Finding Ways to Spend Less and Find Happiness…or Chocolate

A little food for thought this Sunday…

“I moved to a trailer park,” says Mr. Belic, “which is the first real community that I’ve lived in in my life.” Now he surfs three or four times a week. “It definitely has made me happier,” he says.

“The things we are trained to think make us happy, like having a new car every couple of years and buying the latest fashions, don’t make us happy.”Mr. Belic says his documentary shows that “the one single trait that’s common among every single person who is happy is strong relationships.”

Buying luxury goods, conversely, tends to be an endless cycle of one-upmanship, in which the neighbors have a fancy new car and — bingo! — now you want one, too, scholars say. A study published in June in Psychological Science by Ms. Dunn and others found that wealth interfered with people’s ability to savor positive emotions and experiences, because having an embarrassment of riches reduced the ability to reap enjoyment from life’s smaller everyday pleasures, like eating a chocolate bar.

via Consumers Find Ways to Spend Less and Find Happiness – NYTimes.com.

I’d like a Snickers right about now. Though tomorrow I may wish for 100 Grand.