know that it will either be spent or given away for you in death.
I have a pretty good nest egg. I owned a home for years before it occurred to me that I could spend <$1000 on a piano to put in my own home. That piano brings me joy every single day. I'm sure there are lots of other thousand-dollar purchases I could make that would bring me lots of joy, but I never do, because I find it extremely difficult to justify spending money on myself. I bought this home so that I could live with my (future) wife and so that my (future) children would have a place to live; it's still very difficult for me to think of it as anything other than "their" house. So these people do exist.
Yep, there is a very deep contentment with knowing whatever happens, you're safe. I started my career in 2008. I used to think of my money in terms of what I could buy for life. First it was food, then rent, and later all my expenses. Financial independence was the best thing I ever 'bought' for myself.
I have trouble reading this format so I threw it into ChatGPT to summarize:
This article, authored by Elizabeth W. Dunn, Daniel T. Gilbert, and Timothy D. Wilson, explores the often weak relationship between money and happiness, and suggests that this might be due to how people spend their money. They propose eight principles to help consumers derive more happiness from their spending:
1. Buy Experiences Instead of Things: Experiences tend to bring more lasting happiness than material goods because they are more central to our identities and hard to compare with others.
2. Help Others Instead of Yourself: Spending money on others, or prosocial spending, can lead to greater happiness than spending on oneself.
3. Buy Many Small Pleasures Instead of Few Big Ones: Due to adaptation, indulging in frequent small pleasures can lead to more sustained happiness compared to infrequent large ones.
4. Buy Less Insurance: People often overestimate their vulnerability to negative events, and thus overspend on unnecessary protections.
5. Pay Now and Consume Later: Delaying gratification can enhance happiness both through the anticipation of the event and by encouraging more thoughtful consumption choices.
6. Think About What You're Not Thinking About: Considering the peripheral aspects of a purchase, such as the daily realities or inconveniences, can lead to better decision-making.
7. Beware of Comparison Shopping: Focusing only on the differences between available options can lead consumers to overlook the importance of how a product will actually affect their happiness.
8. Follow the Herd Instead of Your Head: Other people’s experiences can be a valuable guide to what will make us happy.
The authors argue that while money can indeed buy happiness, it often doesn’t because people do not spend it in ways that actually increase their happiness. By following these principles, they suggest that individuals can make more fulfilling spending choices.
The question of whether a sentence be grammatical equivales the existence of a parse tree which, when linearised, yields the original sentence.
Because the sentence is finite, it has a finite number of components, and hence a finite number of possible parse trees, so we could enumerate them all until we find one that works.
Exercise: what is the maximum number of parse trees a sentence of length N might have?
However (being an english speaker and using wetware as an oracle) a suitable witness can be found by inspection:
Having constructed a specific witness (sufficient for existences) rather than a general argument (necessary for universals), I thought "faciendum" more appropriate than "demonstrandum".
> People are not very good at predicting what will bring them (enduring) happiness / joy.
The bullet list of recommendations are a bit of a sideways approach to lead you into things like building meaningful relationships/connections, experience life alongside people that mean something to you, work towards having autonomy (be efficient with your spending, don't waste money, delay consumption if it means being able to invest and have greater freedom in how you spend later).
This has helped me better understand my avoidance of interest-free credit (assuming one has the option to pay in full). In theory, I get to have the item and a majority of my cash in my pocket with little downside. I reason that it's a burden I have to service and potentially the start of a slippery slope towards embracing credit facilities.
Having money solves money problems. A huge chunk of people worldwide are struggling because of money problems, so of course money will make them happier. Others have problems that have nothing to do with money, and for them "just spend more wisely, duh" is idiotic advice.
So the answer to "does money make people happy?" (on in this case "does using money correctly make people happy?") is – first tell me why they are unhappy.
A recent life lesson I learned: removing a source of unhappiness doesn't make one happy, but it does enable happiness. You can't be happy while you have a source of unhappiness so removing the source of unhappiness is the necessary first step. But adding a source of happiness is a required second step.
I would add to that the fact that some people are even able to get past pretty amazing difficulties and still manage to be happy. So maybe even these "sources of unhappiness" are not fixed.
One big difference is that physical things exact an on-going tax since you have to store them in your house and maintain them. Hence the "does it spark joy?" question.
That said, the up-side is that physical goods can provide on-going benefit. For example, I love my AirPods Pro - they bring me joy every day.
My expensive vacations still feel like too much money spent for too little return.
The parts I loved-- meeting old friends, and spending time with own family outside daily routine -- could have been achieved much more frugally and in a relaxed manner without the pressure of making the vacation pay for itself (e.g. limit the duration because hotels are expensive and rush through things).
Obviously this is a very subjective experience and also varies based on how wisely we plan out vacations and spend versus our means and mindset.
> The Harvard Study of Adult Development has established a strong correlation between deep relationships and well-being. The question is, how does a person nurture those deep relationships?
Elizabeth W. Dunn
University of British Columbia
Daniel T. Gilbert
Harvard University
Timothy D. Wilson
University of Virginia
It should be possible to look them up. I asked ChatGPT 3.5 and it responded:
Elizabeth W. Dunn, Daniel T. Gilbert, and Timothy D. Wilson are prominent psychologists and researchers in the field of psychology. Elizabeth W. Dunn is associated with the University of British Columbia, Daniel T. Gilbert with Harvard University, and Timothy D. Wilson with the University of Virginia. They have contributed significantly to the understanding of happiness, well-being, and social psychology through their research and publications.
1. Elizabeth W. Dunn:*
- Education: Ph.D. in Social-Personality Psychology from the University of Virginia.
- Work: Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of British Columbia.
2. Daniel T. Gilbert:*
- Education: Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Princeton University.
- Work: Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard University.
3. Timothy D. Wilson:*
- Education: Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Michigan.
- Work: Sherrell J. Aston Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia
Then they could try keeping their eyes and ears open and their wallet shut? Not being "nouveau" should be easy for those who are willing to be themselves.
> The Harvard Study of Adult Development has established a strong correlation between deep relationships and well-being. The question is, how does a person nurture those deep relationships?
> Human beings are undeniably complex, and what motivates us can often be a mystery, even to ourselves. So, how do we go about gathering and analyzing the data that will help us answer the most fundamental questions about our lives and our purpose? The answers may lie in an unexpectedly rich source of knowledge, our regrets. While regret is likely to have a decidedly negative connotation for most of us, it is also extremely powerful and can teach us a great deal about ourselves and what we value. It is an emotion that is present in all of us, and social scientists (like anthropologists and sociologists) have been fascinated by the subject for decades. Today on the show, we are joined by one such expert, Daniel Pink, author of the book The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward. In our conversation, Daniel shares details about the research he conducted for his book, how he determined the four main categories of regret, and what we can learn from our regrets by confronting them head-on. We also discuss Daniel’s 2011 New York Times Bestselling title, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, and what he thinks about working from home in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. Daniel is an exceptional storyteller and is highly knowledgeable on the subjects of regret, motivation, and the important role they play in our lives. To learn more about the many facets of regret and how it can help you thrive, be sure to tune in today!
I think the first part of this misses the point of both money and happiness.
The ultimate goal of any life form we are aware of here on Earth is proliferation of the genes it carries, whether that be by individual longevity, reproduction, or longevity and reproduction of closely-related individuals that carry the same genes. Emotions seem to have evolved as a means of motivating behavior toward better adaptive fitness, in an obviously imperfect way because the system has nowhere near perfect information. Maybe you can broadly class emotions and motivations into good and bad or reinforcing versus dissuading, but not all good or reinforcing emotions are happiness.
Simply put, people act with other ends and this includes acquiring money for reasons other than to become more happy. For some reason or another, at least since Aristotle there seems to have been this widespread assumption that all other motivations are only intermediate motivations and happiness is the only terminal motivator. We want power because it will make us happy. We want security because it will make us happy. This seems obviously false to me. I personally do and observe others doing many things that I know will not make them or me happy and I don't think these are wrong or dysfunctional behaviors. Many of the successful people who ever lived were not happy. Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant were perpetually pissed off and miserable. Look at Lamar Jackson before and after the Christmas Day game with the 49ers. Before the game, he complained to the press that the Ravens were being overlooked and deserved to be favored. They win and everyone is now rating them as the best team in the league and he responds by saying he doesn't buy it and thinks they proved nothing. What gives? He obviously needs some chip on his shoulder for motivation and it doens't matter if his reasoning stays consistent or sane. Win or lose he'll be unhappy because he needs to be unhappy to win. Happy people don't obsessively fixate to the point of alienating friends and family on an activity that damages their own health and longevity. Winners do. Happiness is not the end goal here. Winning won't bring satisfaction. Winning in itself is the terminal motivator.
Money works the same way. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos both hope to grow more zeroes at the end of the bank accounts in part because they want to fund moonshots but also just because of a primeval dick-measuring instinct to be #1 at everything they ever try to do, because genes in human males of the past that induce that kind of behavior produced men who had a lot of children and killed other men's children. Why does the money not make them happy? Because if it did, they'd have stopped making more of it hundreds of billions of dollars ago after they finished satisfying all of the reasonable human needs and desires that are more specific than "be better" and "do more."
Money is nonetheless positively correlated with happiness because, as they say, having it means you can buy stuff. Some things you can buy include better health, better security, better education and housing for yourself and your family. These happen to be things that remove particular causes of unhappiness, but they don't remove all of them. Some of them can't be removed. Some people are unhappy because of irrational brain states induced by pathology and nothing that be bought given today's understanding of neurology and psychiatry can ever change that. But some sources of unhappiness aren't removed because not all sources of unhappiness are bad things that the money-owner wants to remove. These people don't want to be happy. They want to be great. They want to win. No matter how much greatness they achieve and how much they win, many if not most will never achieve enough because if such a thing was even possible they would never have been as insanely motivated to achieve what would have been enough.
This is nothing to do with human psychology. This is a far more basic fact common to all life. No amount of profliferation is ever "enough." The pithy Agent Smith nonsense about non-human, non-virus life reaching a natural equilibrium with its environment is not true. All life will consume all available resources and then look for more. The reason temporarily stable ecosystems exist is because predator-prey population dynamics and competition between predators keep any single population from ever becoming too successful, not because it doesn't want to be more successful but because external constraints stop it.
This is exactly why we recoil from fictional tales like Brave New World, think of wireheading as a bad thing, and socially discourage heavy consumption of euphoric drugs. Some part of us instinctively understands that happiness isn't the point and can itself be counterproductive because we need some amount of unhappiness to stay motivated to do what we are actually here to do, which isn't be happy. Yet we still see research projects like this attempting to explain why people living with abundance are not happy. The only reason abundance exists is because no amount of it can ever be enough.
IMHO you're oversimplifying it. The drastic decline in fertility rates in the developed world runs counter to the idea that humans are merely yet another animal that exists to spread their genes. I also don't buy the idea that we're stuck in some endless loop to acquire money or stuff either. There are plenty of people in the FIRE community that have found 'enough' and are content to simply live out their lives doing things they enjoy.
Very true, the Amish lifestyle alone debunks most of the telling above as heavily skewed. Implying certain society values and a way of thinking as natural or god-given, while in fact it only summarizes, whats currently pretty famous as western lifestyle.
> Maybe I am naive, but do Amish typically worry about money and about materialistic things?
Imho everyone worries about materialistic things to a certain degree, as a potatoe for example is very materialistic thing and we cannot eat virtual goods (yet). The potatoe example can also be used illustrate another aspect - all materialistic things will decay over time, thus naturally ppl would not hoard tons of goods beside what they need for themselves or for trading for other goods (which will also decay, so it makes no sense to overly hoard traded goods either).
This did not change much throughout history. Also there was only one outstanding exception to that naturalistic equilibrium - land. Even old bronze age societies already fought for fertile land as thats the very base to sustain life and furthermore it provides access to other resources like ore and such, that we learned to process into other goods. So history tells us - yes thats possible, also the Amish kinda still live in that tradition.
What really changed that almost-equilibrium was the invention of the modern money with the bank system. The big difference now is, that this virtual good "money" does not decay naturally (given the economy is stable). Instead the system even boost itself by constantly creating more money de-valuating itself. Most of us love to see the numbers increasing, because we tend to believe we can buy more things from that. But later we realize that goods just get a higher price tag instead (inflation), which furthr boost the money hunger.
Here we are - the big hoarding tendency in western societies has a lot to do with our money system.
> Some part of us instinctively understands that happiness isn't the point and can itself be counterproductive because we need some amount of unhappiness to stay motivated to do what we are actually here to do, which isn't be happy.
I don't think they are saying we're stuck in some endless loop to specifically acquire money or stuff, but that we are stuck in an endless loop to do something, whatever it may be. This could mean acquiring stuff for some, volunteering and donating for some, baking pastries or going fishing for others.
Decline in fertility rates can be attributed to external causes, not because humans fundamentally no longer want to procreate.
1. We derive pleasure from anticipation, so ensure there are a number of things to look forward to.
2. Likewise we derive pleasure from looking backwards -- so the above is a two-for-one.
3. When making decisions in realtime, we tend to slip into "reptile-thinking" and that in turn leads to unhappy-decisions. They cite a snickers bar versus an apple. So try to make more decisions upfront, aligning them with your goals. e.g. bulk cook versus figure out lunch daily.
4. Day-to-day life has a huge impact on our happiness but we often architect it in ways that make us unhappy. e.g. moving into a big house in the burbs and therefore having a long commute. Think about our goals and design daily life so they flow more readily.
Edit to add my own twist on the paper and a challenge:
If you're so smart, why aren't you happy?