The same kind of comparing doesn’t happen with experiences. “The phenomenon of keeping up with the Joneses is much less pronounced with experiences than with material goods,” said Professor Gilovich. Experiences are personal enough that you don’t need to compare. If you liked the concert you went to at the Hollywood Bowl, you don’t care that someone else had a good time at a nightclub. And if a friend stayed at a fancier hotel in Fort Lauderdale, you can shrug it off, content with your own memory of beach volleyball and romping in the waves.
It also turns out that it’s much easier to romanticize an experience than a possession. If your car keeps breaking down, it’s just frustrating and hard to find any positive spin. “Whereas you can have a miserable vacation and come back and say . . . yeah, it rained the whole time, but we stayed in and we played Scrabble and we bonded,” said Professor Gilovich with a laugh. He told me about one experiment where people who were going to Disneyland were asked about how much they looked forward to the trip. All of them were excited and talked about how great it was going to be. Interviewed at Disneyland, they were much less happy—the lines were endless, the weather was hot, and the food was expensive. Interviewed after they got back, they once again had a positive report—the family loved it and everyone had fun.
“You’re grateful for how you remember an experience rather than what actually happened,” Gilovich said.
Those positive memories are much more pronounced with experiences than with stuff. With big data important to research these days, Gilovich’s team looked at reviews on websites like TripAdvisor, CNET, and Amazon, coding people’s comments for expressions of gratitude. Many more grateful words spilled out when people recounted experiences like going to a restaurant or vacation spot than when describing purchases like clothes or electronic equipment.
Gilovich told me that while other researchers have looked into what it means to feel gratitude toward another person, he was more interested in “untargeted gratitude”—that sense of being connected to the cosmos and happy with the lottery of life. From the personal interviews, questionnaires, and reviews, he was convinced that experiences outranked purchases on just about everyone’s gratitude scale. He was also planning to come up with experiments to determine whether he could induce a “virtuous cycle.” That is, could enjoying an activity that made you grateful also make you less materialistic . . . which made you even more grateful? He admitted that he hoped his research would nudge people along that road.
“If you’re trying to increase your gratitude, tilt toward experiential consumption,” he said. “We don’t always realize how materialistic we are and how much of our environment we’ve turned over to nonfulfilling enterprises like shopping malls.” One advantage of experiences is that they connect you to other people in a way that material goods rarely do. Gilovich pointed out that you’re probably not going to feel very grateful when you drive solo in your car to a big mall with a giant sea of asphalt around it. When you feel isolated, life doesn’t seem as good. But when you’ve had a great experience with friends or family or out in nature, you feel grateful to the cosmos that provided it. Gratitude-inspiring events are very personal, but they almost always fall into the category of experiences. You can’t buy cosmic gratitude in a mall.
Professor Gilovich’s position that you should spend on experiences rather than stuff is gaining steam. After we spoke, I went online to buy a gift for a young couple I knew who were about to get married. Their wedding registry had the usual kitchen tools and wineglasses, but they also had a honeymoon registry for the trip they planned to Hawaii. I signed up to give them a day of scuba diving with a private instructor—figuring that would ultimately make them more grateful than a high-speed juicer. Professor Gilovich would approve of the increasingly common “experiential registries” where instead of requesting china and crystal, couples ask for a day of hot-air ballooning, a weekend at a B and B, or a champagne dinner. And it’s a wonderful change. Silver place settings tarnish, but a memory keeps its polish and, with time, gleams more and more.
A gratitude-inducing, cosmos-connecting experience doesn’t have to be artistic or high-minded. A tech guy I know has season tickets to the San Francisco 49ers and describes football-season Sundays as “the days I’m grateful to be alive.” He is fine with working hard all week, but he is over the moon when he sits at the forty-yard line at Levi’s Stadium (no dress code required) cheering his heart out. “I don’t have a Rolex, but I’ll always have my football games,” he told me with a laugh.
But we have to be a little careful about commoditizing experiences and turning them into just one more object to acquire. A friend of mine recently got back from a week in Venice, where she stayed at the elegant Hotel Cipriani. She’d selected the spot after reading 1,000 Places to See Before You Die, described on Amazon as “the world’s bestselling travel book.” When it was published in 2003, the book became a number one New York Times bestseller and has since given rise to a flood of similar titles that seem to create their own hedonic treadmills.
I expected my friend to tell me about romantic gondola rides, glorious churches, and fabulous food. Instead, she had a different approach.
“Venice was lovely, and I can check it off the list,” she said. “We knocked off two other spots in Italy while we were there, too.”
“Terrific,” I said with a laugh. “If you live three hundred more years, you’ll make it through the whole book.”
Actually, it would take even longer, since a new edition has two hundred additional trips. How could my friend, or anyone else, expect to savor her joyous adventure in Venice when the taunting goal was just to get on to the next exploit in Vienna or Venezuela? We have to be careful about becoming experience junkies, where we are wanting more and appreciating less.
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Behavioral economist and Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman has said that it’s hard to talk about what makes us happy because there are two different parts of ourselves to please—the experiencing self and the remembering self. The experiencing self lives in the present and takes in everything that happens in the 86,400 seconds in a day. The remembering self is a storyteller, weaving some small portion of those experiences into memories that become who we are.
The Roman philosopher Seneca said, Things that were hard to bear are sweet to remember, and we’ve all had experiences that seem miserable while we’re going through them but make us grateful later.
A couple of summers ago, my husband and I went hiking in the Austrian Alps with our younger son, Matt. We trekked each day through verdant mountainsides where cows grazed lazily and wildflowers stretched in all directions, and at night we lodged at cozy inns where we devoured delicious dinners and snuggled down in comfort. The perfect trip—until day four. We spent the morning scrambling up a challenging mountain, which took us from alpine fields to rocky cliffs, and after lunch, inspired by the extraordinary scenery, we finally got to the top and could see in the far distance the pretty red hut where we would spend the night. Matt found the path to take down to the valley—and I saw his expression grow concerned. He searched for a few minutes to see if there might be an alternate trail. There wasn’t.
“It’s kind of steep, but I’m sure we’ll be okay,” Matt said, leading the way.
The narrow trail cut into a mountain with sheer rock on one side and a precipitous drop of several thousand feet on the other. In other words, any misstep and I’d tumble off the mountain and never be seen again. Given that I can be clumsy, that seemed as likely as not. Some handholds and a cable had been cut into the rock, and I clung to them miserably, afraid to move. But I had no choice. Going back wasn’t an option and the path was much too narrow and treacherous for anyone to hold my hand or help me. I could stay in place and burst into tears (my first choice) or figure out how to get through.
I concentrated, focusing on every footfall. Ron walked protectively behind me while Matt scampered ahead, and every c
ouple of minutes he stopped and called out encouragement.
“Ten more minutes, Mom, and we’re off this thing completely,” he said at one point.
Looking ahead, I knew his timing was excessively optimistic, but I was grateful for the coaxing. Half an hour later, when the path grew wider and the sheer drop turned into a gentle incline, Matt raised his arms in victory.
“We did it,” he called out.
Seeing me tired and tremulous, he took my backpack and slung it over his chest (his own was already on his back).
“You don’t have to carry my pack!” I said.
“I like it. I’m balanced,” he said cheerfully.
For the next few minutes, he walked next to me, telling charming stories, singing little songs, and whistling (quite literally) a happy tune. I felt like crying again, but for a different reason.
“Thank you for getting me through,” I said.
If a researcher had called me during that descent, I would have had to admit that it was one of the most terrifying moments in my life. Happy? Grateful? Not in my vocabulary just then. But afterward, I was elated to think about what we’d done and filled with gratitude for my solicitous son. It didn’t take long for the remembering self to kick in. When we all sat down on the terrace of the hut with our large lemonades, Matt said, “What a cool day of hiking!”
“Incredibly cool!” I agreed. With the descent behind me, I could appreciate how beautiful the hiking had been. And I’d done it!
In the mountain escapade, my experiencing self was miserable and my remembering self felt all the satisfaction—but it can work the other way, too. Say you have dinner at a new restaurant where the food is luscious, the service luxe, and you and your beloved canoodle over every bite. Your experiencing self gets two hours of sensual delights, and as you dip into the crème brûlée, you might feel very grateful for the rich pleasures. But for the final course, the waiter spills coffee all over your favorite silk blouse and when you go to leave, the checkroom has lost your computer bag. Was it a good evening? Kahneman would say those two hours of indulgence—each of the 120 moments—actually happened and can’t be taken away. But your more powerful remembering self feels churlish. After going to the dry cleaner and trying to recover what was on the computer, you may give up crème brûlée altogether.
Professor Kahneman has found that the ending of an experience has an undue effect on our overall memory of it. So, for example, if you have a medical procedure that ends with a burst of pain, you’ll remember the procedure as much worse than if that same pain occurred in the middle. And he found that the remembering self isn’t affected by how long an event lasts. What matters is its intensity—its high points and low points. Those neurons that make anything new and different stay in our minds can work to your advantage. For example, taking several short trips in a year is likely to give you more peak experiences—and grateful memories—than one long but unremarkable vacation.
A couple of days after I learned about all this, I was walking outside with my friend David when we got caught in a sudden downpour.
“This is going to be funny later!” I said as we raced for cover, getting soaked. Once we were inside, I explained about the experiencing self versus the remembering one.
David nodded thoughtfully. “Okay, but which one should you try to please? Which makes you more grateful?”
An interesting question, because gratitude can flow from every part of our (different) selves. Expressing gratitude in the moment makes life more positive for the experiencing you. And if the remembering you manages to put a positive glow on something that happened in the past (hello, alpine hiking!), you get to be grateful all over again.
Thinking about Kahneman’s research, it struck me that “stuff” improves our well-being only if it taps into the remembering self. The objects that we most cherish are probably connected to a memory, like the perfume bought on a trip to Paris or the outfit your baby wore on his first birthday. Sometimes the provenance of an object—the love with which it’s given and the gratitude we feel—provides a sheen that lingers. But that’s not an excuse for keeping a lot of clutter. Your remembering self can shimmer with gratitude for the joys of your wedding day even without the prompting of a slightly yellowing lace-and-pearl gown hanging in the attic. Even when we think we are grateful for what we possess, it’s often the bygone experience that we want to have and hold.
Science and research can always win me over, so I thoroughly accepted the idea of spending on experiences rather than stuff. But something kept nagging at me. Ah, yes, the voice of my frugal and prudent mother. Ever practical, she had always believed in putting hard-earned dollars toward possessions that lasted. She considered vacations and parties and fancy evenings out to be fleeting frivolities that vanished with the wind. “Spend on things you’ll see every day,” she lectured me when I was younger, claiming that’s what her mother had taught her, too. My mother rarely traveled, but she had great sofas.
I now understood that Mom was right about investing in things that endured—she was just wrong about what endures. Sofas get old and stained, and the problem with spending on objects you see every day is that you stop seeing them. Possessions recede into the background, but experiences stay vivid in our memories. Maybe the vacation you took to Miami extended only five days, but you can’t really measure by clock or calendar. If it becomes part of your memory and part of who you are, it can make you grateful forever. Short-lived? Not at all. Poignantly, when my dad got very ill at the end of his life, I sat with him in the hospital, holding his hand and reminiscing about what had made him happy. He talked about his children and his wife and even described one of their very rare trips—a cruise to Alaska. He had glowing memories of glacial scenery and dinner under the stars. On the list of what made him grateful, he never mentioned the furniture.
Ron and I raised our children in the suburbs of New York, and once they had grown (sigh), we decided to make our move to the city. I had gotten tired of seeing the same walls and wanted something new. The house sold quickly, at which point I panicked and an odd reverse habituation set in. Now that they wouldn’t be mine anymore, I looked with new eyes at the pretty wallpaper, the graceful fireplace, and the library-like bookshelves. How could I have grown tired of them? Our big basement and attic contained endless items saved from our children’s childhoods—finger paintings Zach created in nursery school, homework Matt aced in first grade, at least twenty pairs of tiny blue Keds sneakers, and T-shirts from every season of Little League. I had trunks, file cabinets, chests, and boxes full of treasures.
“Why are we selling this house?” I moaned to my husband one night. “We raised our children here.”
“Yes, but we’re not selling our children,” he reminded me.
I selected a few items to save (Zach’s third-grade report on the Mayans made the cut) and took pictures of others (all those cute stuffed animals)—and then I got ruthless. I brought boxes of clothes to the Junior League resale shop and left huge bags full of blankets and quilts and cookware for the veterans’ charity. I gave away hundreds of books and donated the boys’ outgrown clothes and skates so others could use them. I finally understood that it wasn’t the frayed baby blanket that made me grateful but the memory of the sweet baby who used it. The day we moved, I stood by as every single item I still owned was piled into a van. If you measured life by stuff acquired, mine had just driven away.
Once the house stood completely empty, Ron and I did a final walk-through—and felt strangely detached from the empty rooms.
“So it wasn’t the house that made us happy—it was the people in it,” I said as we closed the door for the last time. All the things I’d given away didn’t matter, because I got to keep what did—the memories of birthday parties and laughter and family hugs. We decorated our new apartment in Manhattan with clean, minimalist lines, and people who visited marveled at the spare, open feel. One friend twirled
around and said, “I feel like I can breathe in here!” I also liked being able to breathe.
In a study out of Baylor University, researchers in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience found an inverse connection between stuff and gratitude. They concluded that “materialism has been consistently related to lower levels of life satisfaction.” Instead of trying to fill the psychological holes of the soul with jewelry and clothes and cars, it’s better to use gratitude to make the emptiness disappear altogether. As an extra bonus, people who are grateful are less likely to yearn for the stuff that ultimately won’t add to overall well-being, anyway.
The idea that stuff, stuff, and more stuff won’t make us happy seems to be catching on. According to The Wall Street Journal, a peak in clothes buying occurred in 2005, when Americans bought an average of sixty-nine garments per person. Sixty-nine garments? Even counting every pair of black tights I own (and I do own a lot of them) that seems stunning. By 2013, we were spending more but buying less—down to sixty-three garments. Instead of bragging about their endless purchases, fashion bloggers were now heralding the “minimalist closet” and Instagramming photos of half-empty shelves. The idea was to have less so you could appreciate more.
Though on board about the value of experiences over stuff, I realized that a few of my possessions did make me grateful. Ron and I both love art, and my terrific friend Margot Stein, an art dealer with an extraordinary eye, has found fabulous lithographs for us over the years that we could afford (only because she was so generous in pricing for us). Every morning when I walked into my living room, I stopped to look at my favorite prints, and they always made me smile.
I wondered if art might be an exception to Professor Gilovich’s rule about experiences inspiring the most gratitude. But then it occurred to me that art was an experience. Whether I looked at interesting images on my wall or in a museum, I interacted with them. Surely other objects crossed that line to being experiences and so didn’t fall prey to habituation or hedonic treadmills. I know a guy who collects classic guitars—material objects, maybe, but also instruments with a legacy that he shares every time he strums the strings. Comedian Jay Leno keeps 130 cars and 93 motorcycles in his garage (actually a hangar next to an airport), and each one has a key in the ignition because he drives them. “I never thought of it as a collection,” Leno once said, explaining that he just kept the stuff that made him happy—whether it was a $1.2 million McLaren, a vintage Bugatti, or a Chevy.
The Gratitude Diaries Page 9
