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
It's almost everything that we buy, we typically don't think enough about how it's actually going to affect our lives.
So even when you buy a new pair of shoes, it's not as though you're gonna wear those every day for the rest of your life and be incredibly excited about them each time you put them on.
We kind of act like we're going to be when we buy it.
Think of houses.
So with houses, for example, as people get older, they tend to buy larger living spaces.
The size of your house, lots of research shows, is completely uncorrelated with how happy you are with your life.
Again, it feels like a nicer house would be better for you, but when you look at the data, it doesn't seem to do much for us.
And you can think of two reasons for that.
One is if you think of the time that you were happiest in your life, just purely the happiest in your life,
was it in the place that was the biggest?
Or were there other factors in your life that were contributing to the fact that that was the happiest time in your life?
Many people say, oh, the best time in my life was when I had four roommates and we lived in this tiny place and we were all struggling to get by.
That's when I was happiest, not with the huge house.
But related to the car thing, the other problem with huge houses is they tend to be farther from work.
And so when you buy a huge house, what you've also bought is a commute.
And commutes are not good for happiness.
And that's not just my subjective opinion.
The data show commutes are really bad.
You basically say every day for 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes in the evening, I'm going to be angry.
And then...
Showing 121–140 of 351 · page 7 of 18
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