Spending doesn’t make you happy. Actually the opposite is true. If spending money has become a habit then it will always be unfulfilling.
That’s because if you are spending to try and make yourself feel better, the dopamine hit (the brain chemical that gives you the pleasure feeling) is released in your brain in ANTICIPATION of spending money and not the purchases itself.
It’s the reason habitual shoppers often feel empty when they’re back at home with their goods. Under-whelmed and full of remorse and regret.
There’s another reason why the consumerist lifestyle is not good for us. Buying stuff leads to clutter. And clutter makes us unhappy. This cycles builds until it reaches a crescendo until BAM! We take action. I’m talking about the de-clutter.
We sort through all the stuff we bough that we don’t want. Some of it un-worn or un-used. We might be able to re-sell it (for a tiny fraction of what we paid for it) if we can face the pain of the loss and over come our own endowment effect (where we value something we own more than the market does) or hassle of getting rid of it. If not it’s the charity shop or the tip. Money down the drains.
Worse still are storage solutions: plastic boxes and the like to keep all stuff that we now consider clutter.
What we need is a lesson from a minimalist. He packed everything he owned into boxes. Everything. He only took it out when he needed it. After three months he got rid of everything he hadn’t used.
Another chose only 100 items and got rid of the rest. That’s quite extreme but it’s a good paper exercise. Give it a try.
Think how much less stuff we’d need (and how much space we’d have) if we could only have 100 items.