Money Can’t Buy You Happiness & Other Bullsh*t We Wish Was True.

People who say Money can’t buy Happiness, have apparently never used Money. Seriously.

Yes – that’s me in the photo, on the left, trying to act casual whilst lounging on the back of a Superyacht – Say Super-What?! Occasionally life takes a turn for the ridiculous and if you are lucky enough to be on the back of that horse I say, Giddy-Up! Anyway – long story short. Despite the proclamations of the financially mediocre, it seems money can in fact buy A LOT of stuff that makes us happy. It can buy you achingly thin slices of carpaccio dusted with shavings of black truffle. Freshly caught lobsters, brought to the table half dressed and coated with the fresh slick of melted butter. Shots of tequila like toffee and wine that tastes like a tall glass of heaven. It can mean never having to clear your own plate, or make your own bed or pour your own rose. It basically allows you to be merely an eyebrow raise away from someone doing, getting or finding whatever it is you want in that exact moment in time. I am not going to lie – it is fucking awesome.

That said, giant inflatable swans and $900 cognac aside, there is a little more to the math than $$$$ = 🙂 . Which is lucky – because 7 days later, the only thing super left in my life is the market. It’s Chateau-Latour-No-More and back to the bog-standard-Beaujolais. So, in the interest of extending said happiness for as long as possible, I turned to the experts to see how we can best enjoy the fruits of our labour and get the most happiness bang for our buck.

The general premise is that once our basic needs are met (food, water and just enough grooming not to scare people), the relationship between income and happiness is pretty minimal (Howell & Howell 2008). Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton, who co-wrote ‘Happy Money – The Science of Smarter Spending’ phrased it slightly differently: “If you think money can’t buy you happiness, it just means you are not spending it right.” Their findings, plus countless other clever research, make a pretty persuasive case that – Money Can Buy Your Happiness – but only if you:

LIMIT YOUR ACCESS: ‘Abundance it turns out is the enemy of appreciation,’ which will come as little surprise to those of us with wardrobes that are a testament to the oft-told lie that we have ‘nothing to wear.’ We do – we are just bored of all the stuff we already have. Turns out our brains adaptive power is pretty efficient, rapidly adjusting to what it senses – the boffins refer to this as ‘Hedonic Adaptation’. Which explains why lottery winners are no happier on the other side of their million-dollar payouts. The biggest mansion ends up just being a regular house once you live there long enough. Essentially, rich becomes the new normal and our brains simply readjust to our baseline level of happiness. So, if you were a stroppy cow before the big win, chances are, you still will be a year or so down the track. The advice here is to limit the good stuff so it doesn’t lose its lustre. Treat yourself to a fancy dinner or a special purchase once a month instead of making it standard procedure.

MAXIMISE THE ANTICIPATION FACTOR: Anticipation is a five-syllabled wonder as it turns out. Much of our joy stems from this looking-forward-to component. In fact, our anticipation of an event or a purchase increases our happiness significantly more, than the actual event or purchase itself. This delayed gratification can be made even sweeter if we can ‘Pay Now and Consume Later’. By pre-paying for something (like a holiday) which you will enjoy at a later date, you seperate the purchase from the pain and trick the brain in to feeling the end result is essentially free. It’s why the consumption culture most of us live in (with credit cards and after pay seducing you to buy now and pay later) ends up causing us to overspend and overstress.

SPEND MONEY TO BUY TIME: Time is the new money, so spending money on time-saving initiatives is encouraged. This might mean outsourcing the domestic tedium of household chores or getting an Uber to work (but probably not an Uber to everywhere like my family seems to insist on doing). The perception of what Dunn and Norton describe as ‘time affluence’ is even present when people spend their time to help others. Volunteering our time makes us feel we have time to ‘spare’, which in a world dominated by ‘busy’ is a luxury right there. They also urge us to dial down on the least happy uses of time – commuting to work and television. My daily commute is about 12 steps from my bed to my desk so I respectfully request that I am allowed to watch as many damn shows as I like!

BUY MORE EXPERIENCES & LESS STUFF: I have never been a fan of just accumulating more crap and would happily spend my last dollar on a plane ticket so this one resonates loud and clear. This is at the absolute core of why most of us are not happy and why, once again, our brains adaptive power is to blame. You really want a new pair of shoes and you are fairly confident that when you get them you will be happy. So, you buy the shoes. They are nice. A few days/weeks/months down the track you spot another pair. If only you could buy this pair you would be happy. And you are – for a bit – until you aren’t anymore . And so on, and so on until you have 25 pairs of shoes but still complain you have nothing to wear. Experential purchases (such as holidays or tickets to a show) are different and have been proven to make for more enduring happiness. One reason is our brains don’t adapt as successfully to experiences, plus there is the bookend benefits of both the anticipation and the aftermath. With the passage of time our memory of an event or a holiday takes on an even greater lustre. Plus we usually do this stuff with the people we love and connection is at the core of happiness and life’s meaning.

GIVE IT AWAY (or better yet share it): Ironically one of the best things we can do with money to make us happier is to give it away. Turns out giving makes us feel good and the results are visible even on a neural level. It makes little difference how much you give but you can supersize the benefits by spending it on shared experiences. Nobody likes an Ebenezer Scrooge and Dinner for 2 is way more fun than a sad sack table for 1.

So, that’s the secret – Don’t be greedy, wait patiently, outsource, buy less, do more and share the love. That way you can still be happy – even if you are a few friends short of a super yacht.

This Get Happier Post is brought to you by someone who knows that money is not the answer, but who would be in a better position to field questions from her beach house in the Bahamas.