Imagine moving into a house overlooking the sea. During the first weeks, you stop at the window each morning and think: I really live here. A year later, you stand at the same window wondering whether the coffee machine has finished. The view is unchanged. The house has not deteriorated. Your attention simply has other jobs now.
This small thought experiment describes something especially noticeable in expensive purchases but by no means confined to wealthy people. A new bicycle, a better desk or the first flat without noisy neighbours can produce the same experience. New things demand attention. Things reliably present in our lives eventually receive less conscious notice.
Concluding that luxury must therefore disappoint is too easy. A comfortable home can remain pleasant without stopping you in daily amazement. I am interested in a more precise question: what disappears through familiarity, and what remains?
The most exciting day is rarely an ordinary Tuesday
A purchase has several stages. First comes anticipation: how will the car drive? What will finally having enough space feel like? Then comes the special moment when it is new. Afterwards comes the longest stage, actually using it. Advertising tends to make that look suspiciously like day one.
Consider a carefully planned kitchen costing considerably more than its predecessor. Cooking for the first time, you notice every drawer and technical detail. Months later, you reach automatically for the right cupboard. You may still enjoy its convenience, but the running internal commentary stops. This is an achievement of perception: we need not rediscover familiar surroundings with every movement.
Psychologically, declining excitement about novelty should be distinguished from evaluating life overall. A purchase can receive less attention without losing its practical advantages. Confusing these creates an attractive but false theory: every gain supposedly evaporates completely when the initial enthusiasm fades.
What research means by adaptation
Psychologists often discuss hedonic adaptation: changes in emotional experience following positive or negative circumstances. An initially strong feeling may weaken over time. This produced the image of a happiness treadmill on which every change leaves us returning to the same starting point.
That image is memorable, which makes it risky. In their 2006 review, Ed Diener, Richard Lucas and Christie Napa Scollon reconsidered it. They argued that people have different starting levels, components of well-being respond differently and long-term evaluations can change under certain conditions. People also do not adapt uniformly to identical events.
In a further review in 2007, Richard Lucas showed that some major life changes are associated with lasting differences in well-being. These mainly concern significant life events, not long-term experiments with luxury cars. They do challenge the blanket claim that complete adaptation is a law of nature.
For consumption, declining excitement is plausible. How quickly and strongly it declines also depends on what was bought, how it is used and what it means in a person's life.
Attention is not unlimited
Why does the exceptional become ordinary? Part of the answer is attention. New features stand out; familiar ones become quiet assumptions. We often notice only when something fails. A quiet room does not bring happiness every morning. A building site appearing outside the window quickly reminds us of quiet's value.
In 2008, consumer researcher Joseph Redden examined how repeated experiences lose appeal. Across experiments, including consuming different jelly beans, enjoyment declined less when participants distinguished individual varieties rather than grouping everything under one broad category. The study's explanation was that noticing differences makes repetition feel less uniform.
A sweets experiment cannot, of course, explain how to keep your villa permanently exciting. The distance between study and everyday reality is too great. The mechanism is still revealing. Perceived variety depends not only on an object but on whether we continue noticing differences.
A car probably feels different on a familiar commute than on an unusual journey. A garden regularly tended and shaped may occupy a different place in life from perfectly landscaped grounds rarely entered. These are illustrations, not scientifically validated rankings of enduring luxury goods.
Comfort can outlast the thrill
Perhaps the most important distinction is between excitement and relief. A good bed, reliable heating, quiet surroundings or avoiding travel and waiting improve concrete conditions. Becoming accustomed to those improvements does not mean you would manage equally well without them.
Imagine someone who lived in a noisy flat for years. Initially after moving, they notice the silence every time they fall asleep. Later, they rarely think about it. Their nights may remain quieter nevertheless. That possible effect should not be confused with a continually measurable rush of happiness.
Some luxuries, conversely, depend heavily on feeling special. The third exceptional hotel providing less excitement than the first is hardly mysterious. The stay may remain pleasant. Its surprise may simply be weaker.
Luxury covers very different things anyway: functional quality, convenience, design, saved time, social standing and pleasure. One adaptation curve for all this would look tidy but would claim more explanatory power than the research supports.
Experiences beat things? Not quite that simple
Reading about consumption and happiness quickly brings the recommendation to buy memories rather than objects. There is research behind it. In 2003 studies, Leaf Van Boven and Thomas Gilovich found respondents often judged experiential purchases more rewarding than material ones. Their discussion included relationships, identity and positive later recollection.
That initially sounds like a postcard-sized recipe for the affluent: fewer cars, more travel. Matters become more interesting when an experience goes badly.
In a 2009 study, Leonardo Nicolao, Julie Irwin and Joseph Goodman examined how outcomes affect purchase evaluations. Experiences performed better among positively evaluated purchases. For negative experiences, the advantage disappeared or reversed for certain respondents. The authors attributed this partly to slower adaptation to experiences, for better and for worse.
A disappointing holiday can therefore annoy someone longer than a disappointing object. That is not a particularly romantic finding, but is useful for an honest account of consumption. Memories have no built-in quality filter.
Nor do the categories separate neatly. A good musical instrument is an object enabling years of experiences. A boat can simultaneously be a possession, hobby and shared experience. Classifying a purchase as material or experiential does not establish its place in everyday life.
Anticipation is part of the purchase
A purchase's enjoyment is not determined solely when it is used. Looking forward to it can already be pleasant. Across four studies in 2014, Amit Kumar, Matthew Killingsworth and Thomas Gilovich examined waiting for planned experiential and material purchases. Waiting for experiences was, on average, more positive.
What interests me is how value can be spread over time. A journey begins in the mind long before departure. Later, it may leave a story whose emphasis shifts each time it is told. A good camera may instead prove its worth through years of regular use. Both benefits are real but arrive at different times.
Here too, limitations matter. Research comparing things and experiences usually concerns ordinary consumption, not randomised studies among billionaires. Drawing direct conclusions about how a wealthy individual must experience possessions skips several unproven steps.
When new standards become assumptions
Luxury sometimes changes expectations of an entire environment, not just individual experiences. Years spent in highly comfortable business hotels may turn a once-luxurious standard into something average. That does not necessarily mean ingratitude. The baseline has changed.
In a German longitudinal analysis published in 2010, Rafael Di Tella, John Haisken-De New and Robert MacCulloch examined adaptation in well-being to income and status changes. They found substantial adaptation to income over the years considered, while status effects appeared more persistent. This concerned income and social position, not adaptation to particular luxury products. It does show that components of economic circumstances can be processed differently.
Judging every purchase by one standard would therefore be strange. Some spending improves daily life. Some creates variety; some fulfils a longstanding wish. Whether it was worthwhile also depends on what was expected.
People can obviously enjoy expensive things for their quality, design or technical features. There is no need to invent a hidden search for recognition. A preference does not require a psychological revelation every time.
The fantasy of permanent euphoria has a problem
Particularly expensive purchases often carry large emotional expectations. An improved standard of living is then expected to provide more than comfort. It may be supposed to create the condition where everything finally feels right. This confuses a well-functioning object with a lasting state of mind.
When you reach the big goal and surprisingly little changes examines the difference between an anticipated high point and its actual emotional effect, focusing on expectations of a single milestone. Luxury raises another question: what happens when something is not experienced once but used as a matter of course for years?
The answer is sometimes pleasantly unremarkable. Perhaps we barely think about it because it works well. Perhaps it genuinely loses appeal. Repeated use may reveal new qualities. Or we may eventually realise the purchase was lovely but could never fulfil a different wish.
Immediately treating fading excitement as a reason to buy something more expensive can create a cycle of renewed expectations. The next million explores that pursuit. Adaptation alone explains neither a wish for more possessions nor someone's personality.
What remains of the improvement
A genuinely good purchase need not permanently feel like a special acquisition. Its value may be preventing everyday problems, enabling activities or reliably providing pleasure. Some things really do become uninteresting. Recognising the difference allows a closer assessment of possessions without constantly defending them.
Research explains certain mechanisms well, but offers no universal measure of how many months it takes to adapt to a given level of luxury. People, purchases and patterns of use differ too much. Claiming that a clever shopping list could permanently maximise well-being would also be scientifically ambitious.
Can money make you happy? examines broader relationships with life satisfaction and emotional experience. The idea behind Tired of Wealth asks a different question about substantial possessions in its own slightly impertinent way. Nobody owes it an answer. It offers no guarantee of greater happiness either.
Perhaps the most clear-eyed test of luxury is this: do I mainly miss the excitement of the first day, or do I still value what this thing enables in daily life? The answer is not always immediate. It is a better question than how expensive the next purchase would need to be to make the first feel interesting again.
Sources
Diener, Ed, Richard E. Lucas and Christie Napa Scollon (2006). “Beyond the Hedonic Treadmill: Revising the Adaptation Theory of Well-Being”. American Psychologist, 61(4), pp. 305–314. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.61.4.305
Lucas, Richard E. (2007). “Adaptation and the Set-Point Model of Subjective Well-Being: Does Happiness Change After Major Life Events?”. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 16(2), pp. 75–79. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8721.2007.00479.x
Redden, Joseph P. (2008). “Reducing Satiation: The Role of Categorization Level”. Journal of Consumer Research, 34(5), pp. 624–634. https://doi.org/10.1086/521898
Van Boven, Leaf, and Thomas Gilovich (2003). “To Do or to Have? That Is the Question”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(6), pp. 1193–1202. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.85.6.1193
Nicolao, Leonardo, Julie R. Irwin and Joseph K. Goodman (2009). “Happiness for Sale: Do Experiential Purchases Make Consumers Happier than Material Purchases?”. Journal of Consumer Research, 36(2), pp. 188–198. https://doi.org/10.1086/597049
Kumar, Amit, Matthew A. Killingsworth and Thomas Gilovich (2014). “Waiting for Merlot: Anticipatory Consumption of Experiential and Material Purchases”. Psychological Science, 25(10), pp. 1924–1931. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614546556
Di Tella, Rafael, John Haisken-De New and Robert MacCulloch (2010). “Happiness Adaptation to Income and to Status in an Individual Panel”. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 76(3), pp. 834–852. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2010.09.016