I sometimes go digging for quartz. This includes camping out with friends the night before, then getting dirty, digging in the mud, and finding neat little things all day. All in all, I really enjoy the experience. But then I bring home pounds and pounds of the stuff and really only enjoy having a few of the pieces that really jump out to me as being exceptional.
Most people have never gone to dig for quartz, and don't have nearly the amount of it that I do. On top of that, many of my friends attribute all sorts of magical nonsense to the stones. So, the way I enjoy the rest of it is giving it away. Any of the pieces I bothered to bring home seem really beautiful and amazing to people who don't have endless pounds of the stuff cluttering up their room. I'm often told months/years after giving one out that the recipient still has it and cherishes it and keeps it in some special place where they always see it, which provides another little burst of me enjoying the thing.
Similarly, when someone comes into my room for the first time and is amazed by the collection as a whole, I get a little bit of joy out of their amazement. Every time I think I've run out of ones that are w...
I'm often told months/years after giving one out that the recipient still has it and cherishes it and keeps it in some special place where they always see it, which provides another little burst of me enjoying the thing.
This also teaches a lesson on the social skill of 'gift receiving'. Just remembering the gift received and signalling appreciation almost certainly created more goodwill and affiliation than actually buying an expensive gift and giving it to gravitron.
Every time I think I've run out of ones that are worthy of gifting, someone notices one in particular that they really love, and I say "you can have it" and they jump for joy and tell me I'm the greatest person ever.
Cost of jumping and uttering words: maybe a kJ. Social and emotional benefit to both parties: ??.
Better reading: "If money doesn't make you happy, then you probably aren't spending it right", Dunn et al 2011, Journal of Consumer Psychology
This doesn't mean something stodgy like "before you get something, think carefully about whether you will actually use and enjoy it, using outside view information about items in this reference class".
Shame, that would have been an excellent message. It sounds much more practical than self-modifying into someone who likes to make muffins just because I bought a muffin tin.
I'd go as far as to say that a bias towards changing yourself to be someone who uses the stuff you buy is something to beware of. Perhaps before I buy something I should ask the question "How will owning this item change my preferences and my habits? Do I want my preferences and habits to be changed in this way?" (Sometimes the answer is "Yes!")
If you aren't currently someone who would use a muffin tin, and you don't want to self-modify in that direction, then the article seems correct in advising that you don't buy a muffin tin...
I think Alicorn's intended point was closer to "How will owning this item change my preferences and my habits? Do I want my preferences and habits to be changed in this way?" (Sometimes the answer is "Yes!")" than "self-modifying into someone who likes to make muffins just because I bought a muffin tin." You need to do the value-weighing before you purchase something.
Also, she's made an underlying assumption that a) you have limited resources, such that buying something is a tradeoff against buying something else, and b) having stuff you don't use creates "clutter" which is unpleasant. These points may not be true for everyone: someone making $150,000 a year probably doesn't have to ponder very hard on whether or not buying a muffin tin is worth it, because it has a negligible effect on their savings, and not everyone finds having a lot of stuff distressing. I do think it's true that most people err on the side of buying too much (see rising Canadian household debt) and keeping too much stuff around.
This reads like some combination of generalizing from one example / other-optimizing. Is there any reason for me to think anything in this post is true, or useful to me? Is there relevant research on this subject?
Note that you're dismissing the received wisdom about this topic, some of which actually does come from serious research. It seems like you need to be leveraging a bit more evidence here.
I agree that it claims to disagree with it, but look at the actual recommendations of the post. Don't buy items that won't make your life noticeably better; use the items you already have to make your life better; turn your objects into experiences as much as possible. All of those fit with the received wisdom.
The primary effect that reading this had on me was the change in state from [owning a cloak hadn't occurred to me] to [owning a cloak sounds awesome; i am unhappy that i hadn't thought of it on my own]
You can also avoid the permanency of owning things by renting/leasing/borrowing/returning for refund.
EDIT: I place zero value on the fact of ownership. That is, I derive no satisfaction from knowing that something (or someone) belongs to me. I am given to understand that this is rather unusual. Of course, I value having hassle-free access to things when I need them, and often the only way to ensure this is by owning them, but when there is a choice, I'd rather not, even if it costs a bit more. Unfortunately, the society around me is not set up for this, except for really expensive items, like a place to live or a means of transportation. I wonder if other places in the world are more access- rather than ownership-friendly.
I can't seem to find it in my quotes file, but I recall once reading an interesting few paragraphs by someone explaining that capitalism allows them to "own" nearly everything they want in the world. In some sense I am the owner of a 16 inch telescope, a jet ski, a table with a gourmet meal at the best restaurant in the city, etc., regardless of whether I've gone out and bought those things and had them assigned to be my property, because at any time I could go out and buy them if the whim struck hard enough. The world is full of warehouses and store shelves and other buildings whose sole purpose is to store stuff-that-I-can-have-whenever-I-want-it. Even if the transaction costs are still high enough that I may end up foregoing some of those luxuries, just having the option is itself a kind of wealth.
And in a way this bounty of materialism leads one to be anti-materialistic. If I own all these wonderful things, why bother with the inconvenience of storing them in my own house until/unless I'm ready to really experience them?
Fortunately for you, my use of spaced repetition means I know exactly what interesting paragraphs you are talking about: http://www.metafilter.com/65284/Collect-em-all#1862024
I stopped reading around the cloak part. I don't understand. If it makes you happy to buy a cloak, buy it. If it makes you happy to wear a cloak, wear it. Why mete out wearing the cloak as penance for buying the cloak?
Is this supposed to be a way to save money? If so, maybe this strategy makes sense if you frequently find yourself overcome with difficult-to-resist urges to buy stuff that your rational mind considers a low-utility use of your money? I guess I'm lucky to not suffer from that problem much?
What are your goals here, and how are you trying to achieve them?
Is this supposed to be a way to save money? If so, maybe this strategy makes sense if you frequently find yourself overcome with difficult-to-resist urges to buy stuff that your rational mind considers a low-utility use of your money?
This is a fairly common problem. Mostly with girls–it's kind of a Western-cultural thing for girls to go shopping "for fun" and get pleasure from acquiring stuff, which they won't necessarily use frequently. I don't have this problem either, mostly because my threshold for actually buying stuff is really high and I've integrated "being thrifty and good at saving money" as part of my self-concept. But I observe it a lot.
There's also the aspect that using stuff is a good way to increase your day-to-day physical pleasure. A cloak feels nice on your skin, it's warm, it's comfy, etc...and reminding yourself to use it increases the amount of attention you pay to those simple, easy-to-obtain pleasures.
I've witnessed a lot of men having this failure mode in the form of buying new computer games (particularly from services like Steam or Good Old Games) when they still have loads of completely unplayed old ones. Or buying lots of books and only reading a small part of them.
I would add artificially extending the wait time to purchase. Some time ago I read a study (that I can no longer find) that correlated a decline in consumer satisfaction with an increase in credit based purchases. We no longer pine at the store window for months saving up to buy X. Which probably has two effects: when you finally get it, it feels much more satisfying (like the first meal after starving for a week is probably the best meal you have ever had), also, in the three months it takes you to save up to buy a super-left-handed-water-redehydrator, you might have the chance to use one at a friend's house and realize you don't really like it.
My top three satisfying purchases (which happen to all be vehicles) were all acquired after protracted waiting periods, one of which was nearly three years.
Number 2 sounds suspiciously like a sunk cost fallacy to me. (And you don't appear to realize you're allowed to give stuff away/sell stuff/throw away stuff you don't want.)
Number 2 sounds suspiciously like a sunk cost fallacy to me.
Actually this statement seems like an example of Yvain's non-central fallacy, since her hacking her mind into enjoying the stuff she bought is not a bad thing unless she ends up buying more junk just because she knows that she can always make having it fun.
From the few comments of yours I've read, I've noticed that you have a pattern of taking criticism as personal attacks.
Nobody here is trying to teach you how to live your life, but if you engage in public discussion, you can't expect your claims to remain unchallenged, whether for good or wrong reasons. If you are offended when you receive criticism on examples taken from your real life, then don't use them.
As army1987 pointed out, the advice you give appears to entail the sunken cost fallacy, and your last answer doesn't seem to refute that: you first committed to acquire the cloak because you "wanted" it, and then you decided to give it a priority that is dystonic with your true preferences (which would be to use the cloak only when it matches the rest of your outfit) in order to retroactively justify your commitment.
Assuming that your cloak is not a Veblen good (which would gain you utility directly from its price due to status signalling), then, if you wanted to be instrumentally rational, you should have based your decision to buy the cloak on the utility you expected to get from it by using it according to your true preferences, irrespective on its price, and then compare it to the expected utility of other uses of the same amount of money (including savings or donations).
I made up my mind to do what I am doing, cloakwise, before I bought the cloak
As army1987 pointed out, the advice you give appears to entail the sunken cost fallacy, and your last answer doesn't seem to refute that
Read it again. Then keep reading it. Look up sunk cost fallacy again if necessary. You are just trivially wrong.
From the few comments of yours I've read, I've noticed that you have a pattern of taking criticism as personal attacks.
No, she called your criticisms tiresome because they were repetitive, inane and completely unresponsive to her actual words on the subject. Of course there isn't any point in her trying to engage with them further.
Planned sunken cost fallacy?
Or perhaps the "It's Just Not A Sunk Cost Fallacy When You Have Not Sunk Cost And For Crying Out Loud It Is 'Sunk' Not 'Sunken' I've Been Trying To Correct That Subtly" fallacy?
I find it poignant that you had to expend >1000 words to tell people "obtain my consent before using my gift receiving for your pleasure".
Sometimes I hate this society.
I would add a skill, that works quite well at least for me : buy things that emotionally connect with happy moments of your life. It could take many shapes - souvenirs from holidays, D&D manuals that reminds you the fun you had playing the game, an object that reminds you of someone or the great moment you had with someone (like my chess set, I used to play chess with my grandfather, I didn't play it much in the 15 years since he died, but every time I look at my chess set, I remember the games with him). The same goes with presents - many presents I g...
My default position towards things is hate. I hate stuff. It gets dusty, it has to be managed, it takes up space. A room with lots of stuff in it is cognitively difficult for the brain to process; having lots of stuff around actually drains your mental energy.
http://www.paulgraham.com/stuff.html
I generally dislike owning things that I can't physically carry with me at all times (because "if you don't have something with you, owning it probably hasn't made you more powerful"). Consequently, the majority of what I own I carry with me. The only real...
I generally dislike owning things that I can't physically carry with me at all times (because "if you don't have something with you, owning it probably hasn't made you more powerful").
This seems false on all sorts of levels.
With regards to number 1:
When I need something non-essential I put an alert up for it on slickdeals. Eventually a good deal on some version of what I want will be posted. This has had several effects:
Shopping for things in bulk is also an opportunity to practice this skill. If I don't want 200 of it do I actually need it?
My model of people reading this article has some of them wasting time doing things they don't enjoy that much because they bought something for thing they assume they should enjoy. Then they still go and buy something like that next time.
I like your advice even if it is based just on anecdote, I just am not sure what the fraction of those who will use it properly is.
I'm having trouble owning a desktop gaming PC these days. With the form factor of personal computers having gone from the traditional "mini-fridge" to a much nicer "deck of cards" or "thick envelope", I don't really like having to have a giant box and a mess of peripherals and wires that could fit right in a late 1980s computer den around just so that I can play graphics-intensive modern commercial games. I can do all actually useful stuff like reading, writing and coding on a laptop or a tablet, as well as do all the entertai...
famous dinner parties at which the Illuminati congregate.
Upvoted. Your sense of humor is just awesome. Unless this is one humongous Fnord.
This idea is absolutely brilliant, especially #2 on the list, personally I need to ensure that I actually start consciously making the connection between owning things and having them around to use.
I've been cutting back on video game purchases because they make them faster than I can beat them. My Backloggery is something of a testament to the relative speed of acquisitions vs. completions. In other words, I've turned into this guy, only more so, without actually meaning to.
Wow. This is particularly interesting to me, because I already felt this way without knowing why, not having consciously examined the feeling. I know that I already felt uncomfortable around gift-giving holidays, and this provides context to that; I don't particularly enjoy receiving incorrect things, and indeed, I have several boxes full of incorrect things following me around that I can't get rid of (even if I can't think of any reason to have or use a thing, it feels like losing hit points to dispose of it). For the same reason, I feel uncomfortable ...
I find the following difficult to parse:
I think people who are not made happier by having things have the wrong things, or have them incorrectly.
The phrase "having things have the wrong things" is a grammatically valid noun phrase, and it took me >10s to figure out why the sentence [looks to me like it] is missing a predicate.
If money doesn't buy you happiness, you don't have enough money.
For example, what would you do if you had ten billion dollars ? Some people would answer, "I'd buy my own zoo !" or whatever, but the real answer is, "I would never work again; instead, I'd pursue whatever projects I found interesting“. That kind of freedom could enable you to be quite happy.
I'm not sure if this kind of experience scales to lower amounts of money; there's probably a minimum threshold above which wealth becomes entirely self-sustaining, and below which you'd sti...
That kind of money would certainly enable happiness, but I doubt it'd reliably cause happiness. Suddenly removing the need to ever work again, without developing the mental habits needed to exploit that freedom, sounds like a recipe for boredom and listlessness.
I get the impression that money is important to happiness mainly insofar as it affects people's locus of control. That explains the data pretty well: lower-income individuals are on average likely to feel less control over their lives and thus to be less happy, but where we find exceptions to that rule (i.e. broke college kids) we find happier populations. More money implies more options and also a cultural presumption of agency (which hasn't been researched much but probably should be). Above a certain point, though, we hit diminishing returns: an upper-middle-class income gives you more options than a middle-class income, but the diffs are smaller. Eventually they're drowned out by uncorrelated noise: happiness set points, habits, accidents, non-financial life choices.
This predicts that uncorking a $10^10 financial genie wouldn't much affect most people's happiness. As far as I know, windfalls of that magnitude are so rare that there's no data to speak of, but there is a pretty good record of happiness research on lottery winners that seems to back this up on a smaller scale.
This is relevant to #4 – purchasing experiences are some of my best money well spent, especially eating. You can do so affordable by choosing interesting and tasty restaurants to dine at rather than expensive ones. I often find myself in a conversation with people reminiscing about how awesome a restaurant was. This positive shared experience is constantly brought up again and again; whereas I rarely find myself in a situation where I am reminded about how awesome an object is to me.
I built a system into my Empowerment framework for adding things to a "do not want list" alongside the have and want list for exactly this reason.
I would add an additional related skill, of deriving happiness from correctly NOT having things.
I do enjoy window shopping and browsing all kinds of goods, but I have learned to tell the difference between liking something and wanting to have it. So actually, most places which are intended by their owners for the sale of consumer goods are for me just museums and art-galleries of weird stuff humans make. It's a lot of fun.
Correction: I have mostly learned this skill. I do still occasionally buy musical instruments that I believe (with very high probability based on previous experience) I will never bother to learn how to play well.
I am still trying to figure out how to Have Computers correctly, because they suffer from this weird constraint where they're only really useful if I can carry them all over, but if I do that I lose them all the time.
(Symptomatically, I'm typing this on your broken/cast-off macbook =P)
I think people who are not made happier by having things either have the wrong things, or have them incorrectly. Here is how I get the most out of my stuff.
Money doesn't buy happiness. If you want to try throwing money at the problem anyway, you should buy experiences like vacations or services, rather than purchasing objects. If you have to buy objects, they should be absolute and not positional goods; positional goods just put you on a treadmill and you're never going to catch up.
Supposedly.
I think getting value out of spending money, owning objects, and having positional goods are all three of them skills, that people often don't have naturally but can develop. I'm going to focus mostly on the middle skill: how to have things correctly1.
1. Obtain more-correct things in the first place.
If you and I are personal friends, you probably know that I have weird gift-receiving protocols. This is partly because I hate surprises. But it's also because I don't want to have incorrect things, cluttering my space, generating guilt because they're gifts that I never use, and generally having high opportunity cost because the giver could have gotten me something else.
This problem isn't only with gifts. People get themselves incorrect things all the time - seduced by marketing, seized by impulse, or too hurried to think about which of several choices is the best one for their wants and needs. I have some incorrect clothes, which I got because I was sick of shopping and needed a new pair of pants even if it was terrible; as soon as I found better pants (or whatever) those clothes were never worn again and now they're just waiting for my next haul to Goodwill. I bet a lot of people have incorrect printers, mostly because printers in general are evil, but partly because it's irritating and dull to investigate them ahead of time. Cars may also tend to fall into this category, with a lot of people neutral or ambivalent about their self-selected objects that cost thousands of dollars.
If you are not currently living in a cluttered space, or feeling guilty about not using your objects enough, or tending to dislike the things that you have, or finding yourself wanting things that you "can't" get because you already have an inferior item in the same reference class, or just buying too many not-strict-necessities than is appropriate for your budget - then this might not be a step you need to focus on. If you have objects you don't like (not just aren't getting a lot out of, that's for later steps, but actually dislike) then you might need to change your thresholds for object-acquisition.
This doesn't mean something stodgy like "before you get something, think carefully about whether you will actually use and enjoy it, using outside view information about items in this reference class". Or, well, it can mean that, but that's not the only criterion! You can also increase the amount of sheer emotional want that you allow to move you to action - wait until you more-than-idly desire it. If I were good at math, I would try to operationalize this as some sort of formula, but suffice it to say that the cost of the object (in money, but also social capital and storage space and inconvenience and whatnot) should interact with how much you just-plain-want-it and also with how much use you will likely get out of it.
Speaking of how much use you get out of it...
2. Find excuses to use your stuff.
I have a cloak. It cost me about $80 on Etsy. It is custom made, and reversible between black and gray, and made out of my favorite fabric, and falls all the way to the floor from my shoulders, and has a hood so deep that I can hide in it if I want. If I run while I wear it, it swoops out behind me. It's soft and warm but not too warm. I like my cloak.
I also have sweaters. They didn't cost me anywhere near $80, not a one of them.
When it's chilly, I reach for the cloak first.
I'm playing a game with my brain: I will let it make me spend $80 on a cloak, if it will produce enough impetus towards cloak-wearing and cloak-enjoying that I actually get $80 of value out of it. If it can't follow through, then I later trust its wants less ("last time I bought something like this, it just hung in my closet forever and I only pulled it out on Halloween!"), and then it doesn't get to make me buy any more cloaklike objects, which it really wants to be able to do. (I don't know if everyone's brain is wired to play this sort of game, but if yours is, it's worth doing.) My brain is doing a very nice job of helping me enjoy my cloak. Eventually I may let it buy another cloak in a different pair of colors, if it demonstrates that it really can keep this up long-term.
People sometimes treat not using their stuff like something that happens to them. "I never wound up using it." "It turned out that I just left it in the basement." This is silly. If I'm going to use my cloak - or my miniature cheesecake pan or my snazzy letter opener - then this is because at some point I will decide to put on my cloak, make miniature cheesecakes, or open letters with my snazzy dedicated device instead of my nail file. You know, on purpose.
Sure, some things seem to prompt you to use them more easily. If you get a new video game, and you really like it, it's probably not going turn out that you never think to play it. If you get a cat or something sufficiently autonomous like that, you will know if you are not paying it sufficient attention.
But if you get a muffin tin and you have no pre-installed prompts for "I could make muffins" because that impulse was extinguished due to lack of muffin tin, it will be easy to ignore. You're going to need to train yourself to think of muffins as a makeable thing. And you can train yourself to do that! Put the muffins on your to-do list. Lead your friends to expect baked goods. Preheat the oven and leave a stick of butter out to soften so you're committed. If that doesn't sound appealing to you - if you don't want to bake muffins - then you shouldn't have acquired a muffin tin.
Speaking of your friends...
3. Invite others to benefit from your thing.
I've got a pet snake. Six days of the week, she is just my pet snake. On Saturdays, during my famous dinner parties at which the Illuminati congregate, I often pass her around to interested visitors, too. The dinner parties themselves allow my friends to benefit from my stuff, too - kitchen implements and appliances and the very table at which my guests sit. It would be less useful to own a stand mixer or a giant wok if I only ever cooked for myself. It would be less pleasant to have a pet snake if I had no chance to share her. It would be less important to have pretty clothes if no one ever saw me wearing them.
You're a social ape. If you're trying to get more out of something, an obvious first hypothesis to test is to see if adding other social apes helps:
Also, circling back to the bit about gifts: I bet you own some gifts. Use them as excuses to think about who gave them to you! My grandmother got me my blender, my mom made me my purse, my best friend gave me the entire signed Fablehaven series. Interacting with those objects now produces extra warmfuzzies if I take the extra cognitive step.
Speaking of how you go about experiencing your stuff...
4. Turn stuff into experiences via the senses.
Remember my cloak? It's made of flannel, so it's nice to pet; it's fun to swoosh it about. Remember my snake? She feels nifty and cool and smooth, and she looks pretty, and I get to watch her swallow a mouse once a week if I care to stick around to supervise. I get candy from Trader Joe's because it tastes good and music that I like because it sounds good. If you never look at your stuff or touch it or taste it or whatever is appropriate for the type of stuff, you might not be having it correctly. (Raise your hand if you have chachkas on your shelves that you don't actually look at.)
Caveat: Some purely instrumental tools can be had correctly without this - I don't directly experience my Dustbuster with much enthusiasm, just the cleanliness that I can use it to create. Although nothing prevents you from directly enjoying a particularly nice tool either - I have spatulas I am fond of.
And of course if you choose to follow the standard advice about purchasing experiences in a more standard way, you can still use stuff there. You will have more fun camping if you have decent camping gear; you will have more fun at the beach if you have suitable beach things; you will have more fun in the south of France if you have travel guides and phrasebooks that you like.
1It's an optional skill. You could neglect it in favor of others, and depending on your own talents and values, this could be higher-leverage than learning to have things correctly. But I bet the following steps will be improvements for some people.