Have you ever experienced a moment when you realized something you’d taken for truth might actually be a little bit backwards? Maybe it wasn’t anything major. Perhaps after a few years at your job, you found a shorter route to work that cut your time commuting, or you noticed something about your boss that made you see her in a different light.
Sometimes realizations like these can have more meaningful implications. For example, it’s possible there are concealed truths that would turn the way you see money on its head. From the time you were young, you probably recognized a cultural premium being placed on careers, hyper-productivity, and financial success.
What’s so backwards about that? A career you feel good about can be both rewarding and self-affirming; however, being focused solely on your career and maximizing the money you’ve earned can sour the sweetness of down-time and infuse your enjoyment of life with unnecessary anxiety.
So while it’s always good to be mindful about what you do with your time and money, spending a little bit of both can go a long way toward your happiness—especially when they’re spent on someone you love.
Why give a gift?
Research shows that having a substantial savings improves your peace of mind; but research also shows that spending money now and then improves your peace of mind too—you’ll likely feel a little more in-control and upbeat after an affordable shopping spree.
Before you break out your wallet and head to your favorite store in the pursuit of happiness, there’s more: spending your money on others is a much bigger boon to your emotional well being than buying for yourself.
One particular study about what happens when you give a gift found a few interesting things:
- Participants who typically spent more of their earnings on others felt happier than those who did not.
- Participants randomly chosen to spend money on other people experienced more happiness than those selected to spend on themselves.
- When asked to reflect on times they spent money and were happy with their purchase, participants mostly recalled money spent on gifts for others.
When you give a gift, does it matter what you’ve bought?
When you give a gift to your spouse, part of your emotional reward is anticipating the moment of giving, expressing your gratitude, and demonstrating that you’re intimately familiar with your spouse’s wants and interests—ultimately deepening your bond.
So if the big-picture payoff of gift-giving is about shared connection and experience, it makes sense that the happiest gifts you can give involve spending time together. For example, organizing a vacation you can go on as a family will probably be a much more memorable and rewarding gift than remodeling the second bathroom.
Hopefully this news comes as somewhat of a relief; if money is tight, going out to a nice dinner or even just a picnic might be all you need for a mood-boost—both for you and for the gift-receiver.
Viewing gifts in terms of time—not just money—can help you see your happiness a little differently. Rather than feeling like you need to direct all your time toward boosting your bank account, you can view your personal time as its own end. When you think about it, earning those peaceful moments of togetherness is probably a big part of why you work in the first place.
While the price tag can certainly play a big role when you give a gift, it’s not what determines the gift’s significance. The novelty and excitement of shiny, expensive things wears off quickly; what’s meaningful about giving your child a bike isn’t the bike itself, but the time he’ll spend riding it with you.
