Stuff You Should Know - Do objects or experiences make us happier?

Episode Date: February 11, 2014

Since Sartre classified things that make us happy into the categories of having and doing, science took up the investigation into materialism and experientialism. The results have been in for a while: experiences win by a wide margin, but why exactly? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, Jerry's here, and Stuff You Should Know. We've got the A-team. Yeah. In the house. Yeah. Not the Chuck hologram. No.

It's not guest producers, Matt or Noel. It's not Pocket Josh. It's not Pocket Josh, although I do have a Pocket Josh on me. He's here. He's always here. That's a voodoo doll. No, it's not. It's clearly a voodoo doll.

That's my hair, I recognize. How's that back pain treating you? It hurts. It's so bad. How's it going? Pretty good, except for the back pain. Oh, well, let me just massage your little Pocket Josh. Don't touch me, Chuck.

I'm excited about this one. Our ongoing series on happiness. Yeah. We've covered it with Bhutan, a gross national happiness, and then we did our audio book All About Happiness. The Super Stuff Guide to Happiness. And all that was, I guess, a holdover from, was it right before or right after the financial global financial collapse?

I feel like it was sort of in the midst of. Okay. Because I think what it was was the world got cocky, especially the developed world. Sure. Like, hey, things are going so well. Yeah. We're all rich. Everybody's pretty happy.

Yeah. We're at war with not one, but two countries at once. Look at us go. Yeah. Let's start talking about happiness and what makes us happy. Let's start blogs about how we try to be happy and enter it in once a day, every day, and then get a book deal out of it. Let's just think about happiness.

Happiness, happiness, happiness. Well, a few years on, there's been some changes over time. Everybody's sad. We don't talk about happiness anymore. There was a little while where there was a period, basically, from my impression, about 2005 to 2009, where you could get substantial grants to conduct research into the nature of happiness, to quantify happiness, what makes people happy, what makes people unhappy, how to make people happier.

And there was an offshoot of psychology called positive psychology that we talked about in the Super Sub Guide to Happiness that said, we're good at diagnosing maladies, which... Physical maladies? No, like problems, psychological problems, but we're terrible at how to make people happier. So now we're going to have something called positive psychology, which appears to have fallen by the wayside. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Now it's all negative psychology. Well, psychology itself, as a field, is under tremendous amount of attack, and positive psychology, I think they gave the chance to retreat, they're like, look, you're pretty easy target. Yeah. You should probably go... What did they say? Like, this isn't even a real thing?

I don't know. Maybe. It was a valiant attempt. I think it just came in at the wrong time. But the point is, if you look up happiness now, you'll notice just about everything cuts off in 2009. I did notice that, actually. America doesn't care about being happy anymore, or maybe they're just hanging on.

Studied and learned everything they need to know, and we're like, all right, here we are. Well, you know what? It's funny that you say that, because if that's true, you could be right. That represents then possibly the shortest amount of time any subject has ever been studied. No, really. Because it started in what makes people happy in maybe, I think 2003, I read a study, and it was about how this was one of the first studies to ever try to figure out what makes

people happy. So then this field of study existed from 2003 to 2009, and they were saying that the reason that this would be the first study is because it's been so accepted for so many years, ever since the philosopher Hume, David Hume, Robert Hume, the Scottish philosopher, is one of my favorites. Just, if you were on Jeopardy, you could just say Hume. Hume. We'll go with Hume.

Yeah. Who is Hume? If you're on Jeopardy. He was a Scottish philosopher. No, I just had to phrase it. Okay. I know. I'm just teasing.

Gotcha. He said, he was one of the first people to mention this concept of what makes people happy insofar as what we're talking about today, which is, does an object make you happier, or does an experience make you happier? Yeah. I think they've done the lottery studies before 2004, if lottery winners. But that's a pretty specialized study. Yes.

So my point is to try to quantify happiness, that kind of thing, and really investigate it. It started in the early 2000s and ended by the mid 2000, the first decade of the 2000s. Yeah. Well, while I'm reading all these studies, I'm looking 07, 08, 04, yeah. Very keen observation. And I can't quite figure out, I mean, obviously, I think the Great Recession is almost entirely responsible for that falling to the wayside.

But if you look still today, there are still related studies, it's just not happiness studies. Yeah. I found when I was reading this, I disagreed with a lot of these findings and studies. They didn't seem fully fleshed out, did they? Well, for instance, we'll go ahead and start with this supposed fact, researchers have done some studying and they have pinned down how long a material object will make you happy, and they say between six and 12 weeks, then you get bored with it basically. I just don't know about that because to me, it wholly depends on what the object is.

If it's something that gives you ongoing pleasure, like a guitar, let's say, because that is also an experience, it's an object, but I will love my guitars till I die because I play them and enjoy it and play with them with my friends, you know? Yeah. And what you're talking about now? The gift that keeps giving. Right. Exactly.

So, active engagement, it is a purchase, and when we say purchase, we're not talking about necessarily just an object, which we'll talk about in a little bit, you can also, you purchase experiences as well. Yeah. In fact, they say that's the way to go. Right. So, there's a happiness purchase is what we're saying. Yeah.

And your guitar that you purchased, that's an object, but you purchased it, but it's making you happy and over and over and over again. The reason why is because you become actively engaged in it, and active engagement in anything that is positive or that makes you happy can continue to make you happy for longer than, say, another object that doesn't actively engage you, like a pair of shoes that you wanted really, really bad, and then got. Oh, and then like sit in your closet, because you don't wear them anymore? Because after, well, you may still wear them, but you're wearing them as shoes, you're not

wearing them like, I'm the king of Rotterdam here, check out my shoes, you know? Yeah. That kind of thing that lacks active engagement, that lacks social interaction, and that lacks exercise. And those are the three? Those are the big three things that you can buy, objects-wise, that kind of sit outside of that six to 12-week happiness adaptation is what it's called. So yeah, you kind of nailed it right there with the guitar, it's not just guitar, video

games are another good example. Yeah. They're PS3, and you may get sick of some of the games, but they're always releasing new games. Right. If you bought a language module, you learn a language or something, you know? I mean, it's something that actively engaged you, something that you use for exercise or something that leads to social interaction are the three object types that make you

happier longer. Well, that makes me feel better then. Right, that whole six to 12 weeks, though, whether that's an accurate number or not, though Chuck, remember we talked about the hedonic treadmill? Yeah. It's evidence of the hedonic treadmill, this is thing called hedonic adaptation. Yeah. And that is that something that makes you happy isn't going to make you happy forever.

Yeah. Something you've purchased, pretty much whatever it is. Yeah. You're going to eventually subsume it into your everyday life, you're going to end up taking it for granted, basically, is another way to put it. Yeah. How long, how short that happens or how long that happens is it definitely differs depending on the type, and we'll talk about the type in a minute, but what people end up getting

on once an object stops making them happy, they still want to be happy, so they end up on the hedonic treadmill, they buy another pair of shoes and then another and then another and then another, and you end up just trying to keep pace buying all this stuff, accumulating all of this material stuff, and it's just kind of keeping you at a steady pace of happiness without any kind of real enrichment, and that's the hedonic treadmill. Yeah, and that's materialism, which they've done studies on materialism. There was one by these dudes Chaplin and John in 2007, where they linked it to low self-esteem generally from childhood, like you're always trying to gain your self-esteem through material

objects. Right. They've linked it to narcissism, people who try to build themselves up through having fancy things and showing them off. Yeah. I mean, that is a real technique that people use to establish their identities, establish their worth to others, and ironically, it's a cheap and easy way to do it. It may be very expensive dollar-wise, but you don't have to put a tremendous amount

of thought or effort into it, you just go buy the most obvious, obviously expensive item you can and wear it out and broadcast it and get your sense of self-worth from that. So it is a very shallow thing, materialism. I think everybody kind of knows that intuitively, but it's been studied. It is linked to all these kind of personality disorders. There's a guy named Russ Belk, who's a marketing researcher, and he was the first one to really research materialism. I wonder if the Belk chain of stores.

I wonder. Yeah, he found it to be a character trait marked by envy, non-generosity, and possessiveness. Yeah, materialism is so hard to define for me, though, because it's like a guitar is a material object and a nice guitar is, I don't know, I definitely not materialistic, I don't think, but I want a nice guitar because it sounds awesome and looks cool. But I think that that's why Belk and Chaplin and John went to the trouble of kind of investigating it. It's like, do you have a clinically flawed personality that's based on your desire for

material objects? Yeah, but see, it's all personal. I might think it's material to go out and buy a pair of $800 shoes, but the person might get a lot of joy out of those shoes and say, I think it's stupid to go pay $1,000 for a guitar. Sure. You know? Yeah.

I don't know. I don't know what I'm saying. No, I mean, I think you raise a good point, and it's valid because the research isn't that deep. Yeah. I mean, you could be exactly right. And I think it's something... It's so subjective, too.

Yes, and not only is this whole, you know, the findings subjective, the reportings are subjective, too. I think there's a study in San Francisco in 2009, the last year that happiness was ever studied. The last year, happiness mattered. And basically, this group had 154 college students fill out a survey. They said that we want you to write down a little bit about an object that you purchased to make you happy in the last three months, or an experience that made you happy in the

last three months. That you purchased, yes, which is important to distinguish that, because you can have free experiences, too. You can, yeah. And we'll get to that. But the college students self-reported that at the time of the purchase, the experiences made them happier, and the happiness lasted longer than the ones who reported an object made them happy.

Yeah. I mean, every study pretty much confirms experiences over material objects. Yes. My point is, it was self-reported, so it's subjective right out of the gate, and that's the problem with studying things like happiness. It's an emotion which is subjective. And then it was also a small sample of college students, a homogenous group. And what do they know?

Nothing. They don't have money for anything. But there's this acronym for studies like that. It's weird. It's Western, educated, something rich and democratic. Oh, really? Yeah. I can't remember what the I is.

But weird. And it's saying there's a lot of studies out there that people rely on. That are weird. That the population sample are like 18 to 21-year-old fairly well-off Western kids. Right. That's what they tell us. Yeah. Yeah.

So this is an example of that. I saw another study that I thought was interesting as far as objects go. Like we said, across the board, they pretty much have said experiences purchased or free mean more to someone in the long run than an object. But when it comes to spending on objects, this one study did find that spending on others across the board, even on an object, brings more happiness than spending on yourself for an object. And in fact, people were assigned to spend money in one of these studies, and they experienced

greater happiness in people assigned to spend money on themselves. Like, here's $100, go buy yourself something nice, or here's $100 bucks, go buy someone else something nice. People were happier that bought something for someone else, which I thought was interesting. And you were saying that's like the case with objects and experiences as well? I think that was just objects. Right. Okay.

But I would say it probably holds true for experience. Like you take someone out to dinner. Right. You feel good about it. Sure. So what you have there is you're spending on another person. It's fostering social interaction, which is another key. Huge.

And it's an experience. Yeah. In fact, they say that. That's pretty much like you couldn't get happier than that. Yeah. The social thing is kind of the key to all of this, they say, because generally your experience happiness is usually not alone. Like you'll go to a concert with someone or dinner with someone, but not always.

Right. But always is a pretty good little buzz term for this part of the podcast because there's also research that shows that objects can bring more happiness than experiences depending on the experience. Like for a long time, the literature just basically said experiences make you happier than objects. What if it's crappy? Exactly.

Yeah. And these researchers found that an unhappy experience, especially one that was meant to be happy, like let's say you went on a cruise or you went on a vacation and it just sucked. Yeah. Like that compared to an object that's supposed to make you happy, that object's going to beat that experience. Yeah.

And you're going to have that bad memory of the experience longer too. Yeah. You know, what else I think I haven't seen pointed out is you can't get your money back on a bad dinner and play. Yeah, that's true too. But if you get an object and you're like, this thinks you can usually return that. Right. Unless you took a bite out of it already.

Yeah. That's a good way to say it. But you can't, you know what I'm saying? Like you take a vacation that ends up being a disaster. I would be more upset about that because it's like you've lost your money. You're going to have this bad memory. But if you buy some stupid thing, you can like just resell it or on Craigslist or send it back.

Sure. Right. That's one distinction between materials and I guess objects and experiences. Yeah. And we should give a shout out to Sartre here. Who? Sartre. Oh yeah.

John Paul Sartre, the philosopher who is kind of credited with really introducing this concept or codifying it into the mainstream. To Sartre, there were three paths to happiness or three types of happiness. There was having, doing, and being, and being we're not even talking about in this one. But having and doing materialism and experientialism, Sartre in the fifties, I think, just kind of introduced this into the literature and that ultimately is what kicked off this kind of study into which one's better, which one makes you happier. Yeah.

And I like how you wrote this, right? Mm-hmm. And it's not about Buddhism, how they feel that material objects actually get in the way of happiness. Not only may they not bring you happiness, but they will prevent it. Sure. And it's not just Buddhism. It's for centuries.

It's just basically been accepted that an object is less desirable if you're seeking happiness than an experience. And that's why the researchers were saying, we're one of the first studies to conduct an investigation into this because it's just been generally accepted that that's the case, but no one knew exactly why. Yeah. So now we've kind of reached the why parts. And one of the things you said is you can't take an experience back.

All right. Hold on to that thought. Let's take a quick message break and we'll get back with the why. Okay. Chuck. Yeah. I don't know if you've heard this or not, but the cost of a stamp just went up to 49 cents. Whoa.

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So why? Well, you mentioned that objects, you can take an object back. Sure. You can't take an experience back. Yeah. One of the big differences that researchers came up with is that with experiences, you can, because you can't take them back, they're kind of esoteric. Yeah.

You're also more subject to revision, right? Yeah, sure. So you can think back to an experience and over time, adopt, pump it up, alter it slightly, make it more meaningful, whatever, you're just kind of adding to it. You remember when we did that thing on memory, we researched memory and it's like every time you bring up memory, you kind of add to it when you store it away. It's different. It's altered in one way.

Sure. Well, you're remembering an experience. You're not remembering an object because you have the object in your hand and you're shaking it and you're like, why don't you make me happy anymore? What happened to you? I wanted this object so bad and now it's whatever. The reason why is because it's part of your present and experience is part of your past. It can be your immediate past, your distant past, whatever, and that is subject to revisionism,

which is one of the reasons why they think that when you especially self-report what makes you happier, you're probably going to go with an experience. Yeah. I'm kind of that way. I think a lot of people, even with bad experiences later on, you might think, oh, you know, it was bad at the time, but we laugh about it now or you know how you can reframe bad experiences or if you're super on the ball in the moment, you can say, maybe we'll be laughing at this in 10 minutes.

Oh, yeah. Like some terrible vacation. Right. There's a lot of fun memories about bad experiences and I don't think it's revisionism. I think it's just time and maybe at the time you're not looking at the positives, you know? Right. Because your genes are expressing all sorts of horrific things that are making you so mad, you know, but once the genes go back to normal, yeah, things kind of take on a

different cast. Like for instance, we went on a big group camping trip like five or six years ago. Each of us, my dog got in a fight with my friend Justin's dog, poured down rain and it was the worst camping trip I've ever been on. But now we look back at it and we laugh and we remember the midnight dance party we had in the rain and we made the best of it, but at the time we're all like, man, I got to get out of here. This is miserable.

You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Like I look back on certain miserable experiences and kind of laugh about them. Yes. I think awful experiences unless it involved like, you know, something really bad and like life changing. Like I don't look back at like the death of a relative and say, you know, that was really pretty fun.

I thought that that dress they buried her in was horrible, but now it's hilarious. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. You can't do that with an object. No, you can't do that. And even if you say, well, I remember when I was eight, I got this awesome Castle Grace goal play set and it was the bomb and I was so happy.

What you're doing right there is remembering an object, which is significant, but sort of the experience of having it though. Exactly. Yeah. That's the big distinction. And I don't think anybody in the literature has done a very good job or did a very good job over that six year period when happiness was studied of explaining that that when you're talking about materialism versus experientialism, objects versus experiences, like you're talking

about the object itself and not your propensity to generate memories and experiences through the object. Yeah. Yeah. Which is kind of confusing and cluttering, frankly. It is. But it's an important point. There's a book out.

People love writing books about this stuff too. Yeah. I'm writing them for 895 online, Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton wrote one called Happy Money, the Science of Smarter Spending. And they tracked down some key principles. They obviously say experiences are more valuable than objects, but they break it down further and give you some advice like you should buy an experience first of all, you should make it a treat, which means it makes it more special if you limit your access to these things.

When I get that, if you go to like some really fancy restaurant, it's great, but if you go like every week, you kind of like, all right, I'm kind of sick of this place. For sure. That's the Hedonic treadmill. Exactly. They say you should buy time, which I'm not fully sure I understand what that means. You go to another human being and say, I would like to purchase one to two years of your life and you just put it onto my little watch here.

I'm going to take it from your watch. How much do you want? And then they give you some of their life. Okay. And then they say to invest in others, which goes back to that original study I was talking about and then pay now and consume later and that delayed consumption leads to increased enjoyment. Oh yeah.

Which is the opposite of one of the tenants of materialism, like you get it exactly and then you pay now. Apparently people who are, I guess, registered materialists, I don't remember how they quantified it or figured it out in the study. But people who are materialistic have more credit cards, typically have at least one loan of $1,000 or more outstanding. It's just kind of a, not only does it lead to or is it associated with character flaws, it also has other pitfalls and pratfalls associated with it too, like debt.

Yeah. That's the exact opposite. That's consume now, pay later. Exactly. The other is like Tantra and this is like whatever the opposite of Tantra is. I don't know. But there's this kind of unspoken or very rarely spoken indictment of material culture. And that, while I ran across this one quote, it's called, it's a consumer materialism is

a degrading outcome of untrammeled marketing power, that it's kind of like you have people who possibly have low self-esteem, low self-worth and are looking for a way to generate their own identity, who are more highly susceptible, maybe two being marketed to, like if you drink this liquor, you're going to turn into a lion and own the bar you're in, no matter what your salary is, as long as you can afford a bottle of this, no matter how much it puts you out, you're going to be awesome, your friends are going to be awesome. And some people say like, I need to feel awesome right now and I'm willing to shell out $50 for that and I'm going to do it.

And who knows, maybe it does pump them up a little bit. Hopefully though, ideally, if it does pump them up, it pumps them up to a level where they realize that materialism isn't going to make them happy. What about a facelift that's neither an object nor, I guess the experience is having the new face. Currently, plastic surgery people are reported to have longer lasting happiness that hedonic adaptation takes way longer for plastic surgery than other, I guess, purchases. Right.

Interesting. Yeah. Well, going back to the whole lottery thing, I think everyone knows that all the studies generally point to, it's like a baseline happiness. Objects can make you happy in the moment, but with lottery winners, they did find out repeatedly that they generally go back to their baseline happiness from before they had the dough. Yeah. And I would say that's the case for most of these studies.

It's not about how happy you are in a moment or even in a given experience or holding an object, but eventually you're going to return to the schmuck that you are. You're either happy or you're not. Right. You know? Remember when we did our super stuff guide to happiness, there was that one of the founders of transhumanism who was saying like, we need to figure out how to ratchet up everybody's base level happiness.

Yeah. Like even with pills and things, right? Or genetic manipulation or whatever he's like, whatever it takes. That's one of the things that should be a pursuit of humanity is making everyone happier by nature. I don't like that. Yeah. I think you said the same thing in the stuff guy.

Yeah. Yeah. Because I think pathos is valuable. You know? Yeah. I'm pretty sure we made that point. Yeah. Seems like something you would say.

And I'd be like, yeah. Yeah. I think it's valuable to the human experience. I think it can do you a lot of good to be briefly depressed. Yeah. Well, here's an example of that. This the Great Recession. Since the Great Recession, teenagers have been reporting less desire for material objects

than the teenagers from a decade before. Right. But you're not talking about my smartphone, right? Everything but that. Right. Yeah. And they were scoring on materialism surveys as less materialistic than their counterparts a decade before.

And they were more likely to say things like, I want a job that benefits society. Yeah. They were becoming less materialistic and more pro-social. And they were saying that that's a direct result of this Great Recession. So lessons learned. Yeah. Your point that depression of one way or one sort or another can be beneficial. It's on a social societal level, that's true too, apparently.

I dig it. Happiness, objects or experiences, what do you think? I think objects. Super shiny golden sparkly objects. Yeah. Which is one last thing. I think you made a really good point, like wanting a guitar doesn't make you a materialist. Okay, good.

You don't have to reject all possessions to be a good, grounded, normal, happy person. Yeah. Listen to our podcast on Freegans. Yeah. And dumpster diving. I think those people are happy. I say yes. Yeah.

And go check out our Super Stuff Guide to Happiness. It was very, very good. It's on iTunes. It's available on iTunes. Is it still there? Search that, sure. Yeah. Just blow the dust off of it.

It's still relevant because everything stopped in 2009. It was so interesting too. Yeah. It was a good one. If you want to learn more about objects or experiences, you can type those words in the search bar at HowStuffWorks.com and it will bring up this article that we were working off of. And since I said search bar, it's time for Listener Mail.

All right, I'm going to call this grocery waste. We did our podcast on defridging and we got surprisingly a lot of responses from people. Yeah. I was kind of surprised. It really hit home. So this is from a former grocery store employee when he was in high school. He said, part of my job at the store was to find all the eggs, bread, and milk that had a sell-by date within the next three days.

And it's really terrible because sell-by dates are designed with some wiggle room just to make sure nothing is spoiling before the date on the carton. When I had the cart loaded up with perfectly good food, I had to throw the bread and eggs into the garbage compactor and pour all the milk down the drain, dozens of gallons a night. It's just like maddening, isn't it? I got with the local FFA teacher, whatever that is, and asked if all... Future Farmers of America. Oh, yeah?

Look at you. It's like 4-H. Oh, okay. Whatever that is. It's... I don't remember what the 4-H is, I can't remember. They asked if all this wasted food... I asked if all the wasted food could be used to slop the pigs that the students were raising.

And he said, that'd be a great idea. So I went to the manager of the grocery store, said we should do this and it might even be good PR for us. It turns out the grocery store got back partial store credit from their suppliers for expired food that they threw away. And here's the hitch. They would not get any credit if any of the expired food was put to any use. Isn't that awful?

Yes. Some suppliers would even refuse credit if they decided the store wasn't doing enough to prevent dumpster divers from retrieving food. What's worse, many foods that don't actually spoil for years and years, but they have arbitrarily short sell-by dates because they found that people don't trust foods that have an expiration date too far into the future. Do you remember? Didn't we talk about...

Oh, I did a brain stuff on water going bad and it's like there's no reason for it to have an expiration date. Oh yeah? Yeah. So he says, thus I spent one memorable evening throwaway throwing out hundreds of dollars worth of cheese. Oh man. That was a known danger of spoiling anytime soon.

Even asked if I could take some home and they said that that would be considered shoplifting. Wow. So I don't see food waste being addressed until it becomes a matter of public outrage on the level of sweatshop labor. There are just too many economic barriers in the way. That is from Todd from OKC. Thanks Todd. And that is just his store.

We heard from other people. Some stores have different policies where they can actually put some of that food to use but I don't think that's the norm. No. And we heard from another guy too who was fired because he got so tired of throwing stuff where he took a bunch of baguettes to a homeless shelter and they found out about it and he was fired because of it. Oh he did.

But he said he didn't regret it still this day. Good. Good for him. Yeah. Thanks Todd from OKC. I would say go thunder but go heat instead. If you want to get in touch with Chuck or me or Jerry you can send us a tweet. Our handle is S-Y-S-K podcast with the little at symbol ahead of that.

We're on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. Check us out there. You can check out our YouTube channel, Josh and Chuck. That's the name of it. You'll love it. You can also send us a regular old email stuffpodcast at discovery.com and join us at our home on the web. It is awesome.

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