Hi John! The Regular Daily Expenses contain a lot of expenses, like: rent, petrol, insurance, car maintenance, apartment & furniture stuff, clothing, stuff like that 🙂

Thanks for the nice words, Scott! You raise a very interesting point. The hedonic treadmill is something that I do eventually want to write a happiness essay about. I do believe that happiness has a tidal motion, it inevitably goes up and down, which is unpreventable. I’d like to see how this tidal movement (troughs after spikes) and the “amplitude” is influenced by different factors, of which spending money is one!

Everlasting happiness is indeed non-existent. No matter how hard you try, there are going to be periods of unhappiness in your life. It’s the tidal motion that cannot be prevented. But I do believe that we can still influence the tide, even when that influence is small. And that’s why I track my happiness and believe that others can benefit from it as well. 🙂

I would love to see an analysis of how the hedonic treadmill relates to your data. It looks to me like after each holiday spike, there is a very predictable trough. So while you may experience temporarily increased happiness during increased spending, you ultimately pay that happiness back 3-4 weeks later when you enter “withdrawal”. This would relate to a lot of the qualitative insight in Buddhism (and folk wisdom in general), would be really neat to see more quantitative data on the topic!

My hypothesis is that no positive experience really has a lasting effect on happiness, besides something like learning to meditate – after all, after all your spending, your happiness level ends up about where it started ;).

Best,
Scott

I use YNAB! I manually enter every expense and income using their app, it’s really easy 🙂

Thanks, Tom. Those are good points. I can’t think of a way to differentiate between measuring long term vs short term happiness. Short term happiness can easily morph into long term happiness, like you say. 🙂

Thanks Jojo, you raise some good points! The most difficult thing about happiness is that it’s impossible to measure objectively. I agree with you, long-term happiness comes from things that usually can’t be purchased (health, friends and relationships). However, I hope this article explains that spending money on certain things will have a bigger impact on your happiness than others. In the end, it depends on who you are and what influences your happiness the most. That’s why I try to spread the word about tracking happiness 🙂