Whoever said money can't buy you happiness just isn't doing it right
by DAVID BOOTH | AUGUST 2, 2019
https://driving.ca/features/feature-...ness-after-all
I have long held the belief that the “science” surrounding happiness is really just a ginormous crock of smelly brown stuff. I am not talking about just those idiotic self-help books — The New Good Life, 10% Happier, etc. — or even all those positive-thinking “life coaches” — I am looking at you, Tony Robbins — peddling the power of self-delusion. Even scholarly articles — titles like The Secret to Happiness are popular even amongst professional psychologists — perpetuate some truly outrageous fantasies, the most important of which, at least the most important to a car columnist, is that money can’t buy happiness.
Yes, I am really going to take on the oldest truism in pop psychology, a maxim so popular, so universally accepted, that I’m guessing every parent at some point in time mouthed it. Yes, you know it. Let’s say it all together …
Money can’t buy happiness.
Now, let’s never mind that no one in a third world country has ever mouthed these words. Or that it takes the barest amount of common sense to understand that, even in a worst-case scenario, it’s probably better to be rich and unhappy than poor and unhappy. Let’s just take those as givens, shall we? What I’d really like to talk about is this misconception that possessions — the things we are supposedly wasting our money on — can’t make us happy. Indeed, the accepted wisdom seems to be that said possessions make us decidedly unhappier.
The theory, as neatly explained by David Futrelle in Time magazine’s recent The Science of Happiness journal, is that, because we humans are adaptable creatures, we will always “overestimate how much pleasure we’ll get from having more.” We quickly adjust to our newfound wealth — the “hedonic treadmill,” Futrelle calls it — our increased affluence becoming our new paradigm. Thus, says the theory, the joy of the new car you just bought or the spanking new condo you just moved into will always be fleeting.
The reason, goes the theory, that that the new Porsche or BMW isn’t making us happy is that we are always comparing ourselves to our neighbours, H.L. Mencken famously quipping that a happy man is one who makes $100 more than his wife’s sister’s husband. Happiness scholars, says Futrelle, have found that “how you stand relative to others makes a bigger difference in your sense of well-being than how much you make in an absolute sense,” which is the reason why, says the author, in the case of cars, when the shiny newness of said new Porsche wears off, “you don’t question the notion that you can buy happiness on a car lot,” but rather your choice of car.
That’s why pretty much every author on the subject says that buying “experiences” is a surer road to fulfillment. “Things that don’t last create the most lasting happiness,” says Futrelle, mainly because, as he quotes Cornell University psychologist Tom Gilovich, “experience tend to blossom as you recall them,” not age like the suddenly tatty Chrysler in your driveway. Indeed, that seems to be the reason, according to a recent University of Colorado survey, that students got more pleasure out of “doing things” rather than “having things.”
It is also, however, where this whole eschewing personal possessions theory falls apart. Last time I looked, the majority of said experiences — certainly the majority of the experiences that bring me pleasure — require a certain amount of … let’s call it equipment. For instance, I loving racing cars round a track and, having done pretty much nothing but for the last 30 years or so, I can absolutely assure you said experience will be a whole lot more joyful in a brand new Lamborghini than it will be in a clapped-out Toyota Camry. Anyone not understanding that simple equation either hasn’t driven a Lamborghini — which, counter to Futrelle’s thesis, I can assure you will remain a source of contentment long after the newness wears off — or has no idea of how to drive a car. The same would apply for anyone looking to “experience” off-road Jeeping, long-distance boat trailering or just the ordinary act of hauling of cord wood. Anyone thinking that the quality — and, hence, the cost — of your possessions won’t add to the joyfulness of your experience is probably just a poor person fooling themselves.
Oh, I suppose one could make an argument for diminishing returns, that the rewards for trading up from a new $69,998 C8 Corvette to a $631,680 Lamborghini Aventador SVJ will not be commensurate with the monies spent. Or that possessing five Lamborghinis won’t make you happier than owning just one (though I can see an excellent argument to be made for having five Lambos stored at five different race tracks — let’s start with Laguna Seca — around the world).
But such relativism works both ways. Sometimes it isn’t the absolute amount you spend, but rather the relative expenditure that matters. As an example, I have weathered many a rainstorm aboard a motorcycle in both cheap and expensive rain suits, and let me assure you that my “experience” has always been far “happier” when I was not chilled to the bone. I am in possession of both Bell Revolver ($300) and Schuberth E1 ($1,000) modular motorcycle helmets. Both share almost identical spec sheets, but wildly different build qualities. Care to guess which one makes me happier? And no, I have yet to suffer what Futrelle calls “hedonic adaption” — that which is superior eventually becoming our new norm — despite owning the latter for more than four years. Indeed, I just went out and bought an identical Schuberth precisely because I knew it would make my long-term experiences happy when the current one wears out.
Indeed, the whole notion that “money can’t buy happiness” would seem to be based on the fallacy that the problem lies in the mere possession of a material good and not the reason to possess it. That trying to keep up with the Joneses will not make you happy in the long term — envy being, after all, the crack cocaine of emotions — is somehow still news absolutely baffles me. To blame the resultant lack of contentment on the possession and not the motivation is sheer idiocy. Indeed, even Futrelle quotes professor Gilovich as noting that people are “happiest when they are wringing experiences out of everything they spend money on.”
Or, to quote a famous Lexus ad: “Whoever said money can’t buy happiness just isn’t doing it right.”