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You Can Buy Happiness - Can Money Buy Happiness? FutureIQ

4,762 views Wait, is this logic right? • Dec 27, 2024
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Slog Reference: How To Buy Happiness

Description

In this episode, we talk about how money can make you happy, but only if you spend it the right way. People often say money can't buy happiness, but that’s not true. It’s not about buying things like clothes or phones, but about spending money on fun experiences, like vacations or concerts. These experiences make us happier and last longer. We also discuss how spending money to make life easier like paying for good sleep or helping others can bring more joy. So, yes, money can buy happiness, but only if you spend it smartly!

More Videos For You:
How To Be Happy: https://youtu.be/reYUf2nkcQg?feature=shared
The Dollar Value: https://youtu.be/C-8gffw9_h4?feature=sharedalue

Hope you enjoyed FutureIQ by Navin Kabra and Shrikant Joshi. Do hit us up on Twitter:
@ngkabra http://twitter.com/ngkabra
@shrikant https://twitter.com/shrikant

Listen it on the podcast provider of your choice: https://tapthe.link/FutureIQRSS

Sources:
Experienced well-being rises with income: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2016976118
Buy Experiences Not Things: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/10/buy-experiences/381132/
Why are experiences better than things: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22369046/
Experiences aren't always better than things: https://forge.medium.com/why-buy-experiences-not-things-is-bad-advice-ba59d6bede7b
Happiness Activities Chart: https://x.com/NGKabra/status/1539122130297790466
List of happiness techniques ranked by effectiveness
https://x.com/emollick/status/1412591520813826050

00:00 Money Can Buy Happiness?
02:35 How To Spend Money Properly?
08:49 Best of Both worlds?
10:30 The Truth About Experiences
11:07 Other Ways To BUY Happiness
16:05 Being Rich Is Important?
17:37 Important Thing to Remember!

#futureiq #happiness #moneycanbuyhappiness

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How To Buy Happiness

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Transcript

you must have heard the phrase you can't buy happiness that's [ __ ] people who say that don't know how to spend their money okay or they don't have enough money so in this episode we are going to talk about how money can actually be used to buy happiness and this is proven by research as usual interesting there are of course some kind of people who uh for whom no amount of money is is able to buy happiness yes the research says that there are 20% people for whom they will not be happy no matter what but this episode is for the remaining 80% so are you in the 20% or 80% you'll have to
figure out which you will by the end of this episode but U coming back to the topic uh there was research that pointed out that Beyond a certain amount of wealth or money uh it didn't matter right so yes there was research by Daniel kman saying that in the US Beyond $75,000 per year okay money doesn't get you happiness that would be roughly equivalent to saying that in India if your income is beyond 15 lakhs then extra money doesn't make you happy this is not foreign exchange conversion right this is PPP you're talking about purchasing power parity correct that was the previous understanding which is that if you are poor getting money reduces your sadness your misery and increases
your happiness but once you go past a certain amount of money then money stops helping you turns out that that research was flawed there is new research much more detailed using much better techniques and what that proved is that there is no limit okay the more money you have the happiness does increase the only difference is that the amount of money needed huh to buy the same amount of Happiness goes up exponentially right ah so if you have more money you need more money to buy more happiness correct yeah in fact they plotted it on a graph and they saw that you know the graph looked like it is flattening out like this when they converted it to a semi log graph
then they saw that there's a straight line so increasing amount of money can still get you U small amounts of happiness so yes you can so the Delta is is small but significant I think if you look at the research what comes out is that the simple truth is that people don't know how to spend their money they spend their money on the wrong things and realize that it's not making them happy hold on go back on that what do you mean don't know how to spend people have ideas on how to spend how they want to spend their money and they do it well they do a very bad job of it right as in
you know they spend on Mercedes and and they spend on iPhones and those do not give you happiness except for a short amount of time iPhones I agree but Mercedes is a good car man that's because you don't have a Mercedes right once you get a Mercedes for 9 days you will enjoy it after that it'll be just oh just any other car I'm stuck in traffic damn it ouch that was true and it hurts what the research says is BU experiences not things Okay so spend your money on vacations concerts yeah music festivals things like that right makes sense Beach vacations makes sense makes sense yeah whereas clothes iPhone don't do that right because an experien
is forever things are temporary isn't don't you mean the other way around experiences are temporary they are momentary Things Are Forever they last not really right as in if you really think about it we adapt to new things so quickly that they stop giving us the pleasure after a while whereas an experience every once in a while you keep remembering your vacation and you say oh that was so nice you look at a photograph of your uh vacation and again oh that was so nice and so on right you can relive and experience as many times as you want you're right experiences are forever not just that but a thing the novelty wears off right whereas an
experience you can keep repeating right you buy the same iPhone phone it's not going to give you the same pleasure the second time whereas a Beach vacation every time you get the pleasure partly because iPhones don't really change from version to version so an old iPhone is the same as a new iPhone and yes I'm taking a dig at Apple here but I do agree with him on that there's also saying in marati n noas a new thing is new only for about N9 days a few more things right if there were some bad parts in an experience but so much of it was good right the bad parts are forgotten and you remember the good
parts that's true of most people 80% like I said right except for those 20% but bad parts of things they're like in your face every day right if your iPhone fingerprint sensor doesn't work very well every day you're reminded of that irritating thing yeah it's not easy to forget it absolutely true another thing is that and this is the research speaking okay not me seeing that anticipation of experiences is what gives you the most happiness right okay experience itself is okay right but planning your vacation thinking about it oh now it's just 3 weeks from now just two weeks from now that is so much fun right whereas yeah anticipation for things usually doesn't isn't that much fun it is irritating
it's like when is my Mercedes coming here when is my iPhone coming here so it is actually better to rent a Mercedes as many times as you want than buy a Mercedes you keep getting that experience over and over again sorry bad joke so you know suppose you're waiting in line for a concert it's still you feel good about it and you're talking to the people around you about the concert and the previous concert and how good the singer and so on right whereas if you're waiting in line for an iPhone you're like why is there a line right so another very interesting thing that the research tells us is that experiences are connected to our
identity who we see ourself as a person right rather than things and if you that didn't make sense to you let me explain I am yeah when you talk about your life what do you talk about you are going to talk about your experiences the things you did you are not primarily going to talk about the things you own yeah similarly think about others you want to know their experiences rather than what things they own right true yeah that makes sense and finally one more thing the research shows is that it is very easy to compare the things you have with the things someone else has and realize that your thing is not as good and so
now you are unhappy right whereas with experiences experiences are are unique you experience it differently from that person so the the comparisons are much more fuzzy and they're not really there right um so I'll give you a specific example of research right they asked people what would you prefer having a low salary Which is higher than your peers or having a high salary which is lower than your peers right and people find it difficult to decide which one is better right both have their advantages and disadvantages or compare that with the following situation people were asked do you prefer a 4-we vacation which is shorter than the six week vacation that your friends took versus a 2 we vacation
which is longer than the onee vacation your friends took pretty much anybody will say I prefer the 4-we vacation yeah right so see how in case of salary which is like a thing compare to Vacation which is an experience yeah longer vacation is always preferable man because there is no foro in your vacation compared to somebody else's vacation true true true true true true although I would still prefer a six we vacation rather than a four week vacation but then that's just me being greedy uh I'm now trying to think of whether there is a possibility to have a Best of Both words like best of experiences and best of what you want to do is tie a thing to an exper experience
right so when you go on a vacation and you buy a hat right now every time you wear that hat it reminds you of that vacation and makes you feel good right so try to convert your things to reminders of experiences that pretty much explains why souvenir shop exists absolutely absolutely and that's why I mean people do buy souvenirs even though it is like a very touristy thing to do right yeah and yeah fridge magnets they Ser l no purpose other than reminding you that you've had that experience which is perfect yeah uh so that's the best of both worlds so the worst of Both Worlds would be if your experience became sort of a thing
absolutely in fact when I said that experiences cannot be compared I'm sure some of you had started thinking of comparing experiences and what is happening is that marketers are trying to productize experiences right and the intention is very simple they do want you to compare your experience with that person's experience feel for more and then spend more money on that experiences right so marketers are trying to convert experiences into things that you can buy and with the specific measurement and so on so thingify experiences wow that's an interesting experience Es are good if you are buying them to experience them they are bad if you are buying them to try to impress someone else right that's
the difference yeah so treat experiences as experiences not as things that yeah for basically do it for the correct reason right all right so uh what we started off with saying buying happiness to buy happiness we need to buy experiences not things is what you're essentially coming down to so that's not the only thing that is one of the important big things but there are other ways where you can buy happiness okay researchers have made a list of activities based on a lot of research they did where the activity increases your happiness and it is easy to do right uh there's a list we have put it there but I went through that list the top items in that list and
I saw which ones of them you can actually buy so here are some examples right so one is that your happiness can increase if you help others if you are generous right so and this is easier to do if you have money if you have money you can go around being generous and that does increase your happiness Jeff Bezos Elon Musk are you listening well much better is McKenzie Bezos right she's like spending her money like crazy her money yes of course then another is that good sleep is one of the important things you can do to reduce your unhappiness reduce your stress and there what you can do is overspend on getting a good bed and good pillows
right that can make a big difference in your sleep quality good bed good pillows and good chair because you spend 16 hours of your life either sleeping or sitting in a chair and if the chairs are not comfortable you are screwing up your body right another thing you can do is enroll in an automatic savings plan right what happens is that slowly you are getting bunch of money put away for a raining day and that significantly reduces your stress you know something bad happens you're not stressed as to how am I going to pay for it right similarly by good health insurance a lot of these are important expenses and yeah in in a sense they are being used to buy
happiness and no and people don't do that right that not that many people who say you know what I should spend a lot of money on my bed rather they would spend on a Mercedes which doesn't make that much sense another thing you should do is spend money to reduce daily irritations like what spend money to reduce your commute oh yeah okay so spending money on higher rent but you have less commute and you will sign significantly improve your happiness again research shows that reducing your commute by half an hour is equivalent to a 15% raise okay oh okay another is spend money to Outsource boring work right things you hate doing can I Outsource some of my learning and some
of my weight loss to someone okay bad joke but I get what you mean another thing is understand the dollar value of your time right and whenever there is something which is stressful irritating just spend money to get rid of it as long as it is not too expensive yeah but that's the that's the nub there what what counts as too expensive is there like youve done an entire episode on it check it out we're linking it here right do check out the episode on the dollar value of your time because that has a lot of interesting ideas on how you can start thinking of the fact that time is indeed money another important thing to keep in mind
is that a lot of people get very stressed out in trying to earn money okay what they don't realize is that earning money doesn't make you happy spending money makes you happy especially when you're spending on the right kinds of experiences not things right um and okay you know there is some research showing that there is certain class of people some people for whom even spending money on things spending money to impress other people increases their happiness conspicuous consumption increases their happiness and sure those people should spend money on things right I I would call it the Delhi model of Happiness uh he doesn't mean it pejoratively he means it very genuinely in terms of the happiness you get think
of the happiness you get yeah exactly yeah so so what I'm saying is that the kind of person you are does matter for what you should spend your money on that is what I was about to ask you when you mentioned some kind of people were you mentioning these kind of people I mean there are a few people who need to impress others yeah and they should spend on money on things that impress others but most people are not in that category they should spend on experiences in a way you can think of these people as the that is the money they're spending to get that experience for themselves so it's not like they're spending on things they are spending on
the experience of impressing others exactly another very interesting research is again canaman did this which is that if at the age of 16 or 17 you were the kind of person for whom being rich was important right then you do need money to be happy okay that person is going to be unhappy if they don't earn enough money if they're not rich right whereas there's an entire other class of people who at that age say you know what being rich is not the most important thing and those people literally 20 years later if you study them you find out that they didn't care if they made money they're happy if they didn't make money I mean their happiness
is not related to money whereas the people for whom being rich was important at the age of 16 20 years later how much money they made did make a difference to whether they're happy or not would those be in the 20% that we talked about at the beginning of the episode no that 20% is different this 20% wanted to be rich and if they are rich they're happy if they're not rich they're not happy right so those people money does make them happy so yeah so for the 20% nothing makes them happy correct yeah for those 20 people I don't know what we can do to help them but we'll figure out some way to help them for sure
someday the point of the matter the Crux of the matter is money can indeed buy happiness for most people the things to remember are is that after a certain amount of money you need much much more money to buy the same amount of Happiness right yeah diminishing returns law of diminishing returns but if you buy experiences that is a much higher chance of making you happy and spend money to reduce stress and to to reduce boring work and to increase your enjoyment right most important spend money to help others that's how you buy happiness and if you want to understand what happiness is and how to be happy not just the money way but how to be
happy in general we've done an entire episode on it go check it out uh and we keep doing such stuff so if you like these comment subscribe etc etc you know the Spiel how it goes Shri Kant Naim future IQ