Rational consumption: the power of novelty and the buying of experience

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

With the help of a small hack, you can completely satisfy your craving for pleasant sensations, while avoiding drowning in materialism.

It would seem that a person is such a complex creature, with reason, intelligence, social. In practice, if you dig a little deeper, it turns out that something quite obvious to anyone who recognizes evolution becomes clear: the most ancient mechanisms are the basis for all the variety of feelings, emotions and sensations that we experience every second now, in the modern developed world.

Take the same consumption. Excessive, unreasonable consumption imposed by the modern economy. We will talk about how to deceive the desire for possession of things, while minimizing the negative effect both for the wallet and for the psyche.

So, there are two points:

1. To satisfy your internal consumer, it is worth replacing expensive large purchases with more frequent, but small ones.
2. Shopping for things should be replaced with the purchase of a unique experience.

Everything we possess loses its value over time. This is in our nature and is the basis for fundamental questions related to our behavior.

Striving for new and better leads to the search for diversity. This works even if the relationship with the person is replaced by the relationship to things. Just as we get used to and gradually lose passion for a partner, we lose passion for things. Even if you have the best things, they become boring. In search of a dose of the hormone of happiness, we are looking for new positive sensations, and getting something new just gives what we are looking for. Here at our service all the variety of goods. Moreover, following the same principle, it is the novelty of the thing that comes first.

That is, a diamond ring donated will cause short-term heightened joy due to the size of the stone, and a slightly smaller diamond ring will cause slightly less short-term joy. However, in the long run, both rings will feel exactly the same. More precisely, their absence - the ring is already familiar to you, you wear it and do not notice.

It is not the price that is decisive, but the novelty of the thing. Use this to the advantage of your wallet.

The second thesis follows from the difference in our perception of material objects and something immaterial. We are talking about a new experience, new sensations. This topic is much more interesting, because it implies all the same lovely sensations as when unboxing your new iPhone, but only without having to buy another pointless toy.

The thing is static in its essence, and it is next to you, constantly. She will inevitably get bored. The joy of possession is slowly fading away - the thing is already familiar to you.

A unique one-off new experience - something that once gives you incredible sensations. The first jump with a parachute will feel much stronger than a ride in a Ferrari. Calculate how many new things you can experience for the amount you could spend buying a Ferrari. Now translate this according to some of your internal rate into units of happiness. Concerts of all your favorite bands, traveling around the world - there are dozens and hundreds of ways to get a new unique experience, and this experience will give a mad dose of happiness at the moment of receiving, as well as every time you refer to it through memory. Experience does not require closet space, does not break, does not need to be serviced, vacuumed or cleaned. Yes, and it seems that you don't need to pay for the rent of the experience storage in your head either.