Michael Norton
speaker
351 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 8 Aug
Michael Norton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
But in retrospect, people say that that was so wonderful.
That's when I came together as a family.
And you can't compare them as well with other people.
Was your trip to Vegas better than my trip to Vegas?
It's a lot harder than your TV is slightly larger than mine.
So even when we look back on our purchases, sometimes stuff traps us into a world we don't want to be in and experiences can liberate us from that world.
Definitely.
So debt is, not surprisingly, a huge negative drag on our well-being.
It's one of the most negative things we can do for our overall well-being is to have debt.
So these things are, if you're going to buy these things and go into debt to do it, now you're doing a trade-off that's probably not going to pay off that well for your overall well-being.
The thing you're adding is way too negative to make the evening out with your family or the three-day weekend vacation better than that debt.
It is, though, when it's not going to put you in debt, when your needs are met, that's the space where we're thinking, can people shift around a little bit what they're doing?
By the way, one of the biggest categories that makes people happy that we haven't discussed is instead of spending on yourself, spend on other people.
So treat your family to vacation or give money to charity or give money to a religious organization that you care about.
There again, we find that compared to spending on yourself, giving for most people most of the time also results in more happiness.
So sometimes what we're asking people to do is don't just think about yourself and your own needs, but also think about the needs of other people.
Most of us think it's nice to be nice to other people, but we can also show with our research, it actually tends to make you happier than spending that same amount of money on yourself.
Again, not at the cost of you going into debt, but if you're going to buy yourself a coffee, we've literally shown it'll make you happier to buy somebody else a coffee instead of just buying yourself your 50th coffee.
One of the things that researchers suggest rituals help us with, if you think of them, they're very orderly, they're very familiar.
Rituals give us a sense of being in the here and now and help us to get ready for what's coming instead of often our own minds stressing.
Showing 181–200 of 351 · page 10 of 18
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