What Actually Feeds Your Life

There's a piece of research I think about often here. Behavioral scientists studied how people spend and found that most of us fall somewhere on a spectrum they called tightwads and spendthrifts. Tightwads feel too much of what the researchers named the "pain of paying," so they spend less than they themselves actually want to. Spendthrifts feel too little of it, so they spend more than they want to.

The detail that matters most is this: neither group is happy with how they handle money. Both are living at a distance from what they'd genuinely choose. And when the researchers looked at who was most content, it wasn't the savers, and it wasn't the spenders. It was the people in the middle, perhaps because they were the ones who weren't at war with themselves.