In one of my very first posts, I wrote about an arti­cle that noted how “money will make you hap­pier, up to a point. After that, it makes no dif­fer­ence. That point is the won­der­fully quan­ti­ta­tive ‘point of com­fort’.

That is, once we have enough money to feed, clothe and house our­selves, extra money makes lit­tle impact to our hap­pi­ness. Or does it?

Recent research look­ing at this phe­nom­e­non is start­ing to sug­gest that more money can indeed buy hap­pi­ness, but we’re just not very good at doing so.

[Researchers] are begin­ning to offer an intrigu­ing expla­na­tion for the poor wealth-to-happiness exchange rate: The prob­lem isn’t money, it’s us. For deep-seated psy­cho­log­i­cal rea­sons, when it comes to spend­ing money, we tend to value goods over expe­ri­ences, our­selves over oth­ers, things over peo­ple. When it comes to hap­pi­ness, none of these deci­sions are right: The spend­ing that make us happy, it turns out, is often spend­ing where the money van­ishes and leaves some­thing inef­fa­ble in its place.

As Jonah Lehrer puts it, “Instead of buy­ing things, we should buy mem­o­ries”. But why? Lehrer continues:

Why don’t things make us happy? The answer, I think, has to do with a fun­da­men­tal fea­ture of neu­rons: habit­u­a­tion. When sen­sory cells are exposed to the same stim­u­lus over and over again, they quickly get bored and stop firing.

This memories-over-objects the­ory seems to tie-in quite nicely with these pre­vi­ous find­ings.