First time commenting on hacker news: Just wanted to say there's a difference between enjoying a treat you've worked for, and saving for retirement. When you have no clue how long you might live and how expensive your taxes, insurance, mortgage, medical bills, etc might cost in the future, it breeds the mindset of 'save as much as possible as quickly as possible so I can feel safe and relaxed about my future.'
I don't really care about fancy food and toys and cars and blah. Yeah, they are nice, but they are side effects of saving for housing and so on.
The absurd thing is how irrelevant and cheap they are. I could buy a brand new car once per year and scrap it for less than my rent. Ace.
A tiny tiny number of people find themselves in a position in which they have the choice to accumulate 'more than they need'. We used to call them millionaires, but suburban homes are starting to cost that now.
I find the study's interpretation, as reported, to be somewhat dubious.
Seated for what you know to be a study, with few options, even "pleasant music" is pretty boring. (And other sounds that can be accurately described as "white noise" are sometimes so pleasant that people buy devices to generate it!)
Turning a boring situation into a game helps make it less boring, and the researchers provided only one prominent option for doing so: how many chocolates can I 'score'? Plus, it's a psychological study... which participants know may have twists or deceptions. So possible motivations include:
• "I have all the music I can hear at home; maybe something interesting happens after choosing the 'noise' 10 times!"
• "Maybe they'll change the story after phase 1 and I will be able to take the chocolates away, or trade them for something else!"
• "My friend also signed up for this study, afterwards we can compare how many we each earned."
I'm also reminded of the study from about a year ago that got widely forwarded under headlines like "men prefer painful electric shocks to sitting alone with their thoughts". It was also over-spun to claim more than it showed, but the tendency there would be another way to explain this study's results: people prefer to try doing something novel, even if it's superficially/temporarily unpleasant, over idleness. That's not chiefly 'mindless accumulation', just curiosity and testing the edges of your environment.
>Nonetheless, the researchers note that productivity rates have risen, which theoretically lets many people be just as comfortable as previous generations while working less. Yet they choose not to.
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[ 16.6 ms ] story [ 947 ms ] threadI don't really care about fancy food and toys and cars and blah. Yeah, they are nice, but they are side effects of saving for housing and so on.
The absurd thing is how irrelevant and cheap they are. I could buy a brand new car once per year and scrap it for less than my rent. Ace.
A tiny tiny number of people find themselves in a position in which they have the choice to accumulate 'more than they need'. We used to call them millionaires, but suburban homes are starting to cost that now.
Seated for what you know to be a study, with few options, even "pleasant music" is pretty boring. (And other sounds that can be accurately described as "white noise" are sometimes so pleasant that people buy devices to generate it!)
Turning a boring situation into a game helps make it less boring, and the researchers provided only one prominent option for doing so: how many chocolates can I 'score'? Plus, it's a psychological study... which participants know may have twists or deceptions. So possible motivations include:
• "I have all the music I can hear at home; maybe something interesting happens after choosing the 'noise' 10 times!"
• "Maybe they'll change the story after phase 1 and I will be able to take the chocolates away, or trade them for something else!"
• "My friend also signed up for this study, afterwards we can compare how many we each earned."
I'm also reminded of the study from about a year ago that got widely forwarded under headlines like "men prefer painful electric shocks to sitting alone with their thoughts". It was also over-spun to claim more than it showed, but the tendency there would be another way to explain this study's results: people prefer to try doing something novel, even if it's superficially/temporarily unpleasant, over idleness. That's not chiefly 'mindless accumulation', just curiosity and testing the edges of your environment.
Oh, ffs.