Black Friday. Cyber Monday. The horribly coined term “Thanks-getting.” Even Santa Claus. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think the holidays were all about THINGS. Buying things, giving things, getting things: Americans expect to receive an average of 12.9 gifts this year. This is, of course, a boon to the retail industry; Americans will spend approximately $700 each on holiday related items this year, totaling more than $465 billion (it’s also a boon to the debt industry, as the holidays lead to credit card overspending by an average of 16 percent).
Dr. Thomas Gilovich, a psychologist at Cornell University, has been studying money and happiness for more than two decades. In an interview with Fast Co.Exist, he explained how adaptation impacts our happiness: “New things are exciting to us at first, but then we adapt to them.” Once something is part of our routine experience, it becomes the new normal, no longer brining us the rush of happiness it did when we first received it; in fact, our overall satisfaction with it decreases. Conversely, our satisfaction with spending money on experiences increases. “Our experiences are a bigger part of ourselves than our material goods," says Gilovich. "You can really like your material stuff. You can even think that part of your identity is connected to those things, but nonetheless they remain separate from you. In contrast, your experiences really are part of you. We are the sum total of our experiences."
Experiences are even richer when shared. Research shows that undergoing something with another person leads to a more intensified experience: good experiences are better and bad experiences are worse. Although we are more digitally connected