Spending Money Unusually
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- 29 March 2022, 7:00 pm—9:00 pm
- Financial District, Manhattan, New York, NY, USA
This Tuesday I’ll be leading a discussion on unusual ways to spend money to improve your overall life satisfaction. Spending money to make yourself happier is a classically hard problem, especially at higher incomes, because hedonic adaptation means you often adapt to new patterns and return to near your baseline happiness. But some things like social life and relationships are better at producing lasting happiness, and various unusual ways of spending money can be better at targeting those things.
Try to bring some ideas for unusual ways to spend money that you like, and we’ll have people briefly pitch their ideas and then discuss them as a group. Here’s some I’ll pitch as possibly making sense in some circumstances:
Renting apartments in two cities and flying between them every month to benefit from a broader social life and maintain connections if you move.
Living very frugally to build up savings to retire earlier out of your career (see FIRE, Mr Money Mustache)
Buying lots of really bright lights to mitigate risk of Seasonal Affective Disorder.
Putting lots of effort into finding well-fitted or tailored clothes because it makes a difference for some potential partners and finding a great partner is hugely valuable.
Spending more freely on things that let you be a more interesting person: hobby projects, weird art, memorable life experiences
Having an air mattress or guest room to host friends, and staying with friends instead of a hotel when traveling.
=== WHEN+WHERE ===
7:00pm Tuesday, March 29th
The Solarium (Join the mailing list at https://groups.google.com/g/overcomingbiasnyc and say you came from LessWrong to access the post with the address)
I think this is a fascinating topic and would love it if anyone who was present would write down some of the ideas that came up that they found particularly interesting.