Intentional Spending for Happiness

"An interesting study was described in the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist/economist Daniel Kahneman’s book called Thinking Fast and Slow. Basically the study asked people to evaluate others' lives based on their levels of happiness over time. You would think that someone with a pretty consistently happy life would be evaluated better than someone with a neutral life that had a short-lived but major spike in happiness (winning a Nobel Prize for example), but people overwhelmingly evaluated the one-time happiness event person as having lived a better life. The message is that the highs in life, regardless of their duration, shape your life evaluation. This is a little antithetical to early retirement philosophy, but it is also important to note that life evaluations are always done in hindsight, and happiness expert Daniel Gilbert will tell you that hindsight is not a reliable predictor of future happiness."
- FlannelGuyROI.com

----- [Photo cred: CarbonNYC]