Psych pro tip number two is that we can fight adaptation a little bit, not get rid of it, but we can thwart it a little bit through the process of what's called savoring. If we want to take hedonic adaptations seriously, it means we need to be investing in experiences, not material stuff that happiness bang for our buck that we get is better with experiences. It has the good sense to go away and you're left with nothing but a wonderful memory. He says this new car sticks around to disappoint you, but a trip to Europe is over. He's talking about the new car before, about how the new car sticks around to disappoint you. Again, I love Dan Gilbert's work so I can't help but quote him. That means the happiness boost that we get from experiences is much better and much longer lasting than the happiness boost that we get from material goods. Maybe the vacation is five days, concert is a couple of hours, it doesn't last long enough for you to get used to it. You don't have time to get used to it because most experiences don't last very long. You take a vacation to the Caribbean or Europe or something. Experiences things like you go to a concert, you go to a cool museum, you go on a vacation. We don't, it turns out, get used to experiences as much. It's this physical thing that's going to stick around. But that is what we get used to when it comes to a material good. That's true again for everything, whether it's new shoes that you buy or a new video game or whatever you're just going to get used to it. Today's car is going to be tomorrow's boring car that's in your garage. What do I mean by that? Well, we talked about the fact that if you buy some material good, like a wonderful car, you're just going to get used to it over time. Psych pro tip number one is that if you really want to take hedonic adaptation seriously, it suggests that when you're thinking about how you can buy things to be happier, you should focus on buying experiences, not material goods. We get to have our psych pro tips, we think about how to put this into practice. How can we deal with our hedonic adaptation and affectively forecast better? That means we finally get to the thing I was promising you before. That's what we're going to talk about now. They are just features of our mind, but we can figure out better ways to deal with them. You might be asking the question, how do I deal with that? How do I predict better? How can I shut off hedonic adaptation? Sadly, we cannot shut off these processes. We've been talking about how we hedonically adapt over time. We've been talking about how we're bad at affective forecasting.
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