So you pin your hopes on a new BMW, only to be disappointed again. More money can also lead to more stress. The big salary you pull in from your high-paying job may not buy you much in the way of happiness.
But it can buy you a spacious house in the suburbs. Trouble is, that also means a long trip to and from work, and study after study confirms what you sense daily: even if you love your job, the little slice of everyday hell you call the commute can wear you down.
You endlessly compare yourself with the family next door. He was right. Happiness scholars have found that how you stand relative to others makes a much bigger difference in your sense of well-being than how much you make in an absolute sense. Your penchant for comparing yourself with the guy next door, like your tendency to grow bored with the things that you acquire, seems to be a deeply rooted human trait.
An inability to stay satisfied is arguably one of the key reasons prehistoric man moved out of his drafty cave and began building the civilization you now inhabit.
You can afford to step off the hedonic treadmill. The question is, how do you do it? If you want to know how to use the money you have to become happier, you need to understand just what it is that brings you happiness in the first place.
Friends and family are a mighty elixir. One secret of happiness? Innumerable studies suggest that having friends matters a great deal. Compared with the happiness-increasing powers of human connection, the power of money looks feeble indeed.
So throw a party, set up regular lunch dates—whatever it takes to invest in your friendships. But there is good reason to choose wisely. Divorce brings misery to everyone involved, though those who stick it out in a terrible marriage are the unhappiest of all. While a healthy marriage is a clear happiness booster, the kids who tend to follow are more of a mixed blessing.
Studies of kids and happiness have come up with little more than a mess of conflicting data. Doing things can bring us more joy than having things. One reason may be that experiences tend to blossom as you recall them, not diminish. Your trip to Mexico may have been an endless parade of hassles punctuated by a few exquisite moments.
But looking back on it, your brain can edit out the surly cabdrivers, remembering only the glorious sunsets. Of course, a lot of what you spend money on could be considered a thing, an experience or a bit of both. A book that sits unread on a bookshelf is a thing; a book you plunge into with gusto, savoring every plot twist, is an experience.
Applying yourself to something hard makes you happy. Instead, it matters how and why you give. Look for giving opportunities that will enable you to see how your generosity is making a difference for a person or cause you genuinely care about. And you can start small. Research shows that giving even a few dollars can boost your mood. For instance, in one experiment , 79 participants received a voucher to make a purchase at either a bar or a bookstore.
Although both types of purchases provided extroverts with a small boost in happiness, introverts felt much happier after hitting the bookstore rather than the bar.
But this small study is just the beginning of the next chapter of research on spending and happiness. Utilizing advances in big data and machine learning, we are beginning to move beyond population-level spending recommendations, providing more individualized advice to help people get the most happiness from every precious dollar they spend.
You have 2 free article s left this month. You are reading your last free article for this month. Subscribe for unlimited access. Create an account to read 2 more. So how can you keep more cash on hand? Is the expense genuinely contributing to my happiness? If the answer to the second question is no, try taking a break from those expenses.
Other research shows there are specific ways to spend your money to promote happiness, such as spending on experiences, buying time, and investing in others.
Spending choices that promote happiness are also dependent on individual personalities, and future research may provide more individualized advice to help you get the most happiness from your money.
Sign up for. A weekly newsletter to help young professionals find their place in the working world and realize their personal and career goals. Sign Up. Thanks for subscribing,! After the basics are taken care of, you begin to spend on comforts: a chair to sit in, a pillow to sleep on, a second pair of pants. These purchases, too, bring increased fulfillment.
They make you happy, but not as happy as the items that satisfied your survival needs. This part of the curve is still positive, but not as steep as the first section. Eventually your spending extends from comforts to outright luxuries. You move from a small apartment to a home in the suburbs, say, and you have an entire wardrobe of clothing. You drink hot chocolate on winter evenings, sit on a new sofa, and have a library of DVDs. They push you to the peak of the Fulfillment Curve.
Beyond the peak, Stuff starts to take control of your life. Buying a sofa made you happy, so you buy recliners to match. Your DVD collection grows from 20 titles to , and you drink expensive hot chocolate made from Peruvian cocoa beans. Soon your house is so full of Stuff that you have to buy a bigger home—and rent a storage unit. But none of this makes you any happier. In fact, all of your things become a burden.
Rather than adding to your fulfillment, buying new Stuff actually detracts from it. Life is grand. Your spending and your happiness are perfectly balanced. You have Enough. Yup, Enough gets a capital E, too.
Typically, as your income increases, your lifestyle grows with it. When your boss gives you a raise, you want to reward yourself you deserve it! All that new Stuff costs money to buy, store, and maintain. Gradually, your lifestyle becomes more expensive so you have to work harder to earn more. But when they get more money, they discover something else they want. Most Americans are stuck on this treadmill. According to the U.
Back then, less than one-fifth of U. Americans now own twice as many cars as they did in , and we have computers, iPods, and cellphones. Life is good, right? The median is usually different from the average. For example, in the group of numbers 2, 3, 4, 5, and , the average is 23, but the median is only 4.
If economists talked about average incomes instead of median incomes, their numbers would be skewed by billionaires like Warren Buffett. The hedonic treadmill leads to lifestyle inflation, which is just as dangerous to your money as economic inflation; both destroy the value of your dollars.
Fortunately, you can control lifestyle inflation. You can opt out, step off the treadmill, and escape from the rat race.
To do that, you have to set priorities and decide how much is Enough. The next section shows you how. Kurt Vonnegut used to recount a conversation he had with fellow author Joseph Heller Vonnegut published this anecdote as a poem in the New Yorker.
Some folks believe their worries would vanish if only they had a six-figure salary. Others play the lottery because they think winning would solve their problems. In a recent issue of Sports Illustrated , Pablo S. Lottery winners have the same kinds of problems.
During the next few years, Post bought boats, mansions, and airplanes, but trouble followed him everywhere. Of course, not every wealthy person is so profligate. In fact, according to Thomas Stanley and William Danko, most millionaires are careful with their money. In their classic book The Millionaire Next Door Pocket, , Stanley and Danko catalog the characteristics of the quiet millionaires—those who live in average neighborhoods, drive average cars, and work average jobs.
These folks are able to build and maintain wealth because they keep their spending in check—even as their incomes rise. Church, Charity, and Community has more about how to handle a windfall. Knowing that you have Enough can be better than having billions of dollars. Contentment comes from having Enough—not too little and not too much. But how much is Enough? And what you need to remain at the peak of the Fulfillment Curve The Fulfillment Curve will change with time, so Enough is a bit of a moving target.
So take time to really think about what having Enough means to you. Discuss it with your family, and explore the idea with your best friend. Is being debt-free Enough? Being able to pay cash for a new boat?
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