Buying Happiness: Purchase Many Small Pleasures

(This is part three of eight in a series that explores how money can buy happiness, it just buys less than we think and requires that we spend our money the right way. It’s based on the findings of researchers Dunn, Gilbert, and Wilson in their paper, “If Money Doesn’t Make You Happy Then You’re Probably Not Spending It Right” [PDF].)

So far we’ve talked about the first two principles of how money can buy happiness: buying experiences instead of things and helping others instead of yourself.

Today we’ll cover the third principle in the report: buy many small pleasures instead of a few big ones.

Frequency and happiness

There’s nothing wrong with buying a nice house or a fancy sports car, if you can afford it. But when it comes to happiness, you might get more happiness per dollar spent on the small pleasures: your morning latte, a massage, a new album.

People are happier overall when they buy frequent, nice treats instead of infrequent, nicer treats. Contentment is more strongly associated with the frequency of people’s positive experiences, not the intensity (Diener, Sandvik, & Pavot, 1991).

Why does small and frequent create more happiness than big and infrequent? We are less likely to adapt to the small, frequent pleasures because they often satisfy one or more of the following conditions:

• Novelty (you’ve never experienced the event before)
• Surprise (it was unexpected)
• Uncertainty (you’re not exactly sure what the event is)
• Variability (the event continually changes)

For example, after a year or so, you’ll adapt to living in your nice, new house. It’s the same house, day-in and day-out. But you don’t adapt to having a drink with your friends because it’s always a different experience ― different places, drinks, companies, conversations.

Savor the mundane

In a study of Belgian adults, those who had a strong capacity to “savor the mundane joys of daily life” were happier than individuals who didn’t (Quoidbach, Dunn, Petrides, and Mikolajczak, 2010). What’s particularly interesting is that the capacity to savor was reduced among those who were rich.

While having money and spending it in the right ways can lead to happiness, the positive effects of wealth on happiness is undermined by the negative effect of wealth on the capacity to savor. Quoidbach et al (2010) concluded that wealth allows access to amazing experiences, which in turn reduces the ability to savor small pleasures.

In other words, a rich person’s access to peak experiences and the best of everything may actually be counterproductive to his or her happiness.

What are some of the small things you’ve savored today?