Welcome to you stuff you should know from House stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, Jerry's here, and uh, stuff you should know. We've got the eighteen Yeah in the house, not the Chuck Holograham. It's not guest producers mad or Noel. It's not pocket Josh, not pocket Josh, although I did have a pocket Josh on me. So he's here, He's always here. That's a voodoo doll. No, it's not. It's clearly a voodoo doll. That's my hair. I recognize. How's that back pain treating you? Hurt so bad? Uh? How's it going pretty good except for the back pain. Well, let me just massize your little pocket Josh. I think the touch me, Chuck. I'm excited about this one. Our ongoing series on happiness. Yeah, we've covered it with the Bhutan Yeah, a Gross National Happiness, and then we did our audiobook All about Happiness, super Stuff Guide to Happiness, and all that was I guess a hold over from was it right before or right after the financial global financial collapse? M I feel like it was sort of in the midst of okay, because I think what it was was the world got cocky, especially the developed world. Sure like, hey, things are going so well, We're all rich, everybody's pretty happy. We're we're at war with not one but two countries at once. Look at us, go um, let's start talking about happiness and what makes us happy. Let's start blogs about how we try to be happy and enter it in once a day every day and then get a book deal out of it. Let's just think about happiness, happiness, happiness, happiness. Well, a few years on, there's been some changes over time. Everybody said, people don't talk about happiness anymore. Like there is a little while where there was a period basically from my impression about two thousand five to two thousand nine, where you could get substantial grants to conduct research into the nature of happiness, to quantify happiness, what makes people happy, what makes people unhappy, how to make people happier? Um. And there was an offshoot of psychology called positive psychology that we talked about, the super stub guided happiness that said, we're good at diagnosing um maladies, which physical maladies, no like problems, psychological problems, but we're terrible at um how to make people happier. So hence now we're going to have something called positive psychology, which appears to have fallen by the wayside um. Yeah, it's all negative psychology. Well, psychology itself as a field is under tremendous amount of attack, and positive psychology. I think they gave the chance to retreat. They're like, look, you're you're pretty easy target. You should probably go. This isn't even a real thing. I don't know. Maybe it was a valiant attempt. I think it just came in at the wrong time. But the the the point is, if you look up happiness now, you will notice, like just about everything cuts off. In two thousand nine, I did notice that actually American doesn't care about being happy anymore, or maybe they just hanging on studied and learned everything they need to know, and we're like, all right, here we are. Well, you know what, it's funny that you say that, because if that's true and you're you could be right, that represents them possibly the shortest amount of time any subject has ever been studied. No, really, because it started and what makes people happy? And maybe I think two thousand three I read I read a study, and it was about how this was one of the first studies to ever try to figure out what makes people happy. So then this field of study existed from like two thousand three to two thousand nine, and they were saying that the reason that this would be the first studies because it's been so accepted for so many years ever since. Hume the philosopher Hume, David Hume, Robert Hume, the Scottish philosopher is one of my favorites. Just if you're on Jeopardy, you could just say hum hum, We'll go with hum um. Who is hum if you're on Jeopardy he was the Scottish philosopher. No, I'm just had to phrase it, Okay, I'm just teasing um, he said. He was one of the first people to mention this concept of what makes people happy insofar as what we're talking about today, which is does an object make you happier? Or does an experience make you happier? Yeah, I think they've done like the lottery studies before two thousand four, like if lottery winners, But um, that's a pretty specialized study. Yes, So to my point is to try to honify happiness, that kind of thing and really investigated. But it started in the early two thousands, that ended by the mid two thousand, the first decade of the tea. Well, while I'm reading all these studies, I'm looking oh seven oh eight oh four, Yeah, very keen observation, and I can't quite figure out. I mean, obviously, I think the Great Recession is almost entirely responsible for that falling to the wayside. But if you look still today, there's there are still related studies. It's just not happiness studies. Yeah, I found when I was reading this, I disagreed with a lot of these findings and studies. They didn't seem fully fleshed out, did they. Well, for instance, we'll go ahead and start with this supposed fact. Researchers have done some studying and they have pinned down how long a material object can will make you happy, and they say between six and twelve weeks, then you get bored with it. Basically, I just don't know about that because it wholly to me, it wholly depends on what the object is. That's something that gives you ongoing pleasure, like a guitar, let's say, yeah, because that is also an experience an object. But like I will love my guitars until I die because I play them and enjoy it and play them with my friends. You know. Yeah, And what you're talking about the gift that keeps giving right exactly, that's called um uh, active engagement. It is a It is a purchase. And when we say purchase, we're not talking about necessarily just an object, which we'll talk about in a little bit. You can also you purchase experiences as well. In fact, they say that's the way to go, right. So there's a happiness purchase, is what we're saying. And your guitar that you purchased, that's an object, but you purchased it, but it's making you happy, you know, over and over and over again. The reason why is because you become actively engaged in an active engagement in anything that is positive or that makes you happy can continue to make you happy for longer than say another object that doesn't actively engage you, Like a pair of shoes that you wanted really really bad and then got and then like sit in your closets, you don't wear them anymore because after well, you may still wear them, but you're wearing them as shoes. You're not wearing them like I'm I'm the King of Rotterdamn here and check out my shoes. You know that that kind of thing that lacks active engagement, that lacks social interaction, and that lacks exercise. And those are the three, the big three things that you can buy objects wise that kind of sit outside of that six to twelve week Um, happiness adaptation is what it's called. Um. So, yeah, you kind of nailed it right there with the guitar. It's not just guitar. Video games are another good example. Yeah, like you buy your PS three and you may get sick of some of the games, but they're always releasing new games, right. Um, if you bought a um, a language module, you learn a language or something, you know, I mean like it's you're something that actively engage you, something that that you use for exercise, or something that leads to social interaction. Are the three object types that make you happier longer? Well, that makes me feel better than and um the whole six or twelve weeks though, whether that's a an accurate number not the chuck um. Remember we talked about the hedonic treadmill. It's evidence of the hedonic treadmill. That's just a thing called um hedonic adaptation, and that is that something that makes you happy isn't gonna make you happy forever. Something you've purchased pretty much, whatever it is, you're going to eventually subsume it into your everyday life. You're gonna end up taking it for granted, basically, is another way to put it. How long, how short that happens, or how long that happens is um. It definitely differs depending on the type, and we'll talk about the type in the minute. But what people end up getting on once once an object stop making stops making them happy, they still want to be happy. So they end up on the hedonic treadmill and buy another pair of shoes, and then another, and then another and then another. And you end up just trying to keep pace, buying all this stuff, accumulating all of this material stuff, and it's just kind of keeping you at a a steady pace of happiness without any kind of real enrichment. And that's the hedonic treadmill. Yeah, and that's materialism UM. Which they've done studies on materialism. There was one by these dudes Chaplain and John in two thousand seven where they linked it to low self esteem generally from childhood, Like you're sort of always trying to gain your self esteem through material objects. Uh. They've linked it to narcissism. Yeah, people who try to build themselves like up through having you know, fancy things and showing them off. Yeah. And there's the I mean, that's that is a real um technique that people use to establish their identities, established their worth to others. And it's a ironically, it's a cheap and easy way to do it. It may be very expensive dollar wise, but you don't have to put a tremendous amount of thought or effort into it. You just go by the most expensive, most obvious, uh obviously expensive item you can and wear it out and broadcast it and get your sense of self worth from that. So it is very shallow thing materialism. I think everybody kind of knows that intuitively, but it's been studied, you know, like it it is linked to all these kind of um personality disorders. There's a guy named Russ Belk who's a marketing researcher, and he was the first one to really research materialism on the Belk Chain of Stars, I wonder, and he uh, he found it to be a character trait marked by envy, non generosity, and possessiveness. Yeah, materialism is so hard to define for me though, because it's like a guitar is a material object and a nice guitar is. I don't know. I definitely not materialistic, I don't think, but I want a nice guitar because it sounds awesome, it looks cool. But I think that that's why like Belk and Chaplain and John went to the trouble of like kind of investigating it. It's like, do you do you have like a clinically flawed personality? Uh, that's based on your desire for material objects. Yeah, but see that, like it's all personal. Like I might think it's material to go out and buy a pair of eight hundred dollar shoes, but the person might get a lot of joy out of those shoes, and say, I think it's stupid to go pay a thousand dollars for a guitar. You know, Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know what I'm saying. You don't know. I mean, I think you raise a good point, and it's it's valid because there that the research isn't that deep. I mean, you could be exactly right, and I think it's subject yes. And not only is this whole you know, the finding subjective, the reportings are subjective to Like there's a study in in San Francisco, UM in two thousand nine. The last year that happiness was ever studied, the last year of happiness mattered m and basically this uh, this group had a hundred and fifty four college students, it's pretty small fill out a survey. They said that we want you to pick um. We want you to write down a little bit about an object that you purchased to make you happy in the last three months, or an experience that made you happy in the last three months that you purchased. Yes, which is important to distinguish that, right, because you think you're gonna have free experiences too, you can, yeah, and we'll get to that. But the college students um self reported that the at the time of the purchase, the experiences made them happier, and the happiness lasted longer than the ones who reported an object made them happy. Yeah. I mean every study pretty much confirms experiences over material objects. Yes. My point is it was self reported, so it's subjective right out of the gate, and that's the problem with studying things like happiness. It's it's an emotion which is subjective. And then it was also a small sample of college students, um, homogeneous group and what do they know? Not they'ren't money for anything now there, But there's this UM acronym for college for studies like that. It's weird. It's Western educated, uh something rich and democratic. Yeah, I can't remember what the eye but weird it's it's and it's saying like there's a lot of studies out there that people rely on that are weird that the population sample are like eighteen to twenty one year old, right, you know, fairly well off western kids, right, Like, what does that really tell us? Yeah? Yeah, so um, this is an example of that. I saw another study that thought was interesting. As far as objects go, um, Like, like we said, across the board, it's they pretty much have said experiences purchased or free mean more to someone in the long run than an object. But um, when it comes to spending on objects, this one study did find that spending on others across the board, even on an object, is brings more happiness than spending on yourself for an object. Yeah. Um, And in fact, uh, people were assigned to spend money and one of these studies, and they experienced greater happiness. And people assigned to spend money on themselves, like here's a hundred dollars go by yourself something nice, or here's a hundred bucks go by someone else something nice. People were happier that bought something for someone else, which was interesting. And that's you're saying, that's like the case with objects and experiences as well. I think that was just objects, but I would say it probably holds true for experience, Like you takes someone out to dinner, you feel good about it. So what you what you have there is you're spending on another person. It's there. It's fostering social interaction, which is another key huge and it's an experience. Yeah, pretty much like you couldn't get happier than that. Yeah, the social thing is kind of the key to all of this, they say, because generally your experience happiness is usually not alone, like you'll go to a concert with someone or to dinner with someone. But um, but not always right and not always is a pretty good little buzz term for this part of the podcast, because um, there's also research that shows that objects can bring more happiness than experiences, depending on the experience. Like for a long time, the literature just basically said experiences make you happier than objects. It's exactly. And these researchers found that um a an unhappy experience, Yeah, especially one that was meant to be happy. Like let's say you want on a cruise or you went on a vacation and it just sucked like that. That compared to an object that's supposed to make you happy, that object is gonna beat that experience and you're gonna have that bad memory of the experience longer too. Yeah. You know what else I think I haven't seen pointed out is you can't you can't get your money back on a bad dinner and play. Yeah, that's true. But if you get an object, you know, like this thinks you can usually return that unless you took a bite out of it already. Yeah, this is a good way to say it. But you can't, you know what I'm saying, Like you take a vacation that ends up being a disaster, I would be more upset about that because it's like you've lost your money, You're gonna have this bad memory. But if you buy some stupid thing. You can like just resell it or on Craig Lester send it back, right. And um, so that's that's one distinction between materials, I guess objects and experiences. Yeah. Um, and we should give a shout out to start here. Who start sart Oh? Yeah, John Paul Sartra, the philosopher um who is kind of credited with really introducing this concept or codifying it into the mainstream. To start, there were three paths to happiness, are three types of happiness. There was um, having, doing and being and being we're not even talking about in this one, but having and doing, um, materialism and experientialism um start in the fifties. I think, uh just kind of introduce us into the literature, and that ultimately is what kicked off the this kind of study into which one is better, which one makes you happier? Yeah? And I like how you you wrote this, right. I like how you point out about Buddhism, how they feel that material objects actually get in the way of happiness. Not only may they not bring you happiness, but they will prevent it. Sure. And it's not just Buddhism, it's UM for centuries. It's just basically been accepted that an object is less desirable if you're seeking happiness than an experience, and it's that's why the researchers were saying, Um, you know, we're one of the first studies to to conduct and an investigation into this because it's just been generally accepted that that's the case, but no one knew exactly why. So now we've kind of reached the why parts. And one of the things you said is, um, you can't take an experience back. All right, hold on to that thought. Let's take a quick message break and we'll get back with the why. Chuck. I don't know if you've heard this or not, but the cost of a stamp just went up to cents, but not if you have stamps dot Com. Buddy, Oh yeah, yeah. With stamps dot Com you'll pay less for postage than you would at the post office for first class mail, Priority Priority Express mail packages and more. Well, buddy, it's awesome and convenient, super easy to use with stamps dot Com and buy and print discounted stamps, shipping labels, and more using your own printer and computer right there at home. And not only will you save money with stamps dot Com, chuckers by not paying full price for postage. You'll say valuable time to stamps dot Com always keeps the rates up to date, so you'll get the exact postage you need every time, right from your desk. And here's the best part, you may never have to go to the post office again. That sounds good to me. So right now, we have a very special offer. You can use our promo code stuff for a no risk trial plus a hundred and ten dollar bonus offer which includes a digital scale and up to fifty free postage. That's right, so don't wait. Go to stamps dot com before you do anything else. Click on the microphone at the top of the homepage and type an S t U F F that Stamps dot Com enter stuff. Okay, So why well, um, you mentioned that objects. Uh, you can take an object back, you can't take an experience back. One of the big differences that researchers came up with is that with experiences you can because you can't take them back. They're kind of esoteric. They're also more subject to revision. Right, so you can you can think back to an experience and over time, but stopped pump it up, alter it slightly, um, make it more meaningful, whatever. Um, you're just kind of adding to it. You remember when we did that thing on memory, We research memory, and it's like every time you bring up memory, you kind of add to it. When you store it away, it's different, it's altered in one way. Well, what you're remembering an experience, you're not remembering an object because you have the object in your hand and you're shaking it and you're like, why don't you make me happy anymore? What happened to you? I wanted this this object so bad, and you know, and and now it's whatever. And the reason why is because it's part of your present, and experience is part of your past. It can be your immediate pastor just past whatever, and that is subject to revisionism, which is one of the reasons why they think that when you especially self report what makes you happier, you're probably going to go with an experience. Yeah, and I'm kind of that way. I think a lot of people, even with bad experiences, later on you might think, uh, oh, you know it was bad at the time, but we also we laugh about it now, or you know, how you can reframe bad experiences or if you're like super on the ball. In the moment, you can say, you know, maybe we'll be laughing at this in ten minutes, like you know, some terrible vacation, Like I have fun memories about bad experiences, and I don't think it's revisionism. I think it's uh, just time. And maybe at the time you're not looking at the positives, you know, right, because your genes are expressing all sorts of horrific things that are making you so mad, you know. Um, But once the genes go back to normal, Yeah, things kind of take on a different cast. Like, for instance, Uh, we went on a big group camping trip like five or six years ago, a bunch of us, Um, my dog got in a fight with my friend Justin's dog, poured down rain and it was the worst camping trip I've ever been on. But now we look back at it and we laugh, and we remember the midnight dance party we had in the rain and we made the best of it. But at the time we're all like, man, I gotta get out of here. This is miserable, do you know what I'm saying? Like I look back on certain miserable experiences and kind of laugh about him. There aren't many awful experiences unless it's involved, like, you know, something really bad and like life changing. Like I don't look back at like the death of a relative and say, you know, that was really pretty fun. Now I thought that that dress they buried her and was horrible, but now it's hilarious. Yeah, exactly. Um, yeah, you can't do that with an object. No, you can't do that. And even if you stay well, I remember when I was eight, I got this awesome um Castle Gray school place and it was the bomb and I was so happy. Um, what you're doing right there is remembering an object, which is significant, but sort of the experience of having it thought. Yeah, that's the big distinction. And I don't think anybody in the literature has done a very good job or did a very good job over that six year period when happiness was studied of explaining that that. When you're talking about materialism versus experientialism, objects versus experiences, like you're talking about the object itself and not your propensity to generate memories and experiences through the object, which is kind of confusing and cluttering frankly, but it's an important point. Uh. There's a book out people love writing books about this stuff too, telling them for you know online. Elizabe Dunna. Michael Norton wrote one called Happy Money. The science is Smarter Spending. Uh. And they track down some key principles. Um. They they obviously say experiences are more valuable than objects, but they break it down further and give you some advice, like you should buy an experience. First of all, you should make it a treat, which means, you know, it makes it more special if you limit your access to these things. Uh. And I get that if you go to like some really fancy restaurant, it's great, but if you go like every week, you're kind of like, all right, I'm kind of sick of sick of this place. They say you should buy time, which I'm not fully sure to understand what that means. You go to another human being and say I would like to purchase one to two years of your life. Um, and you just put it onto my little watch here. I'm gonna take it from your watch. How much do you want? And then they give you some of their life o. Uh. And then they say to invest in others, which goes back to that original study I was talking about. And then pay now and consume later, and that delayed consumption leads to increased enjoyment. Oh yeah, which is the opposite of one of the tenants of materialism, like exactly, and then you pay now. Apparently, people who are um um, I guess registered materialists. I don't remember how they quantified at r MS figured it out in the UM in the study, but people who are materialistic have UM more credit cards, typically have at least one loan of a thousand dollars and more outstanding. Um. It's just kind of a not only does it lead to or is it associated with character flaws, it also has other pitfalls and pathfalls associated with it too, like debt. Yeah, that's the exact opposite that's consumed now, pay later exactly, whereas the other is like cantra and this is like whatever the opposite of tantra is. I don't know, um, but the the there's this kind of unspoken or very rarely spoken indictment of material culture um and that well, I ran across this one quote. It's called it's a consumer Materialism is a degrading outcome of untrammeled marketing power. That it's kind of like you have people who possibly have low self esteem, low self worth, and are looking for a way to generate their own identity. Who are more highly susceptible, maybe too being marketed to like, if you drink this liquor, you're going to turn into a lion and own the barrier. And no matter what your salary is, as long as you can afford a bottle of this, no matter how much it puts you out, you're gonna You're gonna be awesome. Your friends are gonna be awesome. And some people say, like, I need to feel awesome right now, and I'm willing to shell out fifty bucks for that, and I'm gonna do it. And who knows, maybe it does pump them up a little bit, hopefully though ideally, if it does pump them up, pump them up to a level where they realize that materialism isn't going to make them happy. What about a facelift? That's neither an object nor I guess the experience is having the new face. Apparently, plastic surgery um people are reported to have surgery people they they are reported to have longer lasting happiness. That hedonic adaptation takes way longer for plastic surgery than other I guess purchases interesting. Uh, well, going back to the whole lottery thing, I think everyone knows that all the studies generally point to it's like a baseline happiness. Objects can make you happy in the moment, But with lottery winners, they did find out repeatedly that they generally go back to their baseline happiness from before they had the dough. And I would say that's the case for most of these studies. It's not about how happy you are in a moment or even in a given experience or holding an object, but eventually you're going to return to the schmuck that you are. You're either happy or you're not. You know, we're remember when we did our super Stuff Guide to Happiness, there was that um, one of the founders of trans humanism, who was saying, like, we need to figure out how to ratchet up everybody's base level happiness. Yeah, like even with pills and things right, or genetic um manipulation or whatever. He's like, whatever it takes, that's one of the things that should be a pursuit of humanity is making everyone happier by nature. I don't like that. Yeah, I think you said the same thing in the stuff. Yeah, because I think pathos is valuable. You know, yeah, I'm pretty sure we made that point. It seems like something you would say and I'd be like, yeah, I do. I think it's valuable to the human experience. I think it's I can do a lot of good to be uh, briefly depressed. And well here's an example of that. Um, this the Great Recession. Since the Great Recession, teenagers have been reporting um less desire for material objects than the teenagers for a decade before. Um, They're like, but you're not talking about my smartphone, right, everything? But that right, Well, they were saying like they're there. Um, they were scoring on like materialism surveys as less materialistic than their counterparts a decade before, and they were more likely to say things like I want a job that benefits society. They were they were becoming less materialistic and more pro social, and they were saying that that's a direct result of this Great Recession. So lessons learned. Yeah, your point that, um, that depression of one way or one sort or another can be beneficial. It's on a social societal level that's true too. Apparently, Yeah, I did it. Happiness objects or or experiences. What do you think I think objects super shiny, golden, golden, sparkly objects. Yeah, which is one last thing. I think you made a really good point, like wanting a guitar is doesn't make you a materialist. You don't have to reject all possession to be a good, grounded, normal, happy person. Yeah. Listen to our podcasts on freegans, yeah, dumpster diving. I think those people are happy. I think I say yes, yeah, and go check out our super Stuff Guide to Happiness. It was very, very good. It's on iTunes. It's available on iTunes. Yeah, just blow the dust off of it. It's still relevant because everything stopped in two thousand nine. It was so interesting too. Yeah, it was a good one. Uh. And if you want to learn more about objects or um experiences, you can type those words in the search bar at how stuff works dot com and it will bring up this article that we were working off of. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. All right, I'm gonna call this grocery waste. We did our podcast on de fridging, and we got a surprisingly a lot of responses from people. Yeah, I was kind of surprised. It really hit home. Uh. So this is from a former grocery store employee when he was in high school. He said, part of my job at the store was to find all the eggs, bread and milk that had a cell by date within the next three days. Uh. And it's really terrible because cell by dates are designed with some wiggle room just to make sure nothing is spoiling before the date on the cart. And when I had the cart loaded up with perfectly good food, I had to throw the bread and eggs into the garbage compactor and pour all the milk down the drain dozens of gallons a night. M It's just like maddening. And I got with the local f f a teacher whatever that is, and asked if yeah, look at you, okay, whatever that is, I don't remember for you remember. Um? They asked if all this wasted food? Um. I asked if all the wasted food could be used to slap the pigs that the students were raising, and he said that'd be a great idea. So I went to the manager of the grocery store, said we should do this and it might even be good pr for us. It turns out the grocery store got back partial store credit from their suppliers for expired food that they threw away. And here's the hitch. They would not get any credit if any of the expired food was put to any use. Isn't that awful. Some suppliers would even refuse credit if they decided the store wasn't doing enough to prevent dumpster divers from retrieving food. What's worse, many foods that don't actually spoil for years and years, but they have arbitrarily short sell by dates because they found that people don't trust foods to have an expiration date too far into the future. Can you remember didn't we talk about, Oh, I did a brain stuff on water going bad, and it's like, there's no reason for it to have an expiration date. Yeah? Uh so, he says. Thus, I spent one memorable evening throwaway throwing out hundreds of dollars worth of cheese that was a known danger of spoiling anytime soon. Even asked if I could take some home, and they said that that would be considered shoplifting. Wow. So I don't see food waste being addressed until it becomes a matter of public outrage. On the level of sweatshop labor. There are just too many economic barriers in the way. That is from Todd from Okay. See thanks Todd, And that is just his store. We heard from other people some stores have different policies where they can actually put some of that food to use, but I don't think that's the norm. No. And we heard from another guy too who was fired because he got so tired of throwing stuff where he took a bunch of baguettes to a homeless shelter and they found out about it and he was fired because of it. Um, but he said he didn't regret. It's still his day. Good good for him. Yeah, Um, thanks Todd from Okay. See I would say go thunder, but go heat instead. Uh. If you want to get in touch with Chuck or Me or Jerry, UM, you can send us a tweet. Our handle is s y s K Podcast with the little at symbol ahead of that. We're on Facebook dot com slash stuff you should know check us out there. UM. You can check out our YouTube channel Josh and Chuck that's the name of it. You'll love it. Um. You can also send us a regular old email Stuff podcast at discovery dot com and want to st at home on the web. It is awesome stuff dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it How stuff works dot com with over a hundred thousand titles to choose from. Audible dot com as a leading provider of downloadable digital audio books and spoken word entertainment. Go to Audible podcast dot com, slash no stuff, k n o w S, t u f F to get a free audio book download of your choice when you sign up today.

Welcome to you stuff you should know from House stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, Jerry's here, and uh, stuff you should know. We've got the eighteen Yeah in the house, not the Chuck Holograham. It's not guest producers mad or Noel. It's not pocket Josh, not pocket Josh, although I did have a pocket Josh on me. So he's here, He's always here. That's a voodoo doll. No, it's not. It's clearly a voodoo doll. That's my hair. I recognize. How's that back pain treating you? Hurt so bad? Uh? How's it going pretty good except for the back pain. Well, let me just massize your little pocket Josh. I think the touch me, Chuck. I'm excited about this one. Our ongoing series on happiness. Yeah, we've covered it with the Bhutan Yeah, a Gross National Happiness, and then we did our audiobook All about Happiness, super Stuff Guide to Happiness, and all that was I guess a hold over from was it right before or right after the financial global financial collapse? M I feel like it was sort of in the midst of okay, because I think what it was was the world got cocky, especially the developed world. Sure like, hey, things are going so well, We're all rich, everybody's pretty happy. We're we're at war with not one but two countries at once. Look at us, go um, let's start talking about happiness and what makes us happy. Let's start blogs about how we try to be happy and enter it in once a day every day and then get a book deal out of it. Let's just think about happiness, happiness, happiness, happiness. Well, a few years on, there's been some changes over time. Everybody said, people don't talk about happiness anymore. Like there is a little while where there was a period basically from my impression about two thousand five to two thousand nine, where you could get substantial grants to conduct research into the nature of happiness, to quantify happiness, what makes people happy, what makes people unhappy, how to make people happier? Um. And there was an offshoot of psychology called positive psychology that we talked about, the super stub guided happiness that said, we're good at diagnosing um maladies, which physical maladies, no like problems, psychological problems, but we're terrible at um how to make people happier. So hence now we're going to have something called positive psychology, which appears to have fallen by the wayside um. Yeah, it's all negative psychology. Well, psychology itself as a field is under tremendous amount of attack, and positive psychology. I think they gave the chance to retreat. They're like, look, you're you're pretty easy target. You should probably go. This isn't even a real thing. I don't know. Maybe it was a valiant attempt. I think it just came in at the wrong time. But the the the point is, if you look up happiness now, you will notice, like just about everything cuts off. In two thousand nine, I did notice that actually American doesn't care about being happy anymore, or maybe they just hanging on studied and learned everything they need to know, and we're like, all right, here we are. Well, you know what, it's funny that you say that, because if that's true and you're you could be right, that represents them possibly the shortest amount of time any subject has ever been studied. No, really, because it started and what makes people happy? And maybe I think two thousand three I read I read a study, and it was about how this was one of the first studies to ever try to figure out what makes people happy. So then this field of study existed from like two thousand three to two thousand nine, and they were saying that the reason that this would be the first studies because it's been so accepted for so many years ever since. Hume the philosopher Hume, David Hume, Robert Hume, the Scottish philosopher is one of my favorites. Just if you're on Jeopardy, you could just say hum hum, We'll go with hum um. Who is hum if you're on Jeopardy he was the Scottish philosopher. No, I'm just had to phrase it, Okay, I'm just teasing um, he said. He was one of the first people to mention this concept of what makes people happy insofar as what we're talking about today, which is does an object make you happier? Or does an experience make you happier? Yeah, I think they've done like the lottery studies before two thousand four, like if lottery winners, But um, that's a pretty specialized study. Yes, So to my point is to try to honify happiness, that kind of thing and really investigated. But it started in the early two thousands, that ended by the mid two thousand, the first decade of the tea. Well, while I'm reading all these studies, I'm looking oh seven oh eight oh four, Yeah, very keen observation, and I can't quite figure out. I mean, obviously, I think the Great Recession is almost entirely responsible for that falling to the wayside. But if you look still today, there's there are still related studies. It's just not happiness studies. Yeah, I found when I was reading this, I disagreed with a lot of these findings and studies. They didn't seem fully fleshed out, did they. Well, for instance, we'll go ahead and start with this supposed fact. Researchers have done some studying and they have pinned down how long a material object can will make you happy, and they say between six and twelve weeks, then you get bored with it. Basically, I just don't know about that because it wholly to me, it wholly depends on what the object is. That's something that gives you ongoing pleasure, like a guitar, let's say, yeah, because that is also an experience an object. But like I will love my guitars until I die because I play them and enjoy it and play them with my friends. You know. Yeah, And what you're talking about the gift that keeps giving right exactly, that's called um uh, active engagement. It is a It is a purchase. And when we say purchase, we're not talking about necessarily just an object, which we'll talk about in a little bit. You can also you purchase experiences as well. In fact, they say that's the way to go, right. So there's a happiness purchase, is what we're saying. And your guitar that you purchased, that's an object, but you purchased it, but it's making you happy, you know, over and over and over again. The reason why is because you become actively engaged in an active engagement in anything that is positive or that makes you happy can continue to make you happy for longer than say another object that doesn't actively engage you, Like a pair of shoes that you wanted really really bad and then got and then like sit in your closets, you don't wear them anymore because after well, you may still wear them, but you're wearing them as shoes. You're not wearing them like I'm I'm the King of Rotterdamn here and check out my shoes. You know that that kind of thing that lacks active engagement, that lacks social interaction, and that lacks exercise. And those are the three, the big three things that you can buy objects wise that kind of sit outside of that six to twelve week Um, happiness adaptation is what it's called. Um. So, yeah, you kind of nailed it right there with the guitar. It's not just guitar. Video games are another good example. Yeah, like you buy your PS three and you may get sick of some of the games, but they're always releasing new games, right. Um, if you bought a um, a language module, you learn a language or something, you know, I mean like it's you're something that actively engage you, something that that you use for exercise, or something that leads to social interaction. Are the three object types that make you happier longer? Well, that makes me feel better than and um the whole six or twelve weeks though, whether that's a an accurate number not the chuck um. Remember we talked about the hedonic treadmill. It's evidence of the hedonic treadmill. That's just a thing called um hedonic adaptation, and that is that something that makes you happy isn't gonna make you happy forever. Something you've purchased pretty much, whatever it is, you're going to eventually subsume it into your everyday life. You're gonna end up taking it for granted, basically, is another way to put it. How long, how short that happens, or how long that happens is um. It definitely differs depending on the type, and we'll talk about the type in the minute. But what people end up getting on once once an object stop making stops making them happy, they still want to be happy. So they end up on the hedonic treadmill and buy another pair of shoes, and then another, and then another and then another. And you end up just trying to keep pace, buying all this stuff, accumulating all of this material stuff, and it's just kind of keeping you at a a steady pace of happiness without any kind of real enrichment. And that's the hedonic treadmill. Yeah, and that's materialism UM. Which they've done studies on materialism. There was one by these dudes Chaplain and John in two thousand seven where they linked it to low self esteem generally from childhood, Like you're sort of always trying to gain your self esteem through material objects. Uh. They've linked it to narcissism. Yeah, people who try to build themselves like up through having you know, fancy things and showing them off. Yeah. And there's the I mean, that's that is a real um technique that people use to establish their identities, established their worth to others. And it's a ironically, it's a cheap and easy way to do it. It may be very expensive dollar wise, but you don't have to put a tremendous amount of thought or effort into it. You just go by the most expensive, most obvious, uh obviously expensive item you can and wear it out and broadcast it and get your sense of self worth from that. So it is very shallow thing materialism. I think everybody kind of knows that intuitively, but it's been studied, you know, like it it is linked to all these kind of um personality disorders. There's a guy named Russ Belk who's a marketing researcher, and he was the first one to really research materialism on the Belk Chain of Stars, I wonder, and he uh, he found it to be a character trait marked by envy, non generosity, and possessiveness. Yeah, materialism is so hard to define for me though, because it's like a guitar is a material object and a nice guitar is. I don't know. I definitely not materialistic, I don't think, but I want a nice guitar because it sounds awesome, it looks cool. But I think that that's why like Belk and Chaplain and John went to the trouble of like kind of investigating it. It's like, do you do you have like a clinically flawed personality? Uh, that's based on your desire for material objects. Yeah, but see that, like it's all personal. Like I might think it's material to go out and buy a pair of eight hundred dollar shoes, but the person might get a lot of joy out of those shoes, and say, I think it's stupid to go pay a thousand dollars for a guitar. You know, Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know what I'm saying. You don't know. I mean, I think you raise a good point, and it's it's valid because there that the research isn't that deep. I mean, you could be exactly right, and I think it's subject yes. And not only is this whole you know, the finding subjective, the reportings are subjective to Like there's a study in in San Francisco, UM in two thousand nine. The last year that happiness was ever studied, the last year of happiness mattered m and basically this uh, this group had a hundred and fifty four college students, it's pretty small fill out a survey. They said that we want you to pick um. We want you to write down a little bit about an object that you purchased to make you happy in the last three months, or an experience that made you happy in the last three months that you purchased. Yes, which is important to distinguish that, right, because you think you're gonna have free experiences too, you can, yeah, and we'll get to that. But the college students um self reported that the at the time of the purchase, the experiences made them happier, and the happiness lasted longer than the ones who reported an object made them happy. Yeah. I mean every study pretty much confirms experiences over material objects. Yes. My point is it was self reported, so it's subjective right out of the gate, and that's the problem with studying things like happiness. It's it's an emotion which is subjective. And then it was also a small sample of college students, um, homogeneous group and what do they know? Not they'ren't money for anything now there, But there's this UM acronym for college for studies like that. It's weird. It's Western educated, uh something rich and democratic. Yeah, I can't remember what the eye but weird it's it's and it's saying like there's a lot of studies out there that people rely on that are weird that the population sample are like eighteen to twenty one year old, right, you know, fairly well off western kids, right, Like, what does that really tell us? Yeah? Yeah, so um, this is an example of that. I saw another study that thought was interesting. As far as objects go, um, Like, like we said, across the board, it's they pretty much have said experiences purchased or free mean more to someone in the long run than an object. But um, when it comes to spending on objects, this one study did find that spending on others across the board, even on an object, is brings more happiness than spending on yourself for an object. Yeah. Um, And in fact, uh, people were assigned to spend money and one of these studies, and they experienced greater happiness. And people assigned to spend money on themselves, like here's a hundred dollars go by yourself something nice, or here's a hundred bucks go by someone else something nice. People were happier that bought something for someone else, which was interesting. And that's you're saying, that's like the case with objects and experiences as well. I think that was just objects, but I would say it probably holds true for experience, Like you takes someone out to dinner, you feel good about it. So what you what you have there is you're spending on another person. It's there. It's fostering social interaction, which is another key huge and it's an experience. Yeah, pretty much like you couldn't get happier than that. Yeah, the social thing is kind of the key to all of this, they say, because generally your experience happiness is usually not alone, like you'll go to a concert with someone or to dinner with someone. But um, but not always right and not always is a pretty good little buzz term for this part of the podcast, because um, there's also research that shows that objects can bring more happiness than experiences, depending on the experience. Like for a long time, the literature just basically said experiences make you happier than objects. It's exactly. And these researchers found that um a an unhappy experience, Yeah, especially one that was meant to be happy. Like let's say you want on a cruise or you went on a vacation and it just sucked like that. That compared to an object that's supposed to make you happy, that object is gonna beat that experience and you're gonna have that bad memory of the experience longer too. Yeah. You know what else I think I haven't seen pointed out is you can't you can't get your money back on a bad dinner and play. Yeah, that's true. But if you get an object, you know, like this thinks you can usually return that unless you took a bite out of it already. Yeah, this is a good way to say it. But you can't, you know what I'm saying, Like you take a vacation that ends up being a disaster, I would be more upset about that because it's like you've lost your money, You're gonna have this bad memory. But if you buy some stupid thing. You can like just resell it or on Craig Lester send it back, right. And um, so that's that's one distinction between materials, I guess objects and experiences. Yeah. Um, and we should give a shout out to start here. Who start sart Oh? Yeah, John Paul Sartra, the philosopher um who is kind of credited with really introducing this concept or codifying it into the mainstream. To start, there were three paths to happiness, are three types of happiness. There was um, having, doing and being and being we're not even talking about in this one, but having and doing, um, materialism and experientialism um start in the fifties. I think, uh just kind of introduce us into the literature, and that ultimately is what kicked off the this kind of study into which one is better, which one makes you happier? Yeah? And I like how you you wrote this, right. I like how you point out about Buddhism, how they feel that material objects actually get in the way of happiness. Not only may they not bring you happiness, but they will prevent it. Sure. And it's not just Buddhism, it's UM for centuries. It's just basically been accepted that an object is less desirable if you're seeking happiness than an experience, and it's that's why the researchers were saying, Um, you know, we're one of the first studies to to conduct and an investigation into this because it's just been generally accepted that that's the case, but no one knew exactly why. So now we've kind of reached the why parts. And one of the things you said is, um, you can't take an experience back. All right, hold on to that thought. Let's take a quick message break and we'll get back with the why. Chuck. I don't know if you've heard this or not, but the cost of a stamp just went up to cents, but not if you have stamps dot Com. Buddy, Oh yeah, yeah. With stamps dot Com you'll pay less for postage than you would at the post office for first class mail, Priority Priority Express mail packages and more. Well, buddy, it's awesome and convenient, super easy to use with stamps dot Com and buy and print discounted stamps, shipping labels, and more using your own printer and computer right there at home. And not only will you save money with stamps dot Com, chuckers by not paying full price for postage. You'll say valuable time to stamps dot Com always keeps the rates up to date, so you'll get the exact postage you need every time, right from your desk. And here's the best part, you may never have to go to the post office again. That sounds good to me. So right now, we have a very special offer. You can use our promo code stuff for a no risk trial plus a hundred and ten dollar bonus offer which includes a digital scale and up to fifty free postage. That's right, so don't wait. Go to stamps dot com before you do anything else. Click on the microphone at the top of the homepage and type an S t U F F that Stamps dot Com enter stuff. Okay, So why well, um, you mentioned that objects. Uh, you can take an object back, you can't take an experience back. One of the big differences that researchers came up with is that with experiences you can because you can't take them back. They're kind of esoteric. They're also more subject to revision. Right, so you can you can think back to an experience and over time, but stopped pump it up, alter it slightly, um, make it more meaningful, whatever. Um, you're just kind of adding to it. You remember when we did that thing on memory, We research memory, and it's like every time you bring up memory, you kind of add to it. When you store it away, it's different, it's altered in one way. Well, what you're remembering an experience, you're not remembering an object because you have the object in your hand and you're shaking it and you're like, why don't you make me happy anymore? What happened to you? I wanted this this object so bad, and you know, and and now it's whatever. And the reason why is because it's part of your present, and experience is part of your past. It can be your immediate pastor just past whatever, and that is subject to revisionism, which is one of the reasons why they think that when you especially self report what makes you happier, you're probably going to go with an experience. Yeah, and I'm kind of that way. I think a lot of people, even with bad experiences, later on you might think, uh, oh, you know it was bad at the time, but we also we laugh about it now, or you know, how you can reframe bad experiences or if you're like super on the ball. In the moment, you can say, you know, maybe we'll be laughing at this in ten minutes, like you know, some terrible vacation, Like I have fun memories about bad experiences, and I don't think it's revisionism. I think it's uh, just time. And maybe at the time you're not looking at the positives, you know, right, because your genes are expressing all sorts of horrific things that are making you so mad, you know. Um, But once the genes go back to normal, Yeah, things kind of take on a different cast. Like, for instance, Uh, we went on a big group camping trip like five or six years ago, a bunch of us, Um, my dog got in a fight with my friend Justin's dog, poured down rain and it was the worst camping trip I've ever been on. But now we look back at it and we laugh, and we remember the midnight dance party we had in the rain and we made the best of it. But at the time we're all like, man, I gotta get out of here. This is miserable, do you know what I'm saying? Like I look back on certain miserable experiences and kind of laugh about him. There aren't many awful experiences unless it's involved, like, you know, something really bad and like life changing. Like I don't look back at like the death of a relative and say, you know, that was really pretty fun. Now I thought that that dress they buried her and was horrible, but now it's hilarious. Yeah, exactly. Um, yeah, you can't do that with an object. No, you can't do that. And even if you stay well, I remember when I was eight, I got this awesome um Castle Gray school place and it was the bomb and I was so happy. Um, what you're doing right there is remembering an object, which is significant, but sort of the experience of having it thought. Yeah, that's the big distinction. And I don't think anybody in the literature has done a very good job or did a very good job over that six year period when happiness was studied of explaining that that. When you're talking about materialism versus experientialism, objects versus experiences, like you're talking about the object itself and not your propensity to generate memories and experiences through the object, which is kind of confusing and cluttering frankly, but it's an important point. Uh. There's a book out people love writing books about this stuff too, telling them for you know online. Elizabe Dunna. Michael Norton wrote one called Happy Money. The science is Smarter Spending. Uh. And they track down some key principles. Um. They they obviously say experiences are more valuable than objects, but they break it down further and give you some advice, like you should buy an experience. First of all, you should make it a treat, which means, you know, it makes it more special if you limit your access to these things. Uh. And I get that if you go to like some really fancy restaurant, it's great, but if you go like every week, you're kind of like, all right, I'm kind of sick of sick of this place. They say you should buy time, which I'm not fully sure to understand what that means. You go to another human being and say I would like to purchase one to two years of your life. Um, and you just put it onto my little watch here. I'm gonna take it from your watch. How much do you want? And then they give you some of their life o. Uh. And then they say to invest in others, which goes back to that original study I was talking about. And then pay now and consume later, and that delayed consumption leads to increased enjoyment. Oh yeah, which is the opposite of one of the tenants of materialism, like exactly, and then you pay now. Apparently, people who are um um, I guess registered materialists. I don't remember how they quantified at r MS figured it out in the UM in the study, but people who are materialistic have UM more credit cards, typically have at least one loan of a thousand dollars and more outstanding. Um. It's just kind of a not only does it lead to or is it associated with character flaws, it also has other pitfalls and pathfalls associated with it too, like debt. Yeah, that's the exact opposite that's consumed now, pay later exactly, whereas the other is like cantra and this is like whatever the opposite of tantra is. I don't know, um, but the the there's this kind of unspoken or very rarely spoken indictment of material culture um and that well, I ran across this one quote. It's called it's a consumer Materialism is a degrading outcome of untrammeled marketing power. That it's kind of like you have people who possibly have low self esteem, low self worth, and are looking for a way to generate their own identity. Who are more highly susceptible, maybe too being marketed to like, if you drink this liquor, you're going to turn into a lion and own the barrier. And no matter what your salary is, as long as you can afford a bottle of this, no matter how much it puts you out, you're gonna You're gonna be awesome. Your friends are gonna be awesome. And some people say, like, I need to feel awesome right now, and I'm willing to shell out fifty bucks for that, and I'm gonna do it. And who knows, maybe it does pump them up a little bit, hopefully though ideally, if it does pump them up, pump them up to a level where they realize that materialism isn't going to make them happy. What about a facelift? That's neither an object nor I guess the experience is having the new face. Apparently, plastic surgery um people are reported to have surgery people they they are reported to have longer lasting happiness. That hedonic adaptation takes way longer for plastic surgery than other I guess purchases interesting. Uh, well, going back to the whole lottery thing, I think everyone knows that all the studies generally point to it's like a baseline happiness. Objects can make you happy in the moment, But with lottery winners, they did find out repeatedly that they generally go back to their baseline happiness from before they had the dough. And I would say that's the case for most of these studies. It's not about how happy you are in a moment or even in a given experience or holding an object, but eventually you're going to return to the schmuck that you are. You're either happy or you're not. You know, we're remember when we did our super Stuff Guide to Happiness, there was that um, one of the founders of trans humanism, who was saying, like, we need to figure out how to ratchet up everybody's base level happiness. Yeah, like even with pills and things right, or genetic um manipulation or whatever. He's like, whatever it takes, that's one of the things that should be a pursuit of humanity is making everyone happier by nature. I don't like that. Yeah, I think you said the same thing in the stuff. Yeah, because I think pathos is valuable. You know, yeah, I'm pretty sure we made that point. It seems like something you would say and I'd be like, yeah, I do. I think it's valuable to the human experience. I think it's I can do a lot of good to be uh, briefly depressed. And well here's an example of that. Um, this the Great Recession. Since the Great Recession, teenagers have been reporting um less desire for material objects than the teenagers for a decade before. Um, They're like, but you're not talking about my smartphone, right, everything? But that right, Well, they were saying like they're there. Um, they were scoring on like materialism surveys as less materialistic than their counterparts a decade before, and they were more likely to say things like I want a job that benefits society. They were they were becoming less materialistic and more pro social, and they were saying that that's a direct result of this Great Recession. So lessons learned. Yeah, your point that, um, that depression of one way or one sort or another can be beneficial. It's on a social societal level that's true too. Apparently, Yeah, I did it. Happiness objects or or experiences. What do you think I think objects super shiny, golden, golden, sparkly objects. Yeah, which is one last thing. I think you made a really good point, like wanting a guitar is doesn't make you a materialist. You don't have to reject all possession to be a good, grounded, normal, happy person. Yeah. Listen to our podcasts on freegans, yeah, dumpster diving. I think those people are happy. I think I say yes, yeah, and go check out our super Stuff Guide to Happiness. It was very, very good. It's on iTunes. It's available on iTunes. Yeah, just blow the dust off of it. It's still relevant because everything stopped in two thousand nine. It was so interesting too. Yeah, it was a good one. Uh. And if you want to learn more about objects or um experiences, you can type those words in the search bar at how stuff works dot com and it will bring up this article that we were working off of. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. All right, I'm gonna call this grocery waste. We did our podcast on de fridging, and we got a surprisingly a lot of responses from people. Yeah, I was kind of surprised. It really hit home. Uh. So this is from a former grocery store employee when he was in high school. He said, part of my job at the store was to find all the eggs, bread and milk that had a cell by date within the next three days. Uh. And it's really terrible because cell by dates are designed with some wiggle room just to make sure nothing is spoiling before the date on the cart. And when I had the cart loaded up with perfectly good food, I had to throw the bread and eggs into the garbage compactor and pour all the milk down the drain dozens of gallons a night. M It's just like maddening. And I got with the local f f a teacher whatever that is, and asked if yeah, look at you, okay, whatever that is, I don't remember for you remember. Um? They asked if all this wasted food? Um. I asked if all the wasted food could be used to slap the pigs that the students were raising, and he said that'd be a great idea. So I went to the manager of the grocery store, said we should do this and it might even be good pr for us. It turns out the grocery store got back partial store credit from their suppliers for expired food that they threw away. And here's the hitch. They would not get any credit if any of the expired food was put to any use. Isn't that awful. Some suppliers would even refuse credit if they decided the store wasn't doing enough to prevent dumpster divers from retrieving food. What's worse, many foods that don't actually spoil for years and years, but they have arbitrarily short sell by dates because they found that people don't trust foods to have an expiration date too far into the future. Can you remember didn't we talk about, Oh, I did a brain stuff on water going bad, and it's like, there's no reason for it to have an expiration date. Yeah? Uh so, he says. Thus, I spent one memorable evening throwaway throwing out hundreds of dollars worth of cheese that was a known danger of spoiling anytime soon. Even asked if I could take some home, and they said that that would be considered shoplifting. Wow. So I don't see food waste being addressed until it becomes a matter of public outrage. On the level of sweatshop labor. There are just too many economic barriers in the way. That is from Todd from Okay. See thanks Todd, And that is just his store. We heard from other people some stores have different policies where they can actually put some of that food to use, but I don't think that's the norm. No. And we heard from another guy too who was fired because he got so tired of throwing stuff where he took a bunch of baguettes to a homeless shelter and they found out about it and he was fired because of it. Um, but he said he didn't regret. It's still his day. Good good for him. Yeah, Um, thanks Todd from Okay. See I would say go thunder, but go heat instead. Uh. If you want to get in touch with Chuck or Me or Jerry, UM, you can send us a tweet. 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