Oh Good, Money Can Buy Happiness After All

In a new paper titled “If Money Doesn’t Make You Happy Then You Probably Aren’t Spending It Right,” social psychologist Elizabeth Dunn argues that if money doesn’t make us happy we probably aren’t spending it right. But fortunately the solution is awesome because it involves buying yourself lots of nice things. Here’s a few of her best tips (with more here, and even more if you want to download the entire 29-page paper):

Buy experiences instead of things:
Individuals experienced elevated mood when contemplating a past experiential purchase (relative to those contemplating a past material purchase), suggesting that experiential purchases produce more lasting hedonic benefits.

Buy many small pleasures instead of few big ones:
If we inevitably adapt to the greatest delights that money can buy, than it may be better to indulge in a variety of frequent, small pleasures — double lattes, uptown pedicures, and high thread-count socks — rather than pouring money into large purchases, such as sports cars, dream vacations, and front-row concert tickets.

Uptown pedicures, they’ve been living in their uptown world/I bet they never cloaked these backstreet toes, etc. [Via]

Photo by wordjunky