Dreaming about making an expensive purchase? Consider the following excerpt on ‘Adaptation’ from page 256 of Rob Walker’s book “Buying In – the Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are”:
“…Human beings have a remarkable capacity to get used to things. This means a capacity to get used to miserable situations. And it means a tendency to become bored with stuff that used to thrill us: to overestimate how much pleasure any given purchase will give and for how long. Thus, the iPod eventually gets taken for granted, the visually thrilling high-end kitchen appliance simply becomes your stove, and the (Lance Armstrong) Livestrong bracelet ends up at the back of a drawer.
We all know that novelty fades … What we’re not good at is judging the ‘intensity and duration’ of our feelings about events (i.e. purchases) that haven’t happened yet … we’re not good at figuring out how to factor (our knowledge of fading novelty) into our decision making. ”
(disclosure: my wife and I just bought a new vehicle)
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