Should you be spending your money on the latest feature-rich iPhone or on an Anushka Shankar concert taking place next month? This is a conundrum that everyone is faced with regularly while making purchase decisions. Should we buy a product — a material possession — or invest in an experience?
Numerous scientific studies conducted over the years have revealed that experiences are more a source of happiness for us than material possessions. Let’s see why.
You get used to your possessions but not your experiences.
You feel plenty of excitement before and after you buy a product, like a home theater or a new pair of flats. But this excitement, studies have shown, is short-lived. We get used to the products and then draw no real sense of joy or excitement from them. Experiences, on the other hand, enjoy a longer shelf life, often a lifetime. They give you stories to tell other people, and are a source of joy even twenty to thirty years later if those moments you had were truly special.
Shared experiences are more valued than shared possessions.
You often share experiences and possessions with other people and bond over them. Say both you and your friend spent a week relaxing on the warm beaches of Gokarna, and both of you bought the same brand of jeans from your favorite apparel store last week. If you were to speak about these two events, which one would you bond more over? It’s fairly easy to see that your stay at Gokarna would be more joyful to share. Shared experiences give us more joy than shared material possessions.
Image Source: Aqua World
It’s much harder to compare between experiences.
When you’re talking about your experiences and possessions with other people, you’re much less likely to compare between experiences than with material possessions. Products always come with specifications or parameters over which comparison is possible — 32 GB versus 64 GB, leather jacket versus linen jacket. But there aren’t such parameters for how special your experiences were — they were yours, and you love and cherish it. There’s not much scope for thinking about whose experience was better.
The wait for experiences, not possessions, makes us happy.
We often have a wait period that precedes having an experience or buying a product. While this wait factor is common to both, the nature of the wait is not. We often experience annoyance, excitement, frustration, and other emotions before purchasing a product, especially if the wait somehow gets prolonged or seems out of reach. The wait for an experience, however, involves a pleasant anticipation that breeds joy and excitement as opposed to negative feelings. A study revealed that people who planned for a vacation found happiness, even if they didn’t actually go on a vacation. This is characteristic of a wait for what we perceive as an amazing experience.
We are a sum of our experiences, not possessions.
Our experiences shape us much more significantly than our material possessions. As a test, ask yourself if you’d be willing to let go of a thing you own or a great experience you’ve had if you had to give up on one of these. Our material possessions are the basis for other people’s perception or judgment of ours. But our identity comes from all the experiences we’ve had in our life. And for this reason, and all others discussed above, experiences are much more a source of happiness for people than material possessions.