The risk with this line of thinking is buying 'great' camping gear is going to have minimal impact on the experience of camping. You can go to more extreme places safely and have a lighter pack, but being able to spend more time camping is probably more important than being able to comfortably go another 2 miles a day.

There is a reasonable minimal threshold, but if your spending more than 500-1,000$ on camping gear a year your probably just buying gear for the same sorts of reasons people buy 100,000$ cars.

Yes, but I don't buy 'great' camping gear: I buy what I need. Apart from clothes, I rarely buy anything new. I have standing craigslist feeds for things that I want. The only new music gear in my studio are items that would be unobtainable used.

If you are focused on buying the minimum you need to go on a fun camping trip without worrying about your equipment breaking then you are really buying an experience, just a requisite part of that is having the equipment.

When I was younger, our school used to host a rock concert about twice a year where student bands would play. Since I was far from being the most popular kid in school I figured that getting up and rocking out on that stage would earn me some cred.

Of course to do that you needed to be in a band, and since I couldn't sing at all being in a band meant you needed to be able to play some instrument. So I went to the local pawn shop , bought the cheapest electric guitar I could find and borrowed a spare amp from a family member. Of course what I really spent the money for was to be able to feel like a rockstar for 20 minutes.

Now if I think about all the people I still know from those days playing in the school hall; apart from one or two who managed to get a career in music, most work in IT , accounting or became plumbers etc. They all now have nice collections of expensive guitars (Les Pauls , Ltd Ed. Stratocastors etc) that they love to show off but rarely play anywhere besides their own homes. Really the amount of pleasure that they get from them is probably nothing compared to the joy we had while rocking out at school playing 4 chord greenday & nirvana covers on our £50 pawn shop axes.

Except I have never seen it counted as such by any happiness/consumer research.

No, I think the resources you spend on camping are very much part of the experiences they are referring. Likewise renting a studio and jamming with your friends is another experience that plays into this. You need tools for any given hobby, but once you invest you have a lot of experiences ahead of you.

That's what I thought at first, but I was informed otherwise by the consumer happiness lab. And, the follow up questions on the number of common measures I have read/taken don't support this classification. It's fancy clothes or a night out, all the way down.

Like I said, the field is overly obsessed with lowest common denominator purchase decisions, that IMHO, are totally at odds with the phenomena they are trying to investigate.

Completely agree, IMO money invested in experiential possessions is an excellent bang-for-the-buck.

Yup. For example, you may buy a fancy camera, and then take tons of pictures with it. You get both the possession and experience aspects.

And yet, only worth sidereal research, since the world revolves around shiny things and waiters.

I thought they explicitly said that some things, like cars bought to go places, straddle the line between being goods and being experiences. So it seems at least here they were aware that there are things that don't neatly fall into the classification.

Having a car provides function, but the difference between a mediocre car and a great car is $10k+.

Spending the extra $10k for a better car leads to less happiness than using that same money for a 2-week vacation in Europe / Asia.

This is the false dichotomy that they keep banging their heads against.

It's often given lip service in the literature, and then everyone goes back to asking easy questions.

I don't buy clothes simply to possess them. I buy them either because wearing them will make me feel better/more confident/fit in/stand out or because they offer some utility that I didn't have before. I'd imagine it's a similar situation for most people. Am I buying the clothes themselves, or the experience of wearing those clothes?

They do mention that some things (they give the example of a car) fall in the middle of the possession-experience spectrum, but I'd argue that almost everything does.

Sure, few things are purchased simply to possess them. The difference is murky, yes. Mulling over it, the line seems to fall somewhere between luxury 'upgrades' to things you already have, vs. inexpensive tools that enable things you couldn't do before.

What does IMHE stand for?

Probably "in my humble experience".

Yes.

What's "research psychology", btw? Is it "I do research in psychology" or is it "psychology of researchers"? My googles did not yield useful information.

Research Psychology is, uhm Research Psychology. As opposed to Clinical Psychology. I studied people (behaving online, FWIW), I didn't treat them. Wrote academic papers rather than listening to people.

Oh! For some reason, that didn't occur to me. :P Thanks for clarifying.

OT: You wouldn't happen to have a blog about that? (Nothing is listed in your profile.)

I've tried many times :) But the main reason I've left academia after my master's is that I realized I liked developing the code to run the experiment much, much more than facing my writer's block.

Ok. Thanks for letting me know.

Absolutely agree.