Happy
riences" generally make us happier
acceptance over the past several years, it has also led to some
those who find it glib and sexist to those who question the validity of happiness"
as a legitimate field of empirical or scientific study.
Stuff has gotten a bad rap of late - mostly for its incompatibility with
other lifestyle trends. It won't fit in your tiny house. Marie Kondo thinks
it should be eschewed entirely unless it sparks joy. And there won't be any
need for all your whisks and woks once you switch over to Soylent for
sustenance.
Minimalism is hot, culturally, and for years, science has assured us that it ?
was also the path to maximal bliss. The prevailing wisdom is that people who
want the most happiness for their buck should buy experiences, not things.
448
449
happiness.
3
Khazan /The Three Types of Happiness
The idea is that the joy of an experience
begins before it even starts, and continues
Minimalism is hot,
when you look back on the fancy dinner/
vacation/afternoon of LARPing fondly.
culturally, and for
Experiences provide, in other words, both
years, science has
more anticipatory happiness and afterglow
assured us that it
was also the path to
But a recent study complicates that pic- maximal bliss.
ture, suggesting that sweaters and iPhones
might make you just as happy, in a way,
as cruises and concerts do. There is a third type of happiness – momentary
happiness, and it tends to last longer with material goods because people use
them for more time than they typically experience their experiences for.
For the study, published in Social Psychology and Personality Science, research- 4
ers Aaron Weidman and Elizabeth Dunn from the University of British
Columbia gave 67 participants $20 to spend on either an experiential or mate-
rial purchase of their choice, and then to report one experiential or material
gift they had recently received. Then they quizzed them about their happiness
Happy
riences" generally make us happier
acceptance over the past several years, it has also led to some
those who find it glib and sexist to those who question the validity of happiness"
as a legitimate field of empirical or scientific study.
Stuff has gotten a bad rap of late - mostly for its incompatibility with
other lifestyle trends. It won't fit in your tiny house. Marie Kondo thinks
it should be eschewed entirely unless it sparks joy. And there won't be any
need for all your whisks and woks once you switch over to Soylent for
sustenance.
Minimalism is hot, culturally, and for years, science has assured us that it ?
was also the path to maximal bliss. The prevailing wisdom is that people who
want the most happiness for their buck should buy experiences, not things.
448
449
happiness.
3
Khazan /The Three Types of Happiness
The idea is that the joy of an experience
begins before it even starts, and continues
Minimalism is hot,
when you look back on the fancy dinner/
vacation/afternoon of LARPing fondly.
culturally, and for
Experiences provide, in other words, both
years, science has
more anticipatory happiness and afterglow
assured us that it
was also the path to
But a recent study complicates that pic- maximal bliss.
ture, suggesting that sweaters and iPhones
might make you just as happy, in a way,
as cruises and concerts do. There is a third type of happiness – momentary
happiness, and it tends to last longer with material goods because people use
them for more time than they typically experience their experiences for.
For the study, published in Social Psychology and Personality Science, research- 4
ers Aaron Weidman and Elizabeth Dunn from the University of British
Columbia gave 67 participants $20 to spend on either an experiential or mate-
rial purchase of their choice, and then to report one experiential or material
gift they had recently received. Then they quizzed them about their happiness
But a recent study complicates that pic- maximal bliss.
cure, suggesting that sweaters and iPhones
might make you just as happy, in a way,
as cruises and concerts do. There is a third type of happiness – momentary
happiness, and it tends to last longer with material goods because people use
them for more time than they typically experience their experiences for.
For the study, published in Social Psychology and Personality Science, research- 4
ers Aaron Weidman and Elizabeth Dunn from the University of British
Columbia gave 67 participants $20 to spend on either an experiential or mate-
rial purchase of their choice, and then to report one experiential or material
gift they had recently received. Then they quizzed them about their happiness
levels through text messages and questionnaires.
They found that the study subjects derived more frequent momentary 5
happiness from material goods, but more intense momentary happiness from
the experiences. In other words, they enjoyed their material goods on a greater
number of occasions than they did their experiences, even though the happi-
ness felt from the experiences was slightly more intense.
“Material purchases have an unsung advantage, in that they provide more 6
frequent bouts of momentary happiness in the weeks after they are acquired,"
Weidman and Dunn wrote.
This isn't the only evidence suggesting that material possessions aren't as 7
bleak as they're made out to be. This study somewhat echoes earlier work by
Dunn and others finding that lots of small purchases make people happier
than one big one. Because we psychologically adapt to the things we have new
things provide a positive jolt - which matters in the short run, if not in the
long run. Five trips to H&M serve as tepid, but nevertheless welcome, distrac-
tions from the daily grind.
And another study found that things that help us do activities, like tennis 8
rackets and musical instruments, can also generate happiness. But the differ-
ence between tennis rackets and jewelry is slight: Part
of the fun of shopping,
after all, is imagining the places yąu'll go with the stuff you get.
depends on whether you are seeking an intense but fleeting form of happiness
that is accompanied by a rosy afterglow," Weidman and Dunn write, or a more
So should you splurge on the latest iThing or on Hamilton tickets? It ,
subtle, frequent form of happiness that will endure for weeks or months.”
add that my feelings toward my smart phone every day for the first year I
As someone who had a flip phone for far longer than was hip, I can only 10
owned it were nothing short of the praise-hands emoji.
OLGA KHAZAN
The Three Types of Happiness
A graduate of American University and the University of Southern California,
Olga Khazan is a staff writer for the Atlantic, where she covers gender, health,
and science. Previously, she was a reporter and blogger for the Washington Post,
covering a range of issues, including business start-ups, health, and international
affairs. Khazan's work has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Forbes, and
Wired. She is an International Reporting Project fellowship recipient.
Background on “minimalism" and the tiny house movement “Minimalism is
hot, culturally, and for years, science has assured us that it was also the path to
maximal bliss," writes Olga Khazan in the following selection. Indeed, conspicu-
ous opposition to materialism and the role of "things" in our lives has, in itself,
become a powerful lifestyle signifier. One popular manifestation of the minimal-
ism movement is the recent "tiny house" trend, in which people choose to live
in homes that are smaller than 500 square feet. This trend, in part a response to
the conspicuous spending of the first part of this century and the 2008 global
financial crisis, has been popularized by the popular television show Tiny House
Hunters. The tiny house movement has also been proposed as one possible solu-
tion to the homeless crises in many major cities. For example, the charity Starting
Human has built and donated more than a dozen tiny houses for the homeless in
and around Los Angeles. Of course, the idea of minimalism is not new: monasti-
cism is part of the traditions of many different religious faiths, and the philosophy
proposed by Henry David Thoreau's Walden, the antimaterialism of the beatniks
of the 1950s and hippies of the 1960s, and the "voluntary simplicity" movement
of the early 1980s are all examples of minimalism in action. These and other iter-
ations suggest that minimalism is a newly branded version of an old principle.
Recently, however, empirical science has appeared to support the minimalist phi-
losophy. Research by psychologists and social scientists like Daniel Gilbert, author
of Stumbling on Happiness, and Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton, authors of
Happy Money: The Science of Smarter Spending, among others, indicate that "expe.
riences" generally make us happier than "things." Although this view has gained
acceptance over the past several years, it has also led to some pushback from
those who find it glib and sexist to those who question the validity of happiness"
as a legitimate field of empirical or scientific study.
Stuff has gotten a bad rap of late - mostly for its incompatibility with ?
tractve trends. It won't fit in your tiny house. Marie Kondo thinks
lumnless it sparks joy. And there won't be any
ich over to Soylent for
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