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If money doesn't make you happy, you probably aren't spending it right [pdf]
- NeutronBoy 14y agoPersonally I think a better quote is, 'Money can't buy happiness, but it can help solve all your problems'
- signa11 14y agoor from somerset-maugham's, of human bondage, we have the following: "Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five."
- not_chriscohoat 14y agoI like that a lot...and I've always heard: 'Money doesn't make you happy, but it can make you less unhappy.'
- adventureful 14y agoI've always heard: "money can't buy you happiness, but the lack of money can buy you misery"
- yashchandra 14y agoI have heard that "Money is not everything. But make sure you have enough of it before you talk such nonsense"
- adavies42 14y ago"If money can't buy happiness, I guess I'll have to rent it!"
- tomjen3 14y agoI have always heard it as 'Money can't buy you happiness but it can make you awefully comfortable while you are miserable'.
- DannoHung 14y agoThe best way to spend money is to buy time with it.
- ma2rten 14y agoThis an academic article written by people who extensively studied this topic. I feel that if you want to contradict them you should at least write a sentence on why you think they are wrong.
- melling 14y agoI'm not sure he is contradicting them. #1 is buying more experiences. The more time, the more [potential] experiences you have time for. Take a cab vs the bus. House cleaning, etc. As for #2, I started backing more projects on Kickstarter. It does feel great to see people doing all sorts of cool projects. For example, I wish I had time [and skills] to make a movie with Blender, but since I can't I'll enjoy it through the work of others. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1331941187/the-tube-open-movie http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1331941187/the-tube-open... Oh, and I'm helping to build a 10" rocket engine! http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hermesspace/hermes-spacecraft http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hermesspace/hermes-space...
- zerostar07 14y agoMy empirical observation: time is an inherently limited resource, money isn't.
- reasonattlm 14y agoI concur with this. Despite the grand importance of time as the absolute foundation of wealth, very little progress has been made in the most obvious optimization of all: creating property that can create more time. More heartbeats, more health, more time spent alive and active. Rejuvenation medicine, capable of repairing the damage of aging. Tissue engineering to generate replacements for worn organs. The cure for cancer. If you could do all that, then the much more productive form of escape velocity becomes possible - longevity escape velocity. Why strive to maintain an empire of property that will crumble to dust when the degenerations of age catch up with you when you could be that fit-looking guy having a blast swimming in the breakers every other Sunday for as long as you like? Wealth is exactly time, and here we are, bordering the era of biotechnology for the repair of aging. Planning ahead for the best possible personal future starts with investment now. Think about it.
- rmontanaro 14y agoOddly enough, #1(buy experiences, not goods) and #2 (help others) are precisely the first topics tackled by "59 Seconds", by Richard Wiseman, which is a formidable book.
- GFischer 14y agoThe #1 advice on this paper (experiences, not things) is very relevant for the HN community. A corollary is "Your startup needs to sell experiences, not features": http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2662671 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2662671 Previous discussions ("Money = Happiness, but when it buys experiences"): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=482036 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=482036 "Spend money on experiences, not possessions" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1825525 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1825525
- skrebbel 14y ago> "Your startup needs to sell experiences, not features" Eh, What about B2B startups? What about any utility application? Say, internet search? I'm going to kill Google (and Gabriel Weinberg) if they turn their search engine into an "experience". Seriously, guys, can we stop the "startup == social local friend to friend mobile app thing" thing already?
- lolcraft 14y agoEarly Google was an experience. It gave you a few links in a very minimal layout, and that was it. Yahoo and Altavista gave you incredibly big portals with lots of features that didn't really go to bed together. They lost, because theirs were a shitty experience. The iPod is an experience. Most early MP3s had the same or more features, but the iPod killed them, because it provided an interesting experience of listening to music. Amazon is just another Walmart, too. But with a buyer experience that's much better than anyone else's. Same thing with Facebook vs. MySpace. Or Steam vs. Origin vs. your local videogame shop.
- GFischer 14y agoSorry, I was just trying to dig up the startup-related insights from the study :) What I guess the article meant to say in another way is that your startup needs to focus on its value proposition, “How will buying/using this ... make my life better?”. In the case of both Google and DDG, what they deliver to the user. It's no accident Google has Instant, previews, etc (and DDG has DuckDuckHack)... it's all about making the search experience better.
- NathanRice 14y agoThis article is bullshit. Money can't buy achievement. Money can't buy competence. Money can't buy respect. Money can't buy love. Money can't buy wisdom. Money can't buy knowledge. Money can't buy creativity. The things that make people truly happy are internal, and must be constructed by the person experiencing them. Money can remove discomfort or provide passing distraction from existential malaise, but it can never make you truly happy.
- xyzzyz 14y agoMoney can't buy achievement. Money can't buy competence. Money can't buy respect. Money can't buy love. Money can't buy wisdom. Money can't buy knowledge. Money can't buy creativity. Of course they don't sell these things in shops, but with money, you can create really good environment for yourself to pursue them. Oh, and money sure can buy achievement and respect. You can enroll in best schools or hire best teachers with money to get knowledge and competence. It's easier to find love if you have money, for a wealthy man seem to be more attractive for women. I could go on, but the point is, don't downplay the value of money.
- NathanRice 14y agoHiring good teachers and going to good schools only provides an environment slightly more conducive to success. Motivated people can succeed without these things, and the prodigal will fail despite them. These things are mainly valuable to those around the median of intelligence/motivation distribution. It is easier to find a relationship with money. The person you are in a relationship with will love your money, and tolerate you. Women do love successful/capable men, but in my experience it is the success that is attractive, not the money. As an example, a bankrupt but famous actor or rock star will massively out-compete a rich hedge fund manager. This definitely isn't just about looks, I once met a very attractive girl who waxed poetic about her desire to thoroughly ravish Phillip Seymour Hoffman.
- xyzzyz 14y agoAnd what exactly is your point? Obviously it's easier to be pretty if you were born pretty, but with money you can buy cosmetics and/or a surgery, and without money you're hopeless. Obviously you cannot just buy yourself into being a famous and respected actor, but you still will massively out-compete many competitors. Obviously it is possible to succeed without going to good schools, or having good teachers, but it's much, much harder. I wasn't suggesting that money is always the best solution, but frequently it's a really good, or at least good enough one. More importantly, it's quite general solution that will get lots of your problems solved, which is not the case with being bankrupt famous actor.
- zerostar07 14y agoThere is an overarching idea that people want to be numbed into a form of happiness (by using their money, but it could equally be something else). People like a challenge too, am i the only one who doesn't want to be happy all the time?
- lutorm 14y agoIt seems to me that if you like the challenge, you are in fact happy being challenged...
- reasonattlm 14y agoI recently wrote on the topic of the lack of overlap between zealotry for a cause and wealth. I think that to become super-wealthy requires a certain cluelessness when it comes to what to spend money on - or how to spend money to best effect, or more fundamentally how to use money to change the world in a way you believe in, or a lack of the vision needed to see how to spend money. This is a social evolution sort of a thing: if you are a zealot and you know how to spend money to effect the change you want, then you aren't going to stay on the money-accumulation train for anywhere near as long. You'll spend it, and make some of that change happen. You need something like this sort of effect to explain why there are any wealthy people at all. Any one of the Forbes 100 could cure a couple of diseases, get a fair way to demonstrating a cure for aging in mice ($1 billion price tag), develop the tech to irrigate the Sahara, etc, etc. But they largely do not, and remain within the process they have built for themselves. Where they do go all out for philanthropy, there is usually a startling lack of imagination - see the Gates Foundation, for example, which is doing nothing more than business as usual in big philanthropy, or the Ellison Medical Foundation which does nothing more than replicate the NIH. Anyway. Knowing how to spend money "right" (meaning right for you, your vision, having a vision, etc) is not compatible with accumulating money, and only the outliers will fall into both camps. http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2012/02/one-wealthy-zealot-would-make-a-20-year-difference.php http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2012/02/one-wealthy-zealo...
- SHOwnsYou 14y agoI'm wondering if people in the position to "change the world" have any desire to make that change? If I were in the billions of dollars rich, I don't know if I'd want to do much to change the world. You can call me unenlightened, but and the end of the day, I'd be the unenlightened billionaire and you'd just be some person trying to tell me how to spend my money.
- MartinCron 14y agoGates Foundation, for example, which is doing nothing more than business as usual in big philanthropy I wouldn't call things like the giving pledge "business as usual" in big philanthropy. I can't think of any prior art for it. http://givingpledge.org/ http://givingpledge.org/
- blafro 14y agoThis all makes sense. But having read through it, am I the only one who feels this reads more like an advice column disguised as science than the real deal, even with all the cited double blind studies.
- WalterSear 14y agoI am sick and tired of the experience/possession paradigm that infects all consumer happiness research. Yes, all the evidence so far supports it. But, all the research so far has been looking for ways to support the paradigm. I don't buy experiences, and I don't buy possessions. I buy camping gear, musical instruments and other experiential possessions. But, this concept is lost on consumer researchers, who skew young, female and IMHE, assume the whole world is choosing between a pair of shoes or nice restaurant meal. (FWIW, I just got my masters in research psychology.) [Edited for spelling]
- base698 14y agoNo, I think the resources you spend on camping are very much part of the experiences they are referring. Likewise renting a studio and jamming with your friends is another experience that plays into this. You need tools for any given hobby, but once you invest you have a lot of experiences ahead of you.
- WalterSear 14y agoThat's what I thought at first, but I was informed otherwise by the consumer happiness lab. And, the follow up questions on the number of common measures I have read/taken don't support this classification. It's fancy clothes or a night out, all the way down. Like I said, the field is overly obsessed with lowest common denominator purchase decisions, that IMHO, are totally at odds with the phenomena they are trying to investigate.
- sliverstorm 14y agoCompletely agree, IMO money invested in experiential possessions is an excellent bang-for-the-buck.
- acangiano 14y agoYup. For example, you may buy a fancy camera, and then take tons of pictures with it. You get both the possession and experience aspects.
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- maeon3 14y agoThousands of years ago it was written there is nothing better than for a man to find joy in his labor. Work and stress bring unhappiness in exchange for money. If labor brings you happiness, then you are probably doing better than most in the happiness dept. Don't purchase happiness, Eliminate the unhappiness, and save money by not having to spend money on getting back to equilibrium.
- Dubplate 14y agoThis is our ethos, we're Blink Collective: Experience Marketplace for the UK Check us out: http://blinkcollective.com/ http://blinkcollective.com/
- greenwalls 14y agoI found it interesting how mentioning return policies in advance might actually undermine happiness. Maybe it's better not to have that "30 day refund" text on your product order page to keep your users happy. "People seek extended warranties and generous return policies in order to preclude the possibility of future regret, but research suggests that the warranties may be unnecessary for happiness and the return policies may actually undermine it."
- d2vid 14y agoI found that interesting as well. The problem is that people predict that a generous return policy will make them happy, and they are more likely to purchase if you give them what they predict will make them happy, not what will actually make them happy. Perhaps they will be more likely to refer friends to your service if you don't give them a return policy, since rationalization will kick in and they will make themselves happier with your service if they're stuck with it.
- mverwijs 14y agoThere was a TED talk on that: "How to buy happiness " http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsihkFWDt3Y http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsihkFWDt3Y