Why It’s So Hard to Pack Light and Spend Well

Items packed, but not used, on my trip to Syracuse, New York:

Workout clothes (2 pr shorts, 2 shirts, 1 exercise bra, 4 pr socks)
2 work-related books
2 work-related files

Why do we think we’ll work and exercise according to our everyday schedules while we’re on vacation?

It may give you comfort (or an increasing sense of fatalism) to learn that it’s because our brains are just no good at handling the abstraction of time. According to Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert‘s “Stumbling on Happiness,” we can only imagine the future by comparing it to right now, and then trying to adjust our expectations of what our future selves will be doing.

Our brains put a priority on handling the present. And the more we’re wrapped up in doing the “right now” stuff, the harder it is for us to imagine the future. As an example, study participants under ideal conditions correctly predicted they would like spaghetti more then next afternoon than the next morning.

Those who had to identify musical tones at the same time, however, made the prediction based on whether they were hungry or not — they no longer adjusted their prediction according to future time.

We make the same mistakes with money. For instance, Gilbert writes:

Most of us would be willing to drive across town to save $50 on the purchase of a $100 radio but not on the purchase of a $100,000 automobile because $50 seems like a fortune when we’re buying radios, but a pittance when we’re buying cars.

Economists…will correctly tell you that your bank account contains absolute dollars and not ‘percentages off’… the dollars won’t know where they came from.

But we can think of neither time nor money in an absolute way, but only as relative to whatever we’re comparing it to.

With money, one of our most common mistakes is comparing a present price to a past price than to today’s (or future) possibilities. So, he writes, if we arrive at a concert only to discover we’ve lost our $20 ticket, most of us will walk away from the show.

But if we lost a $20 bill on the way to buying a ticket for this same concert, most people would still pony up $20 for that show. Even though it’s the same amount of money, replacing something from the past, in our minds, is paying twice for the same thing.

If you like mind twisters, you’ll like Gilbert’s book. But if you were to spend the money on it only to discover you hated it, he writes, at least by the end you’d know why.