Stuffocation by James Wallman

Author:James Wallman [Wallman, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Consumerism, Environment, Malcolm Gladwell, Trends, Clutter, Innovation, Happiness
ISBN: 9781909979000
Google: kHwNnwEACAAJ
Amazon: 1909979007
Publisher: Crux Publishing
Published: 2013-12-06T18:03:56+00:00

To Do or to Have? That is No Longer in Question

There was a time, not so long ago, when you couldn’t say categorically whether it was better to choose experiences or material possessions, whether one or the other would more likely lead to happiness. Some thought it was obvious that experiences – like relationships, say, or cycling or dancing – were more meaningful and made you happier.

Others said if you thought that, you were buying the wrong things. After all, they said, getting new clothes or shoes or a handbag or a car always made them feel great. Stuff like that was key to their happiness. The sceptical observer would have considered the opinions of one or two or even a dozen of these people – and dismissed them, the same way she or he would have considered the anecdotal evidence of the minimalists. Perhaps one or the other was better. But, since there was no scientific proof, you could not say for sure whether experiences or material possessions were better.

What you could say, though, was that the virtuous circle of materialism that the captains of consciousness created was not as great as it had first seemed. Richard Easterlin made that clear in 1974, when he showed that higher income, above a certain point, did not lead to higher happiness. In the decades after, researchers noticed another truth: that more materialistic people tended to be less happy. That was interesting, but it created a new riddle, because no one knew which way the relationship worked.

Did being materialistic cause people to be less happy? Or, was it the other way round, that unhappiness made people more materialistic? Or, could it be, as Darby Saxbe suggested for the relationship between stress and clutter, bidirectional? Or, lastly, did neither cause the other, and were the two only loosely connected, in what scientists call a correlation? Understanding this relationship is not just an academic question. It is key, if you care about people’s happiness.

Then, in 2003, two psychologists, Tom Gilovich and Leaf van Boven, collaborated on a landmark study that answered this question. In their paper To Do or To Have? That is the Question, Gilovich and van Boven began with a simple query: “Do experiences make people happier than material possessions?”

To find out, the first thing they did was establish the difference between the two concepts. The simplest way to think about this, as we saw in the last chapter, is that an experience is something you do, and a material possession is something you have. In some cases, the difference is black and white: hosting friends for a barbecue, for instance, as opposed to a chair.

But, as you may have already realized, there is also a lot of grey area. Most objects provide some sort of experience. Even a chair provides you with a, hopefully comfortable, experience of sitting. There are objects even more closely associated with the experiences they provide. So how do you count those? Is, for instance, a pair

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