One of Gretchen Rubin’s revelations from her Happiness Project is that people do not spend enough time thinking about how money could buy them some happiness and instead fall prey to the expensive gym membership effect:
The expensive-gym-membership effect is when you pay money for something in order to force yourself to make time for a priority.Because you want to make yourself go to the gym, you pay a lot for a membership, with the thought, “Gosh, this costs so much, I’ll feel like I have to go to the gym!” Guess what. You won’t. The expensive-gym-membership effect is how gyms stay in business. They can’t afford to have a treadmill for every member, but they know a lot of paying members will never show up.
The effect is more general than that though:
Merely spending money on something doesn’t do much to push you along. You have to decide to make an activity a priority. Probably the reason you’re not taking long baths isn’t because you don’t have the right bath oil, but because you have three kids and no time. You buy the bath oil as an expression of your desire to change something in your life – but that purchase won’t do it.
Could the “value equation” (IE, “I value it, therefore I’ll pay for it”) work in both directions? In other words, perhaps “I paid for it, therefore I’ll now value it.”
Once something is paid for it rises in one’s personal value chain and can be prioritized in one’s schedule. Dunno. Worked for me, at least.
I am not suggesting this be universalized, but by analogy, “sell high and buy low” works every bit as well as “buy low and sell high”. Just a reversal in time order. Ask any competent trader.
In the long run, of course,