June 15, 2020 • 25 mins
Cait Flanders went deep into debt so she could buy all the clothes, books and gadgets she thought would make her happier. It was only when she junked it all that she found that 'doing' rather than 'having' is a better way to spend your salary.
Dr Laurie Santos examines why investing in experiences like concerts, vacations and dining out can give us a long-term happiness boost that buying things just can't match.
For an even deeper dive into the research we talk about in the show visit happinesslab.fm
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin pick up location, SF picked up time twelve thirty.
If there's one car you absolutely have to rent when
you go to San Francisco, it has to be compact,
(00:38):
two four door forward focus or similar. I'm not really
a car person. Automatic transmission, Yes, air con Yes. My
regular ride is a slightly scruffy twenty eleven Nissan CenTra
dual air back awesome. If you can't picture that in
your head, that's okay. I'm not sure anyone can. It's
(00:59):
kind of a dull silver color and relatively anonymous, lost
damage weaver. No child seat. Now, when I travel for work,
I usually rent the cheapest, boxiest and most ordinary car
on the lot, prepaid guess, no confirm rental done. But
(01:21):
when my producer Ryan and I arrived at the San
Francisco airport last fall, we were in for a bit
of a surprise. The woman at the car rental place
apologized profusely they'd run out of normal, boxy compact cars
and intermediates and full sizes. Would it be okay, she
asked if instead of the car I booked, we accepted
at no extra cost, a bright red Mustang convertible. We
(01:55):
in our amazing car took San Francisco by storm. We
crossed and recrossed the Golden Gate Bridge and soaked up
envious glances from teenage boys at crosswalks, and blasted eighties
cent pop on repeat the entire time. Instead of adult
trip into the city for work, Ryan and I had
the time of our lives, laughing like idiots and making memories,
(02:16):
all because of the car. That Mustang experience got Ryan
thinking he's always kind of hated my CenTra. He wants
me to get a newer, safer car, especially since my
Nisan does have a few body work issues. I kind
of hit a huge rock, so Ryan started texting to
make his case. Get a Mustang, Get a Mustang, Get
(02:39):
a Mustang. This carried on and on and on. One
text contained a single word, all caps with an exclamation point, Mustang.
I know Ryan only wants what's best for me, but
I have a mostly working car now, and the science
suggests that giving in and buying a newer, more expensive
vehicle would have a surprising effect on my well being.
(03:02):
It might hurt my happiness rather than help it. Our
minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy,
But what if our minds are wrong. What if our
minds are lying to us, leading us away from what
will really make us happy. The good news is that
understanding the science of the mind can point us all
back in the right direction. You're listening to the Happiness Lab.
(03:25):
Is doctor Laurie Santos. I've had a lifelong fascination with
the supernatural. I wrote a book about that when my
first book was about why we Believe in the supernatural.
This is Bruce Hood, a professor of psychology at the
(03:45):
University of Bristol in the UK. Like me, Bruce is
intrigued by some of the weirder, more irrational parts of
the human mind. But I didn't realize how personal that
interest was until I visited his house for the first time.
You see, Bruce lives in a lovely converted barn in
a quaint, quiet part of the English countryside, and so
I was expecting the inside of his house to look
(04:07):
rather cozy. But that wasn't what I saw when I
first opened the door. Everywhere I looked there was blood,
claws and fangs, which is just the way Bruce likes it.
(04:30):
I've loved horror movies and the sort of genre from
a very early age. I became obsessional about buying vintage
movie posters with werewolves and vampires and all that sort
of thing. Bruce was able to actualize his childhood horror
obsession once he finally got a professor level salary. That
was when he discovered the miracle of online auctions. I
(04:51):
have over a hundred posters now, and there's no way.
I don't think anyone's going a house small, not unless
you're very wealthy. I've got a house so you can
easily accommodate them all. So a lot of them. I
am afraid to just store it away. But I have
framed most of them as many as I can, and
they're all over the walls. You've over a hundred of these,
I have over a hundred. Yeah, and they're like, you know,
meter by is bag. So they're not little things. They're
big posters. Why would anyone buy more movie posters than
(05:14):
they could possibly display? Bruce realized that it wasn't really
the posters he loved so much, it was the pursuit.
I would search on eBay and you can see the
bidding line, and you can offer a bid, and then
you see someone's outbid you, and then you get frustrated.
He's like, I really buzzed, and the thrill of I'd
got it in a complete desperation and disappointment of I'd
lost out to some other guy. And of course the
(05:35):
post would turn up weeks later, and it was great
getting them, but nothing compared to the kind of exhilaration
of winning. The auction that thrill we get from buying
a new prize on eBay is well understood by science.
It's caused by a neurotransmitter called dopamine. Whenever we buy
something exciting, the reward areas of our brain release a
bunch of dopamine, which not only triggers a pleasurable sensation,
(05:58):
but also makes it more likely that we'll repeat the behavior.
Evolutionarily speaking, dopamine is there to ensure that we keep
doing all the important things like eating and having sex.
But now nowadays dopamine can just as easily make us
chase after things that we don't really need for our survival, like,
for example, more vintage horror movie posters than can actually
(06:18):
fit your house. Of course, Bruce understands the science of dopamine.
Knowledge is not enough. You can know these things very
objectively and yet still be a victim to the same
sort of mechanisms, so at least I kind of understood
what was driving it. But I got to a point
where I literally could not buy or put up anymore.
And after that I kind of started to realize, well,
this overconsumption thing, this possession thing, is really interesting. Bruce
(06:42):
began to study the science of why we like to
accumulate so much stuff. This research became the basis of
his recent book Possessed. Why we want more than we
need We buy for a number of reasons. There's a
whole area of evolutionary theory called signaling. The poster child
for signaling, of course, is the peacock. Why does it
have such a silly tail? It costs so much in
terms of energy, it's not very efficient, it makes them
(07:04):
very vulnerable to attack, and yet these animals have evolved
this elaborate because it signals to potential mates that they
have good genes. So rather than fighting or learning to
run away or whatever, they've developed these signing behaviors, like
peacocks strutting their stuff. We humans are naturally drawn to
shiny cars, fancy clothes, and other status symbols. These things
(07:26):
act as outward signs how awesome we are on the inside.
And so our species really likes to accumulate stuff so
much so that we've gone beyond just filling our shelves
and closets and attics and garages. We've fueled a whole
new growth industry self storage rentals. I mean, there are
more storage units than the McDonald's. It's just ridiculously a
(07:48):
symptom of a culture which has become obsessed with possessions.
So that's why I called the book Possessed, because it's
like this demon, is this little inp in our mind
telling us to buy things and don't throw it away
because it might be valuable one day. But is all
this purchasing really making us happier at least beyond the
initial pursuit. I mean, it doesn't really seem like it,
(08:09):
which poses a bit of a paradox, since many scholars
initially assumed that increased material wealth would lead to happiness.
The Eeselin paradox was identified by Richard Estlin back in
the early seventies, and he noted that if you look
at the gross national product of the US, in particular,
as it's been rising, it doesn't seem to have a
corresponding change and increased happiness, and said, he said, that's
(08:30):
the paradox. We should be happier. You may have heard
the term retail therapy, and there's a sort of bit
of truth in that people do enjoy the process of shopping.
But just like me and my poster is that initial
buzz I get from doing it doesn't last very long.
When the buzz of buying wears off. When that dobamine
rush in our brain subsides, those new possessions can make
(08:50):
us feel even sadder than we did before. The trouble is,
as soon as you get something with outstanding quality, it
makes all your other possessions look pretty rubbish. So this
is called the deter Or effect. After the French philosopher,
he really wanted an addressing gown, and he spent a
lot of money on it, and he really commented it,
and he got it and he loved and he looked
around everything else looked a bit shabby. So then he
(09:12):
realized he had to go and change everything else in
this household. And he started to spend more money than
he had and he realized that, you know, in the
past he had control of all his possessions, but as
soon as he took on board this new thing of
high status that changed it almost controlled him. I experienced
a hint of the Dido effect when we rented that
swanky Mustangs. The valet at our hotel did look at
(09:36):
me and Ryan a little oddly, like he was surprised
that the people who dropped off of that kind of
car had the crumpled clothes and crappy luggage that we did.
As we rode the elevated to our rooms, I thought
back to my beat up Nissan with the squeaky windshield
wipers and sticky coffee cup holders. None of that had
really bothered me when I drove it in earlier that morning,
(09:56):
But now my own car seemed well pretty crappy. I mean,
don't get me wrong, the Mustang was super fun to
ride around in, But if it entered into my life
on a more permanent basis, I might fall prey to
that row effect even more. I might wind up changing
the other things in my life to fit with the
fact that I now owned a swanky car. As the
(10:16):
name of Bruce's book suggests, my new ride might end
up possessing me far more than I possessed it. The
good news is that there is a way to enjoy
the happiness boost that Ryan and I got from the
Mustang ride without ending up on a treadmill of buying
a new car every few years. And we'll talk about
that science back strategy when the Happiness Lab returns in
(10:36):
a moment. So maybe they make us happy for a
little while, but over time we just stop deriving as
much satisfaction from them. I wanted to find some evidence
based strategies to help me decide about this car situation,
(11:00):
and so I decided to call a world expert on
happier purchasing. I'm a'm At Kumar. I'm an assistant professor
of marketing and psychology at the University of Texas at
Austin m It studies the way our minds mispredict the
pleasure we get from what we buy, and so I
told him about my car dilemma. Based on his research,
he predicted that any happiness boost I'd drive from buying
(11:20):
that Mustang wouldn't last much longer than the new car smell.
If you've listened to other episodes of The Happiness Lab,
you might know the reason why. A phenomenon that psychologists
have christened hedonic adaptation. We just get used to stuff
far quicker than we think. What seemed kind of new
and exciting at first, that excitement tends to fade. I
(11:41):
guess the other thing is that it's always there in
front of you, so when it malfunctions or if something
goes wrong, you're just kind of bothered by that. But
there's a second reason that our possessions don't make us
as happy as we think that green eyed monster is
always with us. People are often kind of peeved when
they find out that someone else has a nicer TV
(12:02):
than they do, or if they have a fancier wardrobe.
It can be similarly annoying to find out that someone
who has the same thing that you do, like the
same gadget that you have, or something like that, paid
substantially less for it. So these sorts of destructive comparisons
can stand in the way of happiness. So if I
caved in and splurged on a new car, not only
(12:24):
would every scratch indent make me sadder, but I'd also
unwittingly enter an arms race with my friends and neighbors
comparing my purchase to whatever car they had in their driveways,
And even a new Mustang would look crappy next to
my colleagues brand new tesla, but on its research shows
that there's an alternative kind of purchase we can make
(12:46):
that can bring us some lasting joy. Money could make
us happier if we made different decisions or choices with
what we did with it. To get the most happiness
bank for our buck, we should make purchases that are
experiential rather than material. So experiential purchases are essentially something
that you spend money on that's an event or a
series of events that you live through. So basically it's
(13:09):
money that you spend on doing things like travel, vacations,
dining out, going to concert sporting events. If you're anything
like me, you might feel a bit bad about spending
more of your money on meals and trips. It can
feel a little frivolous. So in some sense they might
seem fleeting, But in a way this is actually a
benefit of experiences compared to possessions. So people do tend
(13:33):
to habituate, to get used to things and derive less
value from them over time. With an experience that's already
over that doesn't seem to happen. But experiences don't just
make us feel better after we finish them. Experiential purchases
can also make us happier than material possessions, even before
we get to enjoy them. One thing that's interesting about
(13:55):
waiting is that waiting can also sometimes feel good. So
when it comes to material possessions, it feels more like
impatience or anxiety or frustration, But with respect to experiential purchases,
waiting is just a more positive st We tend to
look forward to what's to come with great excitement and delight.
We look at restaurant menus, and we go through our
(14:16):
travel plans in advance. That tends to feel good instead
of bad. But Ama has found that the biggest reason
experiences bring us more joy is that they aren't normally
a solitary activity. So if your purchases are promoting social interaction,
if you're talking about the things that you've done, or
if you're doing them with other people, that's one reason
(14:36):
they're going to make you happier than some material items
that you might buy. And experiential purchases don't just keep
us social while we're doing them, they also let us
connect with people afterwards too, So if you go on
a vacation, somewhere. There's all sorts of things that you
can talk about, what you did, what you saw, who
you were with, what you ate. There's just lots of
(14:57):
directions to go. It's a bit harder with material goods
and sharing stories about things you've done. We're just reliving
the memories. Also has another happiness boosting effect. Turns out
that sort of generally speaking, reflecting on experiential purchases inspires
more gratitude than reflecting on material purchases, So people are
more grateful for what they've done than for what they have.
(15:21):
Part of the reason that this is particularly interesting is
because of what gratitude tends to predict. So researchers have
found that feeling grateful is associated with a whole host
of positive outcomes. So in some fun studies we've done,
for instance, we found that when people think about their
experiences rather than possessions they've bought, they end up being
(15:42):
more generous to others. They end up treating other people
better as a result of reflecting on their experiential purchases.
All this goes to say, experiences, be they big or small,
they beat material purchases on literally every happiness metric AMH
has study, and yet we still can't seem to break
our habit of filling our closets and addicts and garages
(16:05):
with so much stuff. So after the break, I'll introduce
you to a person who has taken this research to heart,
someone who became so weighed down by her possessions that
she decided to get rid of nearly all of them
and became a lot happier as a result. If I'm
really honest, if I didn't love it or use it,
it was gone. The Happiness lab will be right back.
(16:35):
In some ways, I'm like, who was she who was
old school Kate? I would say that I was someone
who basically spent every penny that I earned. I caught
up with author and blogger Kate Flanders via zoom. If
her bedroom sounds a little echoy, it's because there's virtually
nothing in it. But it wasn't always like that. I
(16:55):
definitely bought things whenever I wasn't feeling great. But then
when you feel your home with stuff that you don't
even use, it actually also feels worse. I would always
text my best friend Emma and tell her whatever silly
thing I was thinking of buying. Like Emma, I think
I need all new betting, and she's like, but do
you like do you need new betting? And I would
(17:18):
just have this idea in my head that somehow that
was the thing that was going to fix me that day,
Like if I somehow made my bedroom look different or whatever,
that that was somehow going to fix whatever was going on.
Kate's material purchases followed a pattern that's familiar to many
of us. She bought things in the hope that they
would make her a better, more interesting person. She filled
her small apartment with unread books and clothes, and then
(17:41):
added cameras, paints, brushes, and other art supplies. I had
purchased things thinking I would like to be the kind
of person who does X, Y or Z, but I
never ended up doing any of it. At the time,
Kate wasn't all that bothered by her shopping habits, but
she did want to fix her financial situation by spending
way more than she earned, she'd run up over thirty
thousand dollars in debt. I decided that for a year
(18:03):
I just wouldn't buy anything unless it was absolutely essential.
The things I could buy were like groceries or put
gas in my car. If I needed it. It had
to be essential, otherwise it just was off the list.
Kate's shopping band was just supposed to reduce her debt,
but it ended up teaching her a lot more about
happiness than she expected. As the flow of books and
clothes and a gazillion other material purchases was cut off,
(18:24):
Kate started to realize just how cluttered her life had been.
I was kind of sick of my drawers always being full,
or my closet being full. Like I've always been someone
who only wears the same two or three outfits, So
why did I have a closet full of clothes or
a dresser full of clothes? It just didn't really make sense.
And so I think as I started decluttering, especially because
I was really aggressive in the beginning, I got rid
(18:46):
of something like fifty percent of my stuff in the
first six months. And I do remember after that just
noticing like when I walked into a room, not only
did it feel like lighter is a good word for it,
but it also actually just felt more inviting. Kate's yearlong
shopping band and radical decluttering made her realize that she
didn't need as many material things as she thought. Her
(19:08):
project also led to a new book, The Year of Less,
How I stopped shopping, gave away my belongings, and discovered
life is worth more than anything you can buy in
a store. Kate had always wanted to become a professional writer,
but her financial situation made that impossible. Having learned to
live with less stuff, she finally got the freedom she
needed to dive into her dream career. Her new found
(19:30):
savings also gave her the funds she needed for something else,
the opportunity to experience the wider world. I didn't travel
as a kid. We didn't do that, but I always
wanted to. Like I knew by the time I was
a teenager that that was something I was interested in.
I felt like I sort of started slow, you know.
I would book three nights away with a friend somewhere,
(19:50):
went away to a wedding to a friend that, like
I never would have been able to afford to go
to her wedding. Since Kate can write from anywhere in
the world, she decided to continue traveling. She gave up
her apartment and now spends her time visiting friends and
experiencing new countries and cultures. Traveling made sense to me,
like it it made me feel more like myself than
(20:11):
anything else, and just as I'm its work would suggest,
these new experiential purchases have given Kate far more joyful
memories than any of her old material things. I don't
remember the majority of what I decluttered and got rid of,
and even just being able to recall things like the
hotel that I stayed up for my friend's wedding or
(20:33):
the house party that I went to with her and
her friends, like the people I met in the conversations
that we had, and I think I had never really
stopped to savor moments like that before, Like really, I
can remember the experiences because of how I felt or
how the air smelt in certain cities, And I mean,
I don't remember anything like that of what I decluttered
(20:54):
or even what I've purchased in the past. When she's
not traveling, Kate uses a single room at her dad's
house as her base camp. That was where she met
me over zoom. It was pretty spartan. One of the
things that's cool about doing this interview is I'm able
on zoom to look to your room and I see
a coat rack with the hat and a coat, but
(21:15):
maybe a chair, but like that's it. Yes, I have
a painting. Yes, I see the painting. It's a lovely painting.
Actually it's done by a friend of mine, So yeah,
it was nice to hang that up. Recently, Kate has
around forty items of clothing like not including socks and underwear,
and a few pairs of shoes, hiking boots, kind of
regular boots, running shoes, and sandals, and that's it. Having
(21:37):
once been possessed by her material purchases, Kate has now
broken free. Now. The few things Kate does have all
serve a purpose or have an important meaning. One of
the things that I kept was my desk, and that's
because I built it with my dad. You just have
more appreciation in general for the things. I think that
you understand where they came from. It also seems like
(21:58):
you're keeping material objects that also have this feature of
they were experiences for you. They were memories for you too,
right Like the desk is a memory that you have
with your dad, and so winds of totally special in essence.
That is something I can't really imagine I would ever
get rid of those. Kate's onto something really important here.
The material possessions we do love are usually imbued with
(22:20):
a certain experiential joy. It got me thinking back to
what Ahmit Kumar had explained when we chatted before. There's
this sort of fuzzy boundary between what's an experience and
what's a possession. Take a bicycle, for example, that's something
that you keep in your possession, but it's literally a
vehicle for experiences. If you think about it in terms
of its features, it's sort of specifications. It's going to
(22:43):
feel a little more possession e and it can lead
to some of these problems with comparison, for instance, that
we've talked about. But if you think about going out
on the trails, then all of a sudden that particular
purchase might be something that inspires more happiness within you
as a result of construing it in terms of its
experiential nature. After talking with Kate and Amitt, I'm more
(23:05):
convinced than ever that I don't need a new car.
I also realize that I can think of my beat
up Nissan in a different light. I can construe it
as a giver of new experiences, one that can connect
me socially with the people I really care about. And so,
dear podcast listener, welcome, inside my beat up Nissan, which
(23:29):
has recently become less beat up than it used to
be since I did, in fact take Ryan's sage advice
and made some strategic auto body repairs. Thanks Ryan, Making
this episode has given me some real gratitude for these
old wheels, and it's helped me reframe how I think
about my car. Generally, this Nissan is going to be
my doorway to new experiences. It's going to be the
(23:51):
car that takes me for nice meals with my husband
or on trips to see my old friends. And with
all that money I'll save from not buying a Mustang,
I'm hopefully I can invest in even more fun experiential
purchases in the future. I can pay for a cool
new yoga class online and enjoy the anticipation of a
fantas plastic future vacation, hopefully one that will involve traveling
(24:12):
somewhere warm and sunny, and maybe just maybe a small
rental car splurge too, because I might enjoy just a
little more muscle car fun sometime soon. The Happiness Lab
(24:47):
is co written and produced by Ryan Dilley. Our original
music was composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring mixing
and mastering by Evan Viola. Pete Naton also helped with production.
Joseph Friedman checked our facts and our editing was done
by Sophie Crane mciven. Special thanks to mil LaBelle, Carl Niggliori,
Heather Fain, Julia Barton, Maggie Taylor, Maya Kang, Jacob Weisberg,
(25:09):
and my agent Ben Davis. The Happiness Lab is brought
to you by Pushkin Industries and me, Doctor Laurie Santos
Pushkin pick up location, SF picked up time twelve thirty.
If there's one car you absolutely have to rent when
you go to San Francisco, it has to be compact,
(00:38):
two four door forward focus or similar. I'm not really
a car person. Automatic transmission, Yes, air con Yes. My
regular ride is a slightly scruffy twenty eleven Nissan CenTra
dual air back awesome. If you can't picture that in
your head, that's okay. I'm not sure anyone can. It's
(00:59):
kind of a dull silver color and relatively anonymous, lost
damage weaver. No child seat. Now, when I travel for work,
I usually rent the cheapest, boxiest and most ordinary car
on the lot, prepaid guess, no confirm rental done. But
(01:21):
when my producer Ryan and I arrived at the San
Francisco airport last fall, we were in for a bit
of a surprise. The woman at the car rental place
apologized profusely they'd run out of normal, boxy compact cars
and intermediates and full sizes. Would it be okay, she
asked if instead of the car I booked, we accepted
at no extra cost, a bright red Mustang convertible. We
(01:55):
in our amazing car took San Francisco by storm. We
crossed and recrossed the Golden Gate Bridge and soaked up
envious glances from teenage boys at crosswalks, and blasted eighties
cent pop on repeat the entire time. Instead of adult
trip into the city for work, Ryan and I had
the time of our lives, laughing like idiots and making memories,
(02:16):
all because of the car. That Mustang experience got Ryan
thinking he's always kind of hated my CenTra. He wants
me to get a newer, safer car, especially since my
Nisan does have a few body work issues. I kind
of hit a huge rock, so Ryan started texting to
make his case. Get a Mustang, Get a Mustang, Get
(02:39):
a Mustang. This carried on and on and on. One
text contained a single word, all caps with an exclamation point, Mustang.
I know Ryan only wants what's best for me, but
I have a mostly working car now, and the science
suggests that giving in and buying a newer, more expensive
vehicle would have a surprising effect on my well being.
(03:02):
It might hurt my happiness rather than help it. Our
minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy,
But what if our minds are wrong. What if our
minds are lying to us, leading us away from what
will really make us happy. The good news is that
understanding the science of the mind can point us all
back in the right direction. You're listening to the Happiness Lab.
(03:25):
Is doctor Laurie Santos. I've had a lifelong fascination with
the supernatural. I wrote a book about that when my
first book was about why we Believe in the supernatural.
This is Bruce Hood, a professor of psychology at the
(03:45):
University of Bristol in the UK. Like me, Bruce is
intrigued by some of the weirder, more irrational parts of
the human mind. But I didn't realize how personal that
interest was until I visited his house for the first time.
You see, Bruce lives in a lovely converted barn in
a quaint, quiet part of the English countryside, and so
I was expecting the inside of his house to look
(04:07):
rather cozy. But that wasn't what I saw when I
first opened the door. Everywhere I looked there was blood,
claws and fangs, which is just the way Bruce likes it.
(04:30):
I've loved horror movies and the sort of genre from
a very early age. I became obsessional about buying vintage
movie posters with werewolves and vampires and all that sort
of thing. Bruce was able to actualize his childhood horror
obsession once he finally got a professor level salary. That
was when he discovered the miracle of online auctions. I
(04:51):
have over a hundred posters now, and there's no way.
I don't think anyone's going a house small, not unless
you're very wealthy. I've got a house so you can
easily accommodate them all. So a lot of them. I
am afraid to just store it away. But I have
framed most of them as many as I can, and
they're all over the walls. You've over a hundred of these,
I have over a hundred. Yeah, and they're like, you know,
meter by is bag. So they're not little things. They're
big posters. Why would anyone buy more movie posters than
(05:14):
they could possibly display? Bruce realized that it wasn't really
the posters he loved so much, it was the pursuit.
I would search on eBay and you can see the
bidding line, and you can offer a bid, and then
you see someone's outbid you, and then you get frustrated.
He's like, I really buzzed, and the thrill of I'd
got it in a complete desperation and disappointment of I'd
lost out to some other guy. And of course the
(05:35):
post would turn up weeks later, and it was great
getting them, but nothing compared to the kind of exhilaration
of winning. The auction that thrill we get from buying
a new prize on eBay is well understood by science.
It's caused by a neurotransmitter called dopamine. Whenever we buy
something exciting, the reward areas of our brain release a
bunch of dopamine, which not only triggers a pleasurable sensation,
(05:58):
but also makes it more likely that we'll repeat the behavior.
Evolutionarily speaking, dopamine is there to ensure that we keep
doing all the important things like eating and having sex.
But now nowadays dopamine can just as easily make us
chase after things that we don't really need for our survival, like,
for example, more vintage horror movie posters than can actually
(06:18):
fit your house. Of course, Bruce understands the science of dopamine.
Knowledge is not enough. You can know these things very
objectively and yet still be a victim to the same
sort of mechanisms, so at least I kind of understood
what was driving it. But I got to a point
where I literally could not buy or put up anymore.
And after that I kind of started to realize, well,
this overconsumption thing, this possession thing, is really interesting. Bruce
(06:42):
began to study the science of why we like to
accumulate so much stuff. This research became the basis of
his recent book Possessed. Why we want more than we
need We buy for a number of reasons. There's a
whole area of evolutionary theory called signaling. The poster child
for signaling, of course, is the peacock. Why does it
have such a silly tail? It costs so much in
terms of energy, it's not very efficient, it makes them
(07:04):
very vulnerable to attack, and yet these animals have evolved
this elaborate because it signals to potential mates that they
have good genes. So rather than fighting or learning to
run away or whatever, they've developed these signing behaviors, like
peacocks strutting their stuff. We humans are naturally drawn to
shiny cars, fancy clothes, and other status symbols. These things
(07:26):
act as outward signs how awesome we are on the inside.
And so our species really likes to accumulate stuff so
much so that we've gone beyond just filling our shelves
and closets and attics and garages. We've fueled a whole
new growth industry self storage rentals. I mean, there are
more storage units than the McDonald's. It's just ridiculously a
(07:48):
symptom of a culture which has become obsessed with possessions.
So that's why I called the book Possessed, because it's
like this demon, is this little inp in our mind
telling us to buy things and don't throw it away
because it might be valuable one day. But is all
this purchasing really making us happier at least beyond the
initial pursuit. I mean, it doesn't really seem like it,
(08:09):
which poses a bit of a paradox, since many scholars
initially assumed that increased material wealth would lead to happiness.
The Eeselin paradox was identified by Richard Estlin back in
the early seventies, and he noted that if you look
at the gross national product of the US, in particular,
as it's been rising, it doesn't seem to have a
corresponding change and increased happiness, and said, he said, that's
(08:30):
the paradox. We should be happier. You may have heard
the term retail therapy, and there's a sort of bit
of truth in that people do enjoy the process of shopping.
But just like me and my poster is that initial
buzz I get from doing it doesn't last very long.
When the buzz of buying wears off. When that dobamine
rush in our brain subsides, those new possessions can make
(08:50):
us feel even sadder than we did before. The trouble is,
as soon as you get something with outstanding quality, it
makes all your other possessions look pretty rubbish. So this
is called the deter Or effect. After the French philosopher,
he really wanted an addressing gown, and he spent a
lot of money on it, and he really commented it,
and he got it and he loved and he looked
around everything else looked a bit shabby. So then he
(09:12):
realized he had to go and change everything else in
this household. And he started to spend more money than
he had and he realized that, you know, in the
past he had control of all his possessions, but as
soon as he took on board this new thing of
high status that changed it almost controlled him. I experienced
a hint of the Dido effect when we rented that
swanky Mustangs. The valet at our hotel did look at
(09:36):
me and Ryan a little oddly, like he was surprised
that the people who dropped off of that kind of
car had the crumpled clothes and crappy luggage that we did.
As we rode the elevated to our rooms, I thought
back to my beat up Nissan with the squeaky windshield
wipers and sticky coffee cup holders. None of that had
really bothered me when I drove it in earlier that morning,
(09:56):
But now my own car seemed well pretty crappy. I mean,
don't get me wrong, the Mustang was super fun to
ride around in, But if it entered into my life
on a more permanent basis, I might fall prey to
that row effect even more. I might wind up changing
the other things in my life to fit with the
fact that I now owned a swanky car. As the
(10:16):
name of Bruce's book suggests, my new ride might end
up possessing me far more than I possessed it. The
good news is that there is a way to enjoy
the happiness boost that Ryan and I got from the
Mustang ride without ending up on a treadmill of buying
a new car every few years. And we'll talk about
that science back strategy when the Happiness Lab returns in
(10:36):
a moment. So maybe they make us happy for a
little while, but over time we just stop deriving as
much satisfaction from them. I wanted to find some evidence
based strategies to help me decide about this car situation,
(11:00):
and so I decided to call a world expert on
happier purchasing. I'm a'm At Kumar. I'm an assistant professor
of marketing and psychology at the University of Texas at
Austin m It studies the way our minds mispredict the
pleasure we get from what we buy, and so I
told him about my car dilemma. Based on his research,
he predicted that any happiness boost I'd drive from buying
(11:20):
that Mustang wouldn't last much longer than the new car smell.
If you've listened to other episodes of The Happiness Lab,
you might know the reason why. A phenomenon that psychologists
have christened hedonic adaptation. We just get used to stuff
far quicker than we think. What seemed kind of new
and exciting at first, that excitement tends to fade. I
(11:41):
guess the other thing is that it's always there in
front of you, so when it malfunctions or if something
goes wrong, you're just kind of bothered by that. But
there's a second reason that our possessions don't make us
as happy as we think that green eyed monster is
always with us. People are often kind of peeved when
they find out that someone else has a nicer TV
(12:02):
than they do, or if they have a fancier wardrobe.
It can be similarly annoying to find out that someone
who has the same thing that you do, like the
same gadget that you have, or something like that, paid
substantially less for it. So these sorts of destructive comparisons
can stand in the way of happiness. So if I
caved in and splurged on a new car, not only
(12:24):
would every scratch indent make me sadder, but I'd also
unwittingly enter an arms race with my friends and neighbors
comparing my purchase to whatever car they had in their driveways,
And even a new Mustang would look crappy next to
my colleagues brand new tesla, but on its research shows
that there's an alternative kind of purchase we can make
(12:46):
that can bring us some lasting joy. Money could make
us happier if we made different decisions or choices with
what we did with it. To get the most happiness
bank for our buck, we should make purchases that are
experiential rather than material. So experiential purchases are essentially something
that you spend money on that's an event or a
series of events that you live through. So basically it's
(13:09):
money that you spend on doing things like travel, vacations,
dining out, going to concert sporting events. If you're anything
like me, you might feel a bit bad about spending
more of your money on meals and trips. It can
feel a little frivolous. So in some sense they might
seem fleeting, But in a way this is actually a
benefit of experiences compared to possessions. So people do tend
(13:33):
to habituate, to get used to things and derive less
value from them over time. With an experience that's already
over that doesn't seem to happen. But experiences don't just
make us feel better after we finish them. Experiential purchases
can also make us happier than material possessions, even before
we get to enjoy them. One thing that's interesting about
(13:55):
waiting is that waiting can also sometimes feel good. So
when it comes to material possessions, it feels more like
impatience or anxiety or frustration, But with respect to experiential purchases,
waiting is just a more positive st We tend to
look forward to what's to come with great excitement and delight.
We look at restaurant menus, and we go through our
(14:16):
travel plans in advance. That tends to feel good instead
of bad. But Ama has found that the biggest reason
experiences bring us more joy is that they aren't normally
a solitary activity. So if your purchases are promoting social interaction,
if you're talking about the things that you've done, or
if you're doing them with other people, that's one reason
(14:36):
they're going to make you happier than some material items
that you might buy. And experiential purchases don't just keep
us social while we're doing them, they also let us
connect with people afterwards too, So if you go on
a vacation, somewhere. There's all sorts of things that you
can talk about, what you did, what you saw, who
you were with, what you ate. There's just lots of
(14:57):
directions to go. It's a bit harder with material goods
and sharing stories about things you've done. We're just reliving
the memories. Also has another happiness boosting effect. Turns out
that sort of generally speaking, reflecting on experiential purchases inspires
more gratitude than reflecting on material purchases, So people are
more grateful for what they've done than for what they have.
(15:21):
Part of the reason that this is particularly interesting is
because of what gratitude tends to predict. So researchers have
found that feeling grateful is associated with a whole host
of positive outcomes. So in some fun studies we've done,
for instance, we found that when people think about their
experiences rather than possessions they've bought, they end up being
(15:42):
more generous to others. They end up treating other people
better as a result of reflecting on their experiential purchases.
All this goes to say, experiences, be they big or small,
they beat material purchases on literally every happiness metric AMH
has study, and yet we still can't seem to break
our habit of filling our closets and addicts and garages
(16:05):
with so much stuff. So after the break, I'll introduce
you to a person who has taken this research to heart,
someone who became so weighed down by her possessions that
she decided to get rid of nearly all of them
and became a lot happier as a result. If I'm
really honest, if I didn't love it or use it,
it was gone. The Happiness lab will be right back.
(16:35):
In some ways, I'm like, who was she who was
old school Kate? I would say that I was someone
who basically spent every penny that I earned. I caught
up with author and blogger Kate Flanders via zoom. If
her bedroom sounds a little echoy, it's because there's virtually
nothing in it. But it wasn't always like that. I
(16:55):
definitely bought things whenever I wasn't feeling great. But then
when you feel your home with stuff that you don't
even use, it actually also feels worse. I would always
text my best friend Emma and tell her whatever silly
thing I was thinking of buying. Like Emma, I think
I need all new betting, and she's like, but do
you like do you need new betting? And I would
(17:18):
just have this idea in my head that somehow that
was the thing that was going to fix me that day,
Like if I somehow made my bedroom look different or whatever,
that that was somehow going to fix whatever was going on.
Kate's material purchases followed a pattern that's familiar to many
of us. She bought things in the hope that they
would make her a better, more interesting person. She filled
her small apartment with unread books and clothes, and then
(17:41):
added cameras, paints, brushes, and other art supplies. I had
purchased things thinking I would like to be the kind
of person who does X, Y or Z, but I
never ended up doing any of it. At the time,
Kate wasn't all that bothered by her shopping habits, but
she did want to fix her financial situation by spending
way more than she earned, she'd run up over thirty
thousand dollars in debt. I decided that for a year
(18:03):
I just wouldn't buy anything unless it was absolutely essential.
The things I could buy were like groceries or put
gas in my car. If I needed it. It had
to be essential, otherwise it just was off the list.
Kate's shopping band was just supposed to reduce her debt,
but it ended up teaching her a lot more about
happiness than she expected. As the flow of books and
clothes and a gazillion other material purchases was cut off,
(18:24):
Kate started to realize just how cluttered her life had been.
I was kind of sick of my drawers always being full,
or my closet being full. Like I've always been someone
who only wears the same two or three outfits, So
why did I have a closet full of clothes or
a dresser full of clothes? It just didn't really make sense.
And so I think as I started decluttering, especially because
I was really aggressive in the beginning, I got rid
(18:46):
of something like fifty percent of my stuff in the
first six months. And I do remember after that just
noticing like when I walked into a room, not only
did it feel like lighter is a good word for it,
but it also actually just felt more inviting. Kate's yearlong
shopping band and radical decluttering made her realize that she
didn't need as many material things as she thought. Her
(19:08):
project also led to a new book, The Year of Less,
How I stopped shopping, gave away my belongings, and discovered
life is worth more than anything you can buy in
a store. Kate had always wanted to become a professional writer,
but her financial situation made that impossible. Having learned to
live with less stuff, she finally got the freedom she
needed to dive into her dream career. Her new found
(19:30):
savings also gave her the funds she needed for something else,
the opportunity to experience the wider world. I didn't travel
as a kid. We didn't do that, but I always
wanted to. Like I knew by the time I was
a teenager that that was something I was interested in.
I felt like I sort of started slow, you know.
I would book three nights away with a friend somewhere,
(19:50):
went away to a wedding to a friend that, like
I never would have been able to afford to go
to her wedding. Since Kate can write from anywhere in
the world, she decided to continue traveling. She gave up
her apartment and now spends her time visiting friends and
experiencing new countries and cultures. Traveling made sense to me,
like it it made me feel more like myself than
(20:11):
anything else, and just as I'm its work would suggest,
these new experiential purchases have given Kate far more joyful
memories than any of her old material things. I don't
remember the majority of what I decluttered and got rid of,
and even just being able to recall things like the
hotel that I stayed up for my friend's wedding or
(20:33):
the house party that I went to with her and
her friends, like the people I met in the conversations
that we had, and I think I had never really
stopped to savor moments like that before, Like really, I
can remember the experiences because of how I felt or
how the air smelt in certain cities, And I mean,
I don't remember anything like that of what I decluttered
(20:54):
or even what I've purchased in the past. When she's
not traveling, Kate uses a single room at her dad's
house as her base camp. That was where she met
me over zoom. It was pretty spartan. One of the
things that's cool about doing this interview is I'm able
on zoom to look to your room and I see
a coat rack with the hat and a coat, but
(21:15):
maybe a chair, but like that's it. Yes, I have
a painting. Yes, I see the painting. It's a lovely painting.
Actually it's done by a friend of mine, So yeah,
it was nice to hang that up. Recently, Kate has
around forty items of clothing like not including socks and underwear,
and a few pairs of shoes, hiking boots, kind of
regular boots, running shoes, and sandals, and that's it. Having
(21:37):
once been possessed by her material purchases, Kate has now
broken free. Now. The few things Kate does have all
serve a purpose or have an important meaning. One of
the things that I kept was my desk, and that's
because I built it with my dad. You just have
more appreciation in general for the things. I think that
you understand where they came from. It also seems like
(21:58):
you're keeping material objects that also have this feature of
they were experiences for you. They were memories for you too,
right Like the desk is a memory that you have
with your dad, and so winds of totally special in essence.
That is something I can't really imagine I would ever
get rid of those. Kate's onto something really important here.
The material possessions we do love are usually imbued with
(22:20):
a certain experiential joy. It got me thinking back to
what Ahmit Kumar had explained when we chatted before. There's
this sort of fuzzy boundary between what's an experience and
what's a possession. Take a bicycle, for example, that's something
that you keep in your possession, but it's literally a
vehicle for experiences. If you think about it in terms
of its features, it's sort of specifications. It's going to
(22:43):
feel a little more possession e and it can lead
to some of these problems with comparison, for instance, that
we've talked about. But if you think about going out
on the trails, then all of a sudden that particular
purchase might be something that inspires more happiness within you
as a result of construing it in terms of its
experiential nature. After talking with Kate and Amitt, I'm more
(23:05):
convinced than ever that I don't need a new car.
I also realize that I can think of my beat
up Nissan in a different light. I can construe it
as a giver of new experiences, one that can connect
me socially with the people I really care about. And so,
dear podcast listener, welcome, inside my beat up Nissan, which
(23:29):
has recently become less beat up than it used to
be since I did, in fact take Ryan's sage advice
and made some strategic auto body repairs. Thanks Ryan, Making
this episode has given me some real gratitude for these
old wheels, and it's helped me reframe how I think
about my car. Generally, this Nissan is going to be
my doorway to new experiences. It's going to be the
(23:51):
car that takes me for nice meals with my husband
or on trips to see my old friends. And with
all that money I'll save from not buying a Mustang,
I'm hopefully I can invest in even more fun experiential
purchases in the future. I can pay for a cool
new yoga class online and enjoy the anticipation of a
fantas plastic future vacation, hopefully one that will involve traveling
(24:12):
somewhere warm and sunny, and maybe just maybe a small
rental car splurge too, because I might enjoy just a
little more muscle car fun sometime soon. The Happiness Lab
(24:47):
is co written and produced by Ryan Dilley. Our original
music was composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring mixing
and mastering by Evan Viola. Pete Naton also helped with production.
Joseph Friedman checked our facts and our editing was done
by Sophie Crane mciven. Special thanks to mil LaBelle, Carl Niggliori,
Heather Fain, Julia Barton, Maggie Taylor, Maya Kang, Jacob Weisberg,
(25:09):
and my agent Ben Davis. The Happiness Lab is brought
to you by Pushkin Industries and me, Doctor Laurie Santos
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