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A big family vacation looms on the distant horizon. You pore over hotel reviews to find just the right place. Every day you check plane fares and different combinations of connecting flights to find the best deal. You comb through Zagat ratings to unearth the ideal places for dinner.
After all that, you need to figure out which tours, which museums, which beaches are worth your time.
Think of the investment of your time and energy in making that plan – and the investment of money that it will take to put the plan into action. Factor in all your daydreaming about your vacation plans, and it amounts to a major life commitment.
We expend so much of ourselves on trips and other extraordinary experiences because there is such great joy potential there, and we want to seize all of it. And to a large extent, experts celebrate the effort because study after study has found we gain more happiness from our experiences than we do from our stuff.* Though it might seem like spending $500 on a chair you’ll have for decades would have a more lasting effect than spending that same money on a concert seat you’ll sit in for two hours, the experience persists in our mind and contributes to our well-being long after we’ve stopped appreciating the chair.
But a new study suggests that the happiness value of our extraordinary experiences may be matched by the happiness value of our ordinary experiences. Put another way: an afternoon in your garden might be just as valuable to your long-term happiness as an evening in paradise.
Amit Bhattacharjee and Cassie Mogilner examined the effect of experiences on happiness, and found that as we get older an ordinary experience comes to be as important as an extraordinary experience in producing happiness.**
The mechanism for this transition appears to be self-definition. For the younger person, bungee-jumping or backpacking through Europe become staples of a self-narrative that feeds life satisfaction. As we age, however, we are just as likely to see ourselves in the little things we regularly do that bring us joy, like reading a good book or cooking a great meal.
The implication is clear. If we are willing to invest our energy trying to perfect the extraordinary moments of our lives, we should invest just as much care and attention enhancing the ordinary moments of our lives. Whether it is seeking out new recipes, new gardening techniques, new strategies to win the fantasy football league, a new route for your weekend bike ride, a new subscription to stream movies, there in an enormous potential payoff in enhancing your routine experiences.
People think of fairy tale weddings, fairy tale vacations and the like, moments when extraordinary events subsume ordinary life and define everything that comes later. But the truth is that enjoying the ordinary events you experience today may be the surest path to living happily ever after.
*Van Boven, L. (2005). Experientialism, materialism, and the pursuit of happiness. Review of General Psychology, 9(2), 132.
**Bhattacharjee, A., & Mogilner, C. (2014). Happiness from ordinary and extraordinary experiences. Journal of Consumer Research, 41(1), 1-17.
