Ways that improve your happiness:
Think about time
One of the chapters in Happy Money is all about buying time. So, everything you buy, think about how it’s going to affect your time. Not the product itself, but what you’re going to do with it later and that massively changes your decision-making. So, not to come back to TVs, but buying a TV, you think, “Oh. This is going to be great. I’m going to have friends over and we’re going to watch TV and the kids will be there. We’ll have family movie night.” It turns out, when you buy a TV, what you do is you watch it by yourself in a dark room. It’s not good for you. If you think about, “Wait. How am I actually going to use this TV? How will it actually change my time?” you might say, “Maybe I don’t want to get a TV.“
Those kinds of decisions, alone, are very important to think about, not your fantasy of what it’s going to do, but “How will this actually change the time I spend in the weeks going forward?” and a TV commits you to thousands of hours by yourself, and that is not good for our happiness. I use this in my own life.
Really think about everything you buy. If you want to buy a huge house, that’s great. If it’s adding a two-hour commute, that’s not great, and think about not just, “Oh. Commute’s fine. I can do a commute.“ Think about two hours every day for the rest of your life. Do you really want to add that to your time or do you want to stay in the house that you’re in? It’s really an important thing to think about.
“Make it a treat”
The idea is that the things that you really like a lot, stop. Stop it. So, if you love, every day, having the same coffee, don’t have it for a few days and, when you wait, and then you have it again, it’s going to be way more amazing than all of the ones that you would have had in the meantime.
The problem with that is, on any given day, it’s better to have a coffee than not, but if you wait three days and don’t have it, it’s going to be way better once you finally do. Interrupting our consumption is free. It actually saves you money and gets you more happiness out of the money spent. It’s like the best of all worlds, but we’re completely unable to do it, because we always want to watch the thing or eat the thing right now. It’s not “give it up forever.” It’s “give it up for short periods of time, and I promise you you’re going to love it even more when you come back to it.”
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