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
And what we can see across many, many experiences and a lot of research is some things after you do them, when we ask, are you happier?
People tend to say, not really.
And other things after they do them, if we say, are you happier?
People tend to say, yeah, I'm a little bit happier.
When people do more of these things over time, we do see that those people tend to be happier overall.
So when we shift you from business as usual with spending to some of these other pursuits, those people also tend to say, I'm actually happier with my life overall now.
For sure.
I think that's part of it.
So I think we're not often saying I'm about to buy something and then I stop and say, hold on, let me assess my happiness on a scale and ensure that, you know, this happiness, this purchase is more is better than another purchase.
We rarely do that.
But when we do buy things, we're doing it with the expectation that we're going to feel good about it.
So when we buy a new car or a new house or a new anything, we're doing it in a sense, almost implicitly saying this is a really good use of my money because I'm really going to like that thing that I'm going to buy right now.
I could buy anything in the world for that amount of money, but I've chosen to buy this specific thing with the theory that we're going to like the fact that we bought it.
What we try to ask people to do instead is there's nothing wrong with buying whatever you want to buy, but sometimes take that beat before you buy and say, hold on, this feels like it's going to be really great.
But if I think about what it's really going to do for my happiness, is it really going to pay off in any way?
It's a little bit like eating healthy is one way that I think about it, which is when we get a pizza and eat it, it's awesome.
You know, there's no doubt that pizza is fantastic and we get it because we like pizza.
And as we eat the pizza, we love the pizza.
So we're making a good decision up to that point.
After the pizza is where the problem happens though, which is, yes, it tasted good right then, but afterward, maybe we ate too much.
Showing 61–80 of 351 · page 4 of 18
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