[ neoblogical ]

Miranda Hitti has a story on WebMD.com, “Why We Buy: Weighing Pleasure Versus Pain,” dated January 5, 2007.

Hitti interviews three Phsychologists who recently published an article in Neuron in which they present findings that “defy an economic theory that purchasing decisions are a trade-off between current pleasure (buying something now) and future pleasure (buying something else later).”

Their findings could lead to a new way of looking at not only personal finance but also personal productivity. In fact, their ideas might add substance to the “how” and “why” of current trends led by books like David Allen’s Getting Things Done(GTD) and similar approaches to personal finance that feature simplification and personal customization, like Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi’s All Your Worth.

Not only in personal finance, but also in the literature of personal productivity and life management (e.g. freshman workshops and classes at universities that aim to teach life management skills), the common wisdom seems to be that most problems are associated with long term thinking versus short term thinking. Of course, the pain/pleasure principle does not have to replace such thinking. it may be that it merely augments it. Perhaps the reason spending the money now is not painful is related to the perception that the pleasure of the purchase outweighs the present pain of the expenditure, but that might also be related to a failure to consider the long term pain, or future pain, of this single decision or action, or the *cumulative* pain of many instances of similar short term decisions/actions.

What does seem intriguing about this view is how it affects the various life management approaches that we attempt to implement to help ourselves make better decisions both now and long-term. Most of those systems are associated with things like budgets, spending logs, time logs, details agendas, etc. None of them, simply, work like people really live. So we don’t use them because the pain of using them is much greater than the pleasure of living reactively from moment to moment, until we reach crisis moments (like going broke or falling irrecoverably behind on our time commitments) that cause us to consider “cracking down” on ourselves again. The new approaches like Getting Things Done and All Your Worth find a way to make the system seem pleasant rather than painful on a daily basis, or at least less painful. And in this they are really still doing what pioneers of the field like Steven Covey have been doing all along, trying to find ways to get people to bring the future into the present in their thinking so that they can see the real pain and the real pleasure, considered over the long term, in the now of making their daily decisions. The difference is that once we’ve been convinced of this approach, the new methods give us life management approaches that don’t add pain overhead to each decision. The new systems are more effective than the old because they don’t drive us back to making bad decisions in order to avoid the pain of complex management tactics and systems. The new ways of doing things are not only good for the long haul, they are not painful in the short term, either (or at least much less painful than previous methods). This is the tao of the life hack.

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