How to Break the Buy-and-Replace Trap - Your Money Briefing

Wall Street Journal

22-05-2025

Full Transcript
This transcript was prepared by a transcription service. This version may not be in its final form and may be updated.
Imani Moise: Here's Your Money Briefing for Thursday, May 22nd. I'm Imani Moise for The Wall Street Journal. We've all been there. It's easy to convince yourself that that shiny new gadget, living room upgrade, or new car with that fresh leather smell is technically an investment when you first buy them. But odds are you'll be eyeing a new version long before you get your money's worth.
Jeff Galak: That's the treadmill, where we're just constantly chasing our tails, looking for the next thing to make us happy. That's fine if you can afford it. But unfortunately, the reality of the world is that most of us have budget constraints.
Imani Moise: This cycle of consumption, buying, replacing, and then buying again, can take a real toll on our wallets. So, how do we break free? We'll talk with Wall Street Journal contributor Jeff Galak about how to trick your brain into being happy with what you already have. That's after the break. Buying new things makes us happy, but for how long? Research shows that we tend to get bored with our things before they actually need to be replaced. A recent Wall Street Journal article outlined ways to beat boredom, boost happiness, and save money along the way. The writer of that article, Jeff Galak, joins me to explain. Jeff, let me start with a confession. I bought a couch during the pandemic that I loved. It was plush. It was stylish. It made my living room feel like a hotel lobby. But now I barely notice it. And when I do, it feels kind of blah. What's going on in our brains when that shift happens?
Jeff Galak: So, you're not alone in this situation. This is what we typically call hedonic adaptation. Some people call it satiation. Some people call it habituation. Others just call it boredom. What you're seeing is that most products that we want to buy that are enjoyable, they start out that way. But unfortunately, our brain tends to reduce that amount of enjoyment as we continue consuming or being exposed to any product that we might have. An example I always like to give is a simple one. If you take a bite of pizza, it's delicious. But by the 10th or 20th bite, it's just pizza at that point. It doesn't really have the same value, the same utility. It's the same thing that's going on with your couch.
Imani Moise: So, if this feeling of boredom with our stuff is natural and pretty much universal, why should we resist it? What does it mean for our wallets? And what's the cost of constantly chasing that sense of newness?
Jeff Galak: There's a phenomenon called the hedonic treadmill. And it's this idea that every time we buy something, as we just said, it becomes less enjoyable with time. And then what we're forced to do to regain that initial high level of enjoyment is to buy the next new flashy thing. And then that, once again, succumbs to hedonic adaptation or hedonic decline. And then we again have to buy that new thing. And so that's the treadmill, where we're just constantly chasing our tails, looking for the next thing to make us happy. That's fine if you can afford it. But unfortunately, the reality of the world is that most of us have budget constraints. And certainly, the more we consume, the more environmental impact that has. So there's a real negative effect on us as individuals from a financial perspective and on our planet from an environmental perspective.
Imani Moise: So, now let's talk about solutions. How can I keep my brain happy without succumbing to the urge to buy a new couch?
Jeff Galak: There's a few things you can do. The easiest is to think about what is your couch? Is it just the thing that you sit on in your living room or wherever you have it? Or is it also the accessories that happen to be on that couch, like your throw pillows or your blankets or whatever else you might be keeping there? Replacing a couch is expensive and costly. Replacing the covers on your throw pillows could be a few dollars or a couple dozen dollars. And that small change might be just enough to revitalize the enjoyment that you get from that couch. So, changing some of the accessories that go with it could be enough to reset that level of enjoyment at a much more financially and environmentally friendly way.
Imani Moise: In your story, you also talk about how you don't necessarily need to buy something in order to trick your brain into getting more enjoyment out of it. How does that work?
Jeff Galak: There's a couple ways we could do this, but I think the one you're talking about is this idea of just rearranging something. There's a study, not my own, that was done that looked at how novelty is perceived and experienced when the core features of it are just merely rearranged or reorganized. So, a real-world example of that might be, if you look at your closet and you're tired of your wardrobe, okay, you could go buy new clothing. That's an option. But of course, as we said, that's expensive. Or you could literally just rearrange how you organize your closet. Put your shirts where your pants usually are, put your pants where you keep your socks, and so on and so forth. And merely that act of moving things around makes the entire set of clothing that you have feel new, even though nothing has actually changed.
Imani Moise: And that also reminds me of this social media trend that I've seen, where people aren't just rearranging things, they're changing how they engage with those things. For example, wearing your pants as a top or a blouse as a skirt. Can you talk a little bit about how engaging with things in a new way can also give you that sense of novelty?
Jeff Galak: Yeah, absolutely. One of my favorite studies that I've read about, again, not my own here, is about consuming food, so popcorn in this example. Most of us will use our fingers to eat popcorn. But in this study, they asked people to eat popcorn with chopsticks. Most of us don't eat popcorn with chopsticks. And it turns out your enjoyment lingers for more. So, if you change the way you're consuming something to something that's unexpected, that will keep happiness with that popcorn lasting longer. And that's true of anything we do. So, I can't speak to the fashion choice of using your pants as a shirt or a top. But I can certainly say that that would be a new way to reconsume the exact same thing you have without being forced to buy something else. That's what we're trying to avoid here.
Imani Moise: Okay. So, if someone out there is listening and they're thinking that they're really feeling this itch to buy something new, what's one quick thing that they can do to try to revive joy in what they already own?
Jeff Galak: Instead of saying, "I don't have any shirts that I like," is there a way you can reuse one of your shirts, as you pointed out, in a novel way? You could also think about taking that product and changing it in some way. I mean, you can dye your clothing to be a different color, and that doesn't require a new purchase. It's simply making a superficial change to the existing items you have. So, just being creative with new uses for existing products is surprisingly effective at not just reducing financial burden but in increasing happiness, which is kind of what I'm mostly after.
Imani Moise: But modifying things you already have can also be expensive. Going back to the example of my couch, getting it reupholstered would probably cost more than getting a new one. Is there a rule of thumb to help you decide when it's better to refresh or replace?
Jeff Galak: The answer to that is incredibly idiosyncratic to the situation we're talking about. So, like, reupholstering a couch, I agree with you, that could be more costly than buying a new couch. And so you have to weigh that financial decision for yourself. Is that the appropriate thing for you to do? To buy a pack of dye to change a white shirt to a red shirt is pretty costless. How much does dye cost? A couple of dollars. So, that might be an easy one to do that'll maintain the happiness. But if the financial burden is high, then sure, that's probably not a reasonable solution for you. So, in the article, I also talk about a paint job for your car. That could be hundreds or thousands of dollars. That's cheaper than tens of thousands of dollars to replace a car. But obviously, that's a decision you might want to take a little more time with. So, I would scale the time you spend with the cost of the decision that you're facing. A new shirt doesn't have to be expensive. A new car is almost certainly going to be expensive. I'd take a lot more time on the expensive purchase than I would on the less expensive one.
Imani Moise: That's WSJ contributor Jeff Galak. And that's it for Your Money Briefing. This episode was produced by Ariana Aspuru, with supervising producer Melony Roy. I'm Imani Moise for The Wall Street Journal. Thanks for listening.