Is It True That Buying Experiences Instead of Things Always Makes You Happier?

A holiday can stay in your mind for years. A new phone can feel exciting for a few weeks and then become the thing sitting in your pocket that you barely notice.

That contrast is behind one of the most repeated pieces of personal-finance advice: if you want to spend money on happiness, buy experiences instead of things.

There is real research behind the idea. People often report more satisfaction from experiences such as trips, concerts, meals and other activities than from buying possessions such as clothes, gadgets and furniture. Experiences can also create anticipation before they happen and memories afterward. They can become connected to relationships and to the way people see themselves.

But the word always causes a problem.

A physical purchase can also make you happier, sometimes for years. A bicycle can become a source of exercise and recreation. A musical instrument can turn into a hobby. A good mattress can improve every night you sleep on it. A washing machine can remove hours of unpleasant work. A computer can help someone earn a living.

So the evidence does not really say, "Experiences are good and things are bad."

It says something more useful:

The happiness you get from spending money depends heavily on what the purchase does for you.

Verdict: partly true

Research generally supports an experiential advantage. When people compare discretionary spending on experiences with spending on ordinary material possessions, experiences often produce greater satisfaction. The Association for Psychological Science's summary of this research — "buy experiences, not things" — reflects findings that have been replicated across many studies.

Several explanations have been proposed. Experiences tend to create stronger social connections, become part of a person's identity and generate fewer comparisons with other people's possessions. Carter and Gilovich's work on this found that experiential purchases resist the kind of unfavorable comparison that possessions invite, partly because they become part of the buyer's story. A person can compare a car, phone or house with someone else's. Experiences are harder to compare in quite the same way because their value depends heavily on what actually happened to you.

People also tend to enjoy looking forward to experiences, not just the experiences themselves.

But this advantage has limits.

Some people get as much or more happiness from material purchases. Useful possessions can improve daily life repeatedly. People with fewer financial resources may value material purchases differently because a physical purchase can meet an important need or remove a practical problem. Research summarized by INSEAD on social class and purchase happiness found the experiential advantage concentrated among higher-resource consumers, with lower-resource consumers sometimes gaining equal or greater happiness from material purchases.

Research also shows that experiences can go badly. When an experience is disappointing, the same qualities that make a good experience memorable can make a bad one memorable too.

So "buy experiences, not things" works better as a general tendency than as a rule.

Why experiences often make people happier

Imagine two purchases.

One is an expensive shirt that looked exciting in the store. You wear it several times, get used to it and eventually stop noticing it.

The other is a weekend trip with someone you care about.

The trip doesn't disappear when you return home. You can remember it, talk about it and look at photographs from it. The event can become part of your relationship with the other person and part of your own story.

This is one reason psychologists have found an experiential advantage.

Research reviewing decades of work — including studies of experiential consumption and the pursuit of happiness — has identified several mechanisms behind it. Experiences can strengthen relationships, become more closely connected with personal identity and reduce the kind of social comparison that often happens with possessions.

A holiday isn't automatically better because it cost more than a new television. Its value may come from the people who were there, what you did, how you felt and what the event came to mean afterward.

The happiness can begin before the experience

There is another advantage that is easy to overlook.

You can enjoy an experience before it happens.

Think about booking a trip several months ahead. You might look at the destination, plan what you'll do, talk about it with someone else and count down the days.

The experience hasn't happened yet, but it is already giving you something.

Research on anticipatory consumption has found that people often derive more pleasure from waiting for an experience than from waiting to receive a material possession.

That gives an experience a longer emotional timeline.

There may be:

anticipation → the experience itself → memories afterward

A physical purchase can have the same stages, but the anticipation and memory may work differently.

You might spend weeks waiting for a new camera to arrive. Then the camera can become part of your life for years. In that case, the object isn't simply an object anymore. It has become a way of creating experiences.

That distinction matters.

A thing can be an experience machine

This is where the simple "experiences versus things" argument starts to fall apart.

Take a bicycle.

Technically, you bought a material object.

But what did you really buy?

You bought morning rides. You bought a way to explore your city. You may have bought exercise, a hobby and perhaps a social activity if you ride with other people.

The physical bicycle is the thing. Much of the happiness comes from what you repeatedly do with it.

The same can happen with a camera, musical instrument, gaming system, camping equipment, cooking equipment or even a television.

Research on consumer happiness increasingly recognizes that purchases can contain both material and experiential qualities. A television is a physical object, but watching films with family is an experience. A musical instrument is a possession, but playing music is an activity.

The categories overlap.

A 2023 study in Psychology & Marketing pushed this further, testing whether the hedonic or utilitarian character of a purchase matters more than its material or experiential label. The result: hedonic objects could outperform utilitarian experiences — a fun physical product sometimes beat a practical activity, because the pleasure the purchase delivers matters more than the category it sits in.

That is why asking whether something is a "thing" or an "experience" can sometimes miss the more useful question:

What will this purchase allow you to do?

Material things can produce more frequent happiness

There is also a finding that gets lost in the usual advice.

Material purchases are not simply short bursts of happiness followed by nothing.

Research comparing the two types of spending — including Weidman and Dunn's work on "the unsung benefits of material things" — has found that material and experiential purchases can provide happiness in different ways. Material purchases may produce smaller but more frequent moments of pleasure, while experiences can produce stronger happiness during individual occasions.

That makes sense when you think about something you use regularly.

A comfortable chair might make you happy every evening.

A good kitchen appliance might make cooking easier several times a week.

A favorite pair of shoes might be satisfying whenever you wear them.

A vacation might create a much stronger peak of happiness, but it happens over a limited period.

Neither pattern is automatically better.

It depends on what you value and what the purchase continues to do after the initial excitement disappears.

The useful thing you buy can beat the impressive thing you buy

There's a big difference between buying a material object because it looks impressive and buying one because it solves a problem.

Suppose someone buys an expensive phone mainly because it is the newest model. The novelty may fade.

Another person buys a laptop because their old computer constantly crashes and makes work miserable.

The second purchase may not produce an Instagram-worthy moment. It can still improve that person's life every day.

This is especially relevant to money.

Research on spending and well-being suggests that people don't get happiness from spending in only one category. A multinational study published in Communications Psychology found that experiences were associated with high levels of happiness, but other spending categories, including education, also mattered. The relationship between spending and well-being also differed across higher- and lower-income countries.

The same study found that people who reported happier spending decisions also showed greater improvements in overall subjective well-being months later.

Money can therefore improve life in several ways.

Sometimes the best purchase is something fun.

Sometimes it is something useful.

Sometimes it is something that removes a problem you've been putting up with for years.

What about buying things that save time?

This is one of the clearest examples of why the simple rule breaks down.

A purchase doesn't necessarily have to create an exciting experience to make you happier.

It can give you time.

Researchers studying time-saving purchases found that people who spent money on services that freed up time reported greater life satisfaction. In the experiments behind the famous "buying time promotes happiness" research, working adults reported greater positive affect and less time stress after making a time-saving purchase than after making a material purchase.

Think about what that means.

Paying for grocery delivery, household help or another service might look like spending money on something ordinary.

But the real purchase is time.

And time can then be spent on the experiences that people often say they value most.

So the supposedly "better" experience may actually depend on a material or practical purchase that makes the experience possible.

Does having less money change the answer?

Yes.

This is one of the most important qualifications to the popular advice.

If someone already has their basic needs covered and has money available for discretionary spending, buying an experience may provide more emotional value than adding another possession to an already crowded life.

But that isn't everyone's financial situation.

Research has found differences based on socioeconomic status. In studies examining experiential and material purchases, people with greater resources showed an experiential advantage, while people with fewer resources did not show the same pattern. For someone dealing with limited resources, a material purchase may be more valuable because it solves a practical problem or satisfies an important need.

That shouldn't be surprising.

A person choosing between a weekend away and a broken refrigerator doesn't face the same spending decision as someone who already has everything they need.

"Buy experiences, not things" becomes poor financial advice when it encourages someone to spend money on leisure while ignoring something that would materially improve their daily life.

What happens when the experience goes badly?

Experiences have another weakness that the slogan doesn't mention.

They can fail.

A new object can disappoint you too, but a bad experience can be difficult to reverse.

The hotel can be terrible.

The flight can be delayed.

You can get sick.

The concert can be disappointing.

The people you travel with can argue.

Research has found that the experiential advantage depends partly on how the purchase turns out. Positive experiences can produce more happiness than material purchases, but negative experiences don't automatically have the same advantage.

In fact, because experiences tend to remain psychologically meaningful, a bad one can remain meaningful too.

That's the other side of the memory argument.

A great trip can become one of your favorite memories.

A disastrous trip can become the story you tell about the time everything went wrong.

The emotional intensity cuts both ways.

Does memory make experiences more valuable?

Often, but not simply because experiences are never forgotten.

Memory changes over time. So does the way we think about purchases.

Experiences can gain meaning because we connect them with people, places and important periods of our lives. A material object can do this too.

A watch inherited from a parent is a thing.

It can also carry decades of meaning.

A childhood home is a physical place.

It can also contain memories that are far more valuable than the building itself.

And sometimes an object becomes valuable because it represents an experience.

A photograph, concert ticket, souvenir or old piece of equipment can act as a physical reminder of something that happened.

Recent research on mementos has even examined why people become more interested in keeping photographs, souvenirs and ticket stubs as an experience comes to an end.

The boundary between "experience" and "thing" gets blurry very quickly.

What about taking hundreds of photos?

Digital technology has changed how we preserve experiences, but it hasn't made memory automatically better.

Research on photo-taking has produced mixed findings depending on how the camera is used.

Taking photographs can increase engagement and enjoyment in some situations. It can also improve memory for certain visual details.

But taking photographs with the goal of sharing them with other people can reduce enjoyment by increasing concern about how the experience will look to others.

Other research has found that using media during an experience can affect memory for what actually happened.

So having 2,000 photographs from a holiday doesn't guarantee that the holiday will feel more valuable years later.

The important part is still the experience itself and what you did with it.

What is post-vacation depression?

You can also spend a lot of money on an experience and feel worse when it ends.

People sometimes describe sadness, low motivation or disappointment after returning from a vacation as "post-vacation blues."

The term isn't a formal psychiatric diagnosis, and the experience varies from person to person.

Research on vacation recovery has found that vacations can improve well-being, but some of those benefits fade after people return to normal routines. A meta-analysis of vacation studies found positive effects on health and well-being, but those effects tended to diminish after work resumed.

That doesn't mean the vacation was worthless.

Sleep also doesn't become pointless because you eventually get tired again.

The value of an experience doesn't have to remain permanently elevated to have been worthwhile.

A week away can give you rest, time with people you care about, new memories and a break from your normal routine even if you feel completely ordinary again a week later.

So when should you buy the thing instead?

There isn't a universal rule, but a few patterns make the decision easier.

A material purchase may make more sense when it:

• Solves a problem you deal with regularly
• Saves you meaningful amounts of time
• Improves your health or comfort
• Helps you work or earn money
• Supports a hobby you actually use
• Creates repeated enjoyable experiences
• Replaces something unreliable or broken
• Meets an important need
• Will be used frequently for years

An experience may make more sense when it:

• Gives you time with people you care about
• Creates something you'll genuinely remember
• Lets you do something you've wanted to try
• Provides novelty or learning
• Strengthens an important relationship
• Gives you a break from an exhausting routine
• Fits comfortably within your budget

And sometimes the best choice is both.

Buy the guitar.

Then play it for ten years.

Buy the camera.

Then use it to document your life.

Buy the camping equipment.

Then actually go camping.

Buy the comfortable sofa.

Then use it for thousands of evenings with people you love.

The object and the experience aren't enemies.

The better question isn't "things or experiences?"

The research gives experiences a real advantage in many situations. They often create stronger memories, social connection and anticipation than ordinary material purchases. That's why the advice became so popular in the first place.

But turning that finding into "experiences always make you happier than things" goes too far.

A purchase that sits in a cupboard and exists mainly to signal status is one thing.

A purchase that you use every day to exercise, create something, work, relax or spend time with other people is something else entirely.

And a purchase that removes an exhausting daily chore can improve your life in a way that has nothing to do with novelty.

The useful question is therefore not:

"Is this a thing or an experience?"

It's:

"After I spend this money, what will actually change in my life?"

If the answer is a single afternoon of excitement, the experience may be worth it.

If the answer is a useful object that makes the next five years easier or more enjoyable, the thing may be worth it.

And if the answer is an object that gives you thousands of future experiences, you've stopped choosing between the two.

You're buying both.