Money and happiness

From Jonah Lehrer’s post Why Money Makes You Unhappy:

What does experience-stretching have to do with money and happiness? The Liege psychologists propose that, because money allows us to enjoy the best things in life – we can stay at expensive hotels and eat exquisite sushi and buy the nicest gadgets – we actually decrease our ability to enjoy the mundane joys of everyday life. (Their list of such pleasures includes ”sunny days, cold beers, and chocolate bars”.) And since most of our joys are mundane – we can’t sleep at the Ritz every night – our ability to splurge actually backfires. We try to treat ourselves, but we end up spoiling ourselves.

I don’t know much about this area, but this theory seems to make sense. The term ‘spoiling’ does seem apt. If I think back to when I was in school, the kids whose parents had a lot of money did not seem to be any happier than those that did not. It’s not shocking that we’d see a similar phenomenon with adults.

Some people seem more sensitive to these qualitative differences, too. For example, some of my friends really enjoy expensive food or expensive cars, which is fine, but these things don’t really affect me much, so I don’t think I end up experiencing this effect in these areas.