Re-think your Accumulation

Articles and arguments about the value you get when you spend your money on experiences versus objects have proliferated over the last decade, and I wish as a society we could take this truism to heart.  A disclaimer up front: my wife and I are both aspirational travel junkies, and even though we've been more stationary than normal for the last few years, we're already sold on the general concept of marshaling our extra resources towards big vacations, rather than big ticket purchases.

With that being said, I'll present the thrust of the argument: when you buy things, your enjoyment diminishes with time.  When you buy experiences, your enjoyment grows with time.  QED.  Not convinced?  Here's a more thorough elaboration.

Point 1: "Stuff" never lasts forever.  It breaks down.  Inevitably, the longer you own it, the worse it will work, and the less successfully it will be able to fulfill whatever desire you were trying to satisfy when you bought it in the first place.  In many cases, particularly with technology, these products have designed obsolescence - the companies build them such that they break or dramatically decrease in function after a certain amount of time.  The incentive on the manufacturer's end is natural - any company that makes a product that lasts forever will eventually put itself out of business once everyone owns the product.  All businesses want you to repeatedly give them your money, and the only way to do that if you manufacture things is either to have those things break (necessitating replacement) or to create "better" versions of the product that will drive a desire for replacement, even when it isn't necessary.  Which leads me to

Point 2: We always re-calibrate our expectations.  You buy a new product.  It's shiny.  It's fancy.  It makes some task simpler or allows you to do cool things.  You're happy... until after a few weeks the new product is just part of your normal routine and fades into the background of your expectation of the experience of life.  We constantly adjust the bar for happiness for ourselves, so that material advancement doesn't make us happier - it's makes us need more things to feel the same amount of happiness we already had before.  Before Keurig machines, everyone made coffee by grinding beans and putting it through a percolator or french press.  They didn't feel like this was a terrible burden - it's just what you did to get coffee.  After people adopted Keurigs, they were amazed at how much time they saved, until they got used to it and took it for granted.  Then for those people whose machines broke and had to revert to the "old" way of making coffee, the process was excruciatingly inconvenient because their expectations had been shifted.  We aren't objective analysts.  Not even close.  The same task (making coffee with a percolator) that didn't make them unhappy before now makes them miserable.  That's what you're paying your hard earned dollars for.

Point 3: Memories gain in value. When you pay for experiences, even experiences that are terrifying or unpleasant in other ways at the time, you get to keep the memories.  As time passes, even memories of experiences that were initially unpleasant become valuable - as funny or exciting stories, as life experiences that make you a more interesting person, as bases of knowledge that create empathy and understanding with a wider range of human life.

Simply put, buying stuff sometimes satisfies a short term addiction, but will inevitably make your future less pleasant.  Buying experiences can make you happy now, and will be exponentially more valuable in the years that follow.

And now the mandatory travel photo that must accompany a post such as this: