POV: You Stopped Buying Things to Feel Better — Nobody Knew What to Get You

At one forty in the morning, on a Tuesday, you bought a telescope you could not afford. The box arrived on Friday. Eleven years later it is still sealed, and it has survived three moves, and you have never once opened it. This is the story of the twenty minutes before you clicked the button, and why those were the only good twenty minutes in the whole transaction. It is about what your friend Wes has on his list and what you have on yours. It is about a French writer who was given a beautiful dressing gown in 1769 and ended up replacing his entire study. And it is about the finding inside the most famous study on money and happiness that almost nobody ever quotes — the one about what winning does to the taste of breakfast. It is not about spending less. Everything in it points somewhere else: you were never buying the object. You were buying a picture of who you would be once you owned it, and that picture is the thing that costs you. CHAPTERS 0:00 One forty in the morning 1:31 The twenty minutes 3:24 The dressing gown 5:28 The thing that actually works 7:37 The winners 9:45 What it costs 11:50 The box, opened SOURCES Brickman, P., Coates, D. & Janoff-Bulman, R. (1978). Lottery winners and accident victims: Is happiness relative? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36(8), 917-927. Lindqvist, E., Ostling, R. & Cesarini, D. (2020). Long-run effects of lottery wealth on psychological well-being. The Review of Economic Studies, 87(6), 2703-2726. https://doi.org/10.1093/restud/rdaa006 Rick, S. I., Pereira, B. & Burson, K. A. (2014). The benefits of retail therapy: Making purchase decisions reduces residual sadness. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 24(3), 373-380. Schultz, W., Dayan, P. & Montague, P. R. (1997). A neural substrate of prediction and reward. Science, 275(5306), 1593-1599. Berridge, K. C. & Robinson, T. E. (2016). Liking, wanting, and the incentive-salience brain system. American Psychologist, 71(8), 670-679. Diderot, D. (1769). Regrets sur ma vieille robe de chambre. This is a fictional story built on real findings. Nobody in it is a real person.