Here's your money briefing for Thursday, May 22nd. I'm Imani Moise for The Wall Street Journal. We've all been there. It's easy to convince yourself that that shiny new gadget, living room upgrade, or new car with that fresh leather smell is technically an investment when you first buy them. But odds are you'll be eyeing a new version long before you get your money's worth. That's the treadmill where we're just constantly chasing our tails looking for the next
thing to make us happy. That's fine if you can afford it, but unfortunately the reality of the world is that most of us have budget constraints. This cycle of consumption, buying, replacing, and then buying again, can take a real toll on our wallets. So how do we break free? We'll talk with Wall Street Journal contributor Jeff Gallick about how to trick your brain into being happy with what you already have. That's after the break.
Buying new things makes us happy but for how long? Research shows that we tend to get bored with our things before they actually need to be replaced. A recent Wall Street Journal article outlined ways to beat boredom, boost happiness, and save money along the way. The writer of that article, Jeff Gallick, joins me to explain.
Jeff, let me start with a confession. I bought a couch during the pandemic that I loved. It was plush, it was stylish, it made my living room feel like a hotel lobby. But now I barely notice it. And when I do, it feels kind of... blah. What's going on in our brains when that shift happens? So you're not alone in this situation. This is what we typically call hedonic adaptation. Some people call it satiation. Some people call it habituation. Others just call it boredom.
What you're seeing is that most products that we want to buy that are enjoyable, they start out that way.
But unfortunately, our brain tends to reduce that amount of enjoyment as we continue consuming or being exposed to any product that we might have. So an example I always like to give is a simple one. If you take a bite of pizza, it's delicious. But by the 10th or 20th bite, it's just pizza at that point it doesn't really have the same value the same utility it's the same thing that's going on with your
So if this feeling of boredom with our stuff is natural and pretty much universal, why should we resist it? What does it mean for our wallets and what's the cost of constantly chasing that sense of newness? yeah there's a phenomenon called the hedonic treadmill and it's this idea that every time we buy something as we just said it becomes less enjoyable with time and then what we're forced to do to regain that initial high level of enjoyment is to buy the next new flashy thing
And then that once again succumbs to hedonic adaptation or hedonic decline. And then we again have to buy that new thing. And so that's the treadmill where we're just constantly chasing our tails, looking for the next thing to make us happy. That's fine if you can afford it, but unfortunately the reality of the world is that most of us have budget constraints.
And certainly the more we consume, the more environmental impact that has. So there's a real negative effect on us as individuals from a financial perspective and on our planet from an environmental perspective. So now let's talk about solutions. How can I keep my brain happy without succumbing to the urge to buy a new cow? There's a few things you can do. So the easiest is to think about what is your...
Is it just the thing that you sit on in your living room or wherever you have it? Or is it also the accessories that happen to be on that couch, like your throw pillows or your blankets or whatever else you might be keeping there? replacing a couch is expensive and costly. Replacing the covers on your throw pillows could be a few dollars or a couple dozen dollars. And that small change might be just enough to revitalize the enjoyment that you get from that couch.
So changing some of the accessories that go with it could be enough to reset that level of enjoyment in a much more financially and environmentally friendly way. In your story, you also talk about how you don't necessarily need to buy something in order to trick your brain into getting more enjoyment out of it. How does that work?
There's a couple of ways we can do this, but I think the one you're talking about is this idea of just rearranging something. There's a study, not my own, that was done that looked at how novelty is perceived in experience when the core features of it are just merely rearranged or reorganized. So a real world example of that might be if you look at your closet and you're tired of your wardrobe.
Okay, you could go buy new clothing. That's an option, but of course, as we said, that's expensive. Or you could literally just rearrange how you organize your closet. Put your shirts where your pants usually are, put your pants where you keep your socks, and so on and so forth. And merely that act of moving things around. makes the entire set of clothing that you have feel new, even though nothing has actually changed.
And that also reminds me of this social media trend that I've seen where people aren't just rearranging things, they're changing how they engage with those things. For example, wearing your pants as a top or a blouse as a skirt. Can you talk a little bit about how engaging with things in a new way can also give you that sense of novelty?
Yeah, absolutely. One of my favorite studies that I've read about, again, not my own here, is about consuming food. So popcorn in this example. Most of us will use our fingers to eat popcorn. But in this study, they asked people to eat popcorn with chopsticks. Most of us don't eat popcorn with chopsticks. And it turns out your enjoyment lingers for more. So if you change the way you're consuming something to something that's unexpected, that will keep happiness with that popcorn.
lasting longer and that's true of anything we do so i can't speak to the fashion choice of using your pants as a shirt or a top but i can certainly say that that would be a new way to reconsume the exact same thing you have without being forced to buy something else That's what we're trying to avoid here. Okay, so if someone out there is listening and they're thinking,
that they're really feeling this itch to buy something new. What's one quick thing that they can do to try to revive joy in what they already own? Instead of saying, I don't have any shirts that I like, is there a way you can reuse one of your shirts, as you pointed out, in a novel way? You could also think about...
Taking that product and changing it in some way I mean you can dye your clothing to be a different color and that doesn't require a new purchase It's simply making a superficial change to the existing items you have so just like being creative with new uses for existing products is surprisingly effective at not just reducing financial burden, but increasing happiness, which is kind of what I'm mostly at.
But modifying things you already have can also be expensive. Going back to the example of my couch, getting it reupholstered would probably cost more than getting a new one. Is there a rule of thumb to help you decide when it's better to refresh or replace? The answer to that is incredibly idiosyncratic to the situation we're talking about. So like reupholstering a couch, I agree with you. That can be more costly than buying a new couch.
And so you have to weigh that financial decision for yourself. Is that the appropriate thing for you to do? To buy a pack of dye to change a white shirt to a red shirt is pretty costless. How much does dye cost? A couple of dollars. So that might be an easy one to do that'll maintain the happiness. But if the financial burden is high, then sure, that's probably not a reasonable solution.
So in the article, I also talk about a paint job for your car. That can be hundreds or thousands of dollars. That's cheaper than tens of thousands of dollars to replace a car. But obviously, that's a decision you might want to take a little more time.
So I would scale the time you spend with the cost of the decision that you're facing. A new shirt doesn't have to be expensive. A new car is almost certainly going to be expensive. I'd take a lot more time on the expensive purchase than I would on the less. That's WSJ contributor Jeff Gallick. And that's it for your Money Briefing. This episode was produced by Ariana Asparu with supervising producer Melanie Roy. I'm Imani Moise for The Wall Street Journal. Thanks for listening.