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The Relativity of Material and Experiential Purchases
The relationship between income and happiness is pretty weak. People that buy stuff are just miserable about their purchases relative to people who buy experiences. One of the best ways to deal with our poor effective forecasting abilities, to deal with hedonic adaptation and to deal with buyers remorse, is to make more frequent, smaller, experiential purchases rather than a few big material ones. Those are all approaches to spending money that brings persistent happiness.
For decades, owning a home has been seen as a hallmark of the ‘American dream’ and a major life milestone. While we take it for granted that home ownership is good, we make the argument in today’s episode that, from the perspective of subjective well-being, owning a home isn’t necessarily the key to happiness. This conversation covers the non-financial aspects of homeownership and why owning a home isn’t necessarily superior to renting one. This is supported by data from a number of different studies that describe the relationship between experienced happiness and life evaluation, and how the decision to buy or rent relates to effective forecasting, for example. Benjamin unpacks concepts like focalism, hedonic adaptation, and buyer's remorse, as well as social comparison and happiness when it comes to material purchases like homes. He concludes with the following words of wisdom: buying a house will not make you happy, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad decision. During the course of today’s episode, we also touch on Shane Parrish’s The Great Mental Models Volume 3: Systems and Mathematics, how individuals engage in panic selling according to the recent MIT study, ‘When Do Investors Freak Out?’, and some of the listener discussion points that arose from our in-depth conversation with John Cochrane in Episode 169. Tune in today for all this, plus so much more!
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Listen to the best highlights from the podcasts you love and dive into the full episode