Imagine life without smartphones; no Google maps, no Uber, none of those things that bring the many conveniences into our lives.
Imagine life without the internet. Or without personal computers. Or without televisions, microwaves, and refrigerators.
It is easy to be happy without these things before they were invented. It was in fact the reality for most of us when growing up. It is also possible to be happy without them even after they were invented.
But it is hard to be happy without them once you’ve gotten used to them.
The same goes with experiences, though everything that changes us is all because of experiences. My daughters, since the time they started noticing, have stayed in nicer places when on vacation. Until that one time we had to stay in a motel, and they still talk about it.
Such is human nature. We get used to niceness. It becomes the new norm.
And it is easy to bring niceness into our lives but extremely hard to let go. Finance writer Andrew Tobias says that a luxury once sampled becomes a necessity.
And once it becomes a necessity, the lack of it only brings unhappiness.
Consumption smoothing gets talked about a lot by personal finance economists. With the most extreme version of it, you want to be borrowing money when you are young so you can have a bigger house and a nicer car that you then gradually pay off as you get older.
Because when you are young, you have plenty of human capital but not much financial capital. And as you get older, you turn that human capital into financial capital and pay off those debts.
So, the idea behind consumption smoothing is why delay the inevitable when the system allows you to borrow for a lifestyle that you are going to be able to eventually afford anyway.
But this notion that you want to have the same level of lifestyle for your entire life does not align with human psychology. You want a gradually rising standard of living to experience lifelong happiness.
You want to start with the Motel 6s of the world before you get to savor the experiences nicer hotels bring. Or when you are used to flying coach and occasionally get bumped to business class, it gets to be a real treat. But once you get used to flying business, it is hard to go back to coach.
Money does buy happiness. To maximize the return on that money on the happiness scale, you want to occasionally splurge and then revert to normal life again.
If you really want to feel sorry for anyone, feel sorry for the children of super wealthy families who will never get to experience the pleasures that a gradually rising standard of living brings. Because once you start life in first class, there is not much to aspire to. It is all downhill from there.
So, pace yourself. Delay gratification. Live a little beneath your means. Tease yourself with anticipation and then savor those occasional splurges.
Thank you for your time.
Cover image credit – Michael Block, Pexels