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 over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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Something You Should Know · The Science of Happier Spending & How to Set Healthy Boundaries - SYSK Choice · 8 Aug 2026 podcast

So you'd think if you win the lottery a year, let's say a million, five million dollars, whatever it might be, you'd think a year later you'd be really happy.

Instead, many lottery winners are worse off, not financially, but worse off psychologically, in part because everyone they've ever known, including their kids and including their spouse, now just sees them as a walking dollar sign.

So the money is good and they can spend it on cool things, but actually it's interfering with the quality of their relationships.

And again, we could expect that actually.

It's just we feel like winning the lottery is good.

I wish I had more money.

Again, if I won the lottery, I'd take the money.

I'm not saying more money isn't something nice to have.

But when you really drill down into it, why is it nice to have?

And what are the consequences of the decisions that we make with our money that might be cool in the moment, but have some other effects that we might not have?

For sure.

One of the things that we see that's really interesting is when we have people reflect back on an experience they bought or on a thing they bought.

So now they've made the decision, the vacations in the past or the TV, they've already bought it.

It turns out that retrospectively, things still make us less happy than experiences.

And the reason is when you buy a new TV, the minute you put it on your wall,

a better TV comes out and now you feel that your TV isn't so good or your neighbor gets a better TV and you feel bad or your kids spill stuff on the TV and it doesn't look as good.

So when we buy stuff, we can see it degrading and we can see that other people are beating us on that thing.

A funny thing about experiences, they're gone.

So the evidence is lost to us.

And so what we do is we tend to idealize them like family vacations were often a nightmare.

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