Why pleasure always trumps possessions
During a recent illness, a local friend in his 70s realised what it was that stood out about the life he had lived: his romantic relationships and his vacations, writes the author.
I have not verified the following claim with my colleagues who oversee staff movements, and I stand ready to be contradicted. But I suspect that, in purely logistical terms, I was the easiest person to transfer overseas in the recent history of this newspaper.
What was shipped from London to Washington almost a year ago was a suitcase of clothes, several boxes of books, four canvas paintings and a Sonos speaker.
After selling a television the size of a tennis court to a friend’s younger brother, I kept nothing in storage other than a rug.
Unless the FT sent a shoeless Spartan to run the Hong Kong bureau once, I suspect the nice man who came around to take the shipping inventory (“The rest is upstairs, yeah?”) has never had an easier gig.
If you believe this testifies to a monkish frugality on my part, let me disabuse you. I am very much of the material world.
Were the FT to double my salary, I fear that I would save none of it beyond the automatic pension deduction. I am one of those who never understood why the Richard Pryor character in Brewster’s Millions had trouble spending US$30 million in 30 days without accumulating assets.
Certain vintages of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, savoured with his friends, would exhaust the first US$10 million over a long weekend.
And therein lies the point. I prefer experiences to possessions. I prefer transient sensations to tangible assets.
In an ideal world, I would buy both. But most of us have to make trade-offs with finite resources, and this is mine.
If I have any advice for the young, as they start to earn their own money, it is to make it theirs too.
Just because economists do not know how to price something as ineffable as an experience does not mean it is worth less than, say, equity in a house.
A generation that is having a hard time acquiring assets might be rational — not just emotionally justified, but rational — to substitute pleasure for security. Perhaps the advice is unnecessary.
The savings rate among millennials is already dire. In 2017, the property magnate Tim Gurner said they had no right to bewail their asset-poverty while they subsisted on “smashed avocado at $19”.
It was what the novelist Joyce Cary once called a “tumbril remark”: a Marie Antoinette-ish incitement to revolution.
Mr Gurner was duly routed on social media for his lavish idea of the millennial lifestyle. No one thought to defend that lifestyle on its own terms. And it is eminently defensible.
Is it really intelligent to spend the prime years of your life living below your means? Is the far-off prospect of an asset worth more than a consistent flow of sensory treats in the present?
Shakiest of all is the premise that an asset lasts and an experience does not. Once a pleasure has been consumed — a holiday taken, a concert attended — that is not the end of the matter.
The memory becomes itself a kind of asset, and an inflation-proof one at that. It can sustain you later in life.
And by later in life, I mean much earlier than I expected. I am already mawkishly wistful about my 20, which were spent in rented flats that were better than anywhere I could have afforded to buy.
The idea that I have “nothing to show for it” is eccentric. I have the best years of my life to show for it.
A financial adviser would have had me in a Zone 6 grotto, saving up much cash, storing up no memories. I am fortunate. The nature of my work means that, mind allowing, I can do it until I drop.
Others have to think much harder about the acquisition of capital to see them through dotage. But it is not unique to me or to my profession, this belief that the best things in life have no lasting form.
During a recent illness, a local friend in his 70s realised what it was that stood out about the life he had lived: his romantic relationships and his vacations.
Our entire species is agreed that the first of these is the best thing we ever do. We honour love in art more than any subject other than god.
But we are warier of giving the second — the bought experience — its due.
The purchase of pleasure as an end in itself is still seen as somehow irresponsible, at least until we have plodded our way to a capital base, at which point it becomes a matter of Saga cruises and weekend trips into town for a show.
There is deferred gratification, and then there is masochism. Let the fun start sooner. FINANCIAL TIMES
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Janan Ganesh is a biweekly columnist and associate editor for the Financial Times. He was previously political correspondent for The Economist for five years.
