newelty

The night before my first day at Regina Coeli (a.k.a. Dutch Princess School), I lay awake, and not just because it was the World Cup final, and rowdy Dutchies were still filling the streets.

What the hell am I doing? Who studies Dutch…for fun?

And did I also mention it cost thousands of dollars?

I had plotted out the route to the school the night before, winding my way through a series of wrong turns and construction zones until I found a reasonable path and knew that it would take me roughly thirty minutes to get there.

But the bigger question remained: Why wasn’t I on a beach somewhere, rather than heading to a classroom at 8 in the morning?

The night before, lying in bed, I thought: Maybe I’ve hit my novelty wall. Maybe going to a town you’ve never been to, to speak a language in the most intensive immersion environment possible, is actually beyond the pale. Maybe it was actually a bad idea.

Flipping through Facebook to distract myself from a rising tide of panic, I clicked on a piece posted by a friend. She liked this fascinating article on how rough it is to parent from New York magazine. It spoke to my exact thoughts about this adventure I was about to start the next day: Maybe doing something only for fun isn’t the point. Maybe it’s actually possible to have a difficult thing bring you happiness, or at least contentment.

Consider this excerpt:

But for many of us, purpose is happiness—particularly those of us who find moment-to-moment happiness a bit elusive to begin with. Martin Seligman, the positive-psychology pioneer who is, famously, not a natural optimist, has always taken the view that happiness is best defined in the ancient Greek sense: leading a productive, purposeful life. And the way we take stock of that life, in the end, isn’t by how much fun we had, but what we did with it.

People ask me how it went at language school, and I struggle to give a simple answer. It was 11 hours of mental bootcamp. My brain got mushy around the edges. I’m still working out how to talk about it on this blog. And yet it was experience I will remember for my whole life, and it made my life the better for it.

So another article about happiness in today’s New York Times was especially relevant to me as I sort all this out. The piece by Stephanie Rosenbloom, titled “But Will It Make You Happy?” talks about what kind of purchases add to our longer-term happiness:

“One major finding is that spending money for an experience — concert tickets, French lessons, sushi-rolling classes, a hotel room in Monaco — produces longer-lasting satisfaction than spending money on plain old stuff.

‘It’s better to go on a vacation than buy a new couch’ is basically the idea,” says Professor Dunn, summing up research by two fellow psychologists, Leaf Van Boven and Thomas Gilovich. Her own take on the subject is in a paper she wrote with colleagues at Harvard and the University of Virginia: “If Money Doesn’t Make You Happy Then You Probably Aren’t Spending It Right.” (The Journal of Consumer Psychology plans to publish it in a coming issue.)

Thomas DeLeire, an associate professor of public affairs, population, health and economics at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, recently published research examining nine major categories of consumption. He discovered that the only category to be positively related to happiness was leisure: vacations, entertainment, sports and equipment like golf clubs and fishing poles.

Using data from a study by the National Institute on Aging, Professor DeLeire compared the happiness derived from different levels of spending to the happiness people get from being married. (Studies have shown that marriage increases happiness.)

“A $20,000 increase in spending on leisure was roughly equivalent to the happiness boost one gets from marriage,” he said, adding that spending on leisure activities appeared to make people less lonely and increased their interactions with others.

That said–and not to put too fine a point on it–but these happiness studies often seem to recommend a life spent living in a yurt, not enjoying Prada’s 2010 orange lipstick, for example. As someone who continues to find happiness in a yellow hard-sided suitcase, I was glad to see the point made, that it doesn’t have to be either-or, as well:

Spending money on an event, like camping or a wine tasting with friends, leaves people less likely to compare their experiences with those of others — and, therefore, happier.

Of course, some fashion lovers beg to differ. For many people, clothes will never be more than utilitarian. But for a certain segment of the population, clothes are an art form, a means of self-expression, a way for families to pass down memories through generations. For them, studies concluding that people eventually stop deriving pleasure from material things don’t ring true.

“No way,” says Hayley Corwick, who writes the popular fashion blog Madison Avenue Spy. “I could pull out things from my closet that I bought when I was 17 that I still love.”

She rejects the idea that happiness has to be an either-or proposition. Some days, you want a trip, she says; other days, you want a Tom Ford handbag.

Interesting stuff, especially for the travel-minded, I think.