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.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
happiness, that they're just kind of getting us in a wheel of doing the same thing over and over again.
And instead, we can think about, you know, maybe 49 coffees is enough this week, and I could take the money from the 50th coffee and do something a little bit different with it.
One opposite of buying stuff for yourself is very simply getting rid of the stuff part and spending money on experiences instead of on stuff.
Experience is really broadly defined.
A trip to space would be fantastic as an experience, but also going out to lunch with a friend, spending time on your hobbies, for example, which are more experiential.
Those kinds of purchases where instead of just a thing you're putting on a shelf, it's a thing that you're going to interact with, that you're going to have an experience with.
Maybe you'll even do it with other people instead of by yourself.
Experiences on average tend to get us more happiness with our money than buying more of the same stuff.
we do a few things to to try to decide you know on average should people shift from doing more of that to doing more of something else and one of the key ones is if we ask people you know would you like to be happy in life most people say yes i would if we say would you like to be happier most people say yes i would
And so then we ask them with any behavior they engage in, do you think that behavior is making you happier?
When you did that, did you feel the same after?
Did you feel worse after?
Did you feel better after?
So we're trying in a sense to help people if they have this goal of being happy in their lives, feeling good about their lives.
We're trying to give them some advice, a little bit of guidance on things they might do that
that might maximize that happiness for them.
And so you can think about, sometimes we do experiments where we give people money and send them out in the world and have them spend it in different ways.
For example, buy something for yourself or buy an experience.
That night we can call them up and say, how happy are you?
literally just one to 10, how happy do you feel right now?
Showing 41–60 of 351 · page 3 of 18
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