The problem is that when you "buy" the experience, the experience becomes a "thing".

An experience is either something genuine or a product. A product is a thing, and money changes a lot of it's attributes.

Getting ripped to shreds by a lion can be a genuine experience, but that doesn't mean I desire it. If you enjoy something you can buy with money, there is likewise no need to taint the experience bleak simply because it was money that enabled you to experience it. I have no doubt that money changes the attributes of a thing sometimes, but so can any other attribute, including the way you collectively simplify a set of attributes and make a comparison to an ideal.

Experience: A wonderful night dancing with a beautiful woman.

Now add and subtract money and it's a very different experience even if everything else stayed the same.

Compare walking down to the beach on a Friday afternoon after work and taking a week vacation to fly to that same beach and spending your last Friday evening walking around.

Experience: being a woman people have call beautiful; experiencing wondering whether I am persistently being evaluated on a superficial characteristic.

We all can draw abstract lines in the sand and overgeneralize to have opinions and make points. It doesn't mean it tells the entire story, nor does it mean it's correct forever.

There are a lot of products and techniques that help people look more beautiful. However, at its core beauty relates to both age and heath and as such it's less superficial than is generally portrayed.

Taking this back to buying experiences. IMO, there is basic expenses like buying gas or shampoo which don’t cheapen things. But the further extremes you go like plastic surgery or renting out a hotel not just a room you’re inherently worse off.

You are judging this from the criteria of an average person living and spending their money.

Plastic surgery might help someone with a physical deformity, and renting out a hotel might be a necessity for a scientific conference.

You can't judge the value of a dollar based on the assumption that there exists an average person that spends it. For every frivolous act of spending you can conceive of, I can respond with a similar 'well intentioned / ethically sanctioned' act of spending, from a perspective you might not have been aware of, given you likely don't have perfect information about the state of everything in existence.

It depends on who you think you are to judge how another person lives their life. What you consider essential and what you can live without is not the absolute for everyone.

I think your taking this well outside of the 'spending disposable money to increase personal happiness’ discussion. Remember this is in reference to the idea people don't become happier as they spend money because their spending it poorly. As such is reasonable to talk about heuristics vs getting tied into specifics.

I am questioning whether the definition of the heuristics influence the outcome. Self fulfilling prophecies and such.

Specifics are necessary because it can determine whether something is a fundamental property of a thing, how it influences the definition of a thing, how that definition influences the perception of a thing, and the relationships that thing has with other things.

A heuristic requires specifics to be defined, in order for it's definition to exist.

Maybe, but then you ventured off to outliers and special cases.

What we want the heuristic for is the average case that you dismissed, which covers the majority of us. There is indeed a thing as a large majority with mostly similar experiences and status, not just an collection of unique snowflakes.

I didn't dismiss it. My point is that theorizing over whether money leads to happiness doesn't take into account the absence of money acting as an obstacle to happiness. The heuristic is psychologically leading in that it does not make the distinction of what happiness is. Happiness can be relatively defined from personal experience. In order to analyze this any further, I'd have to examine the studies to see how the definition and interpretation of happiness is controlled.

There is plenty of research demonstrating adding money to low income people does increase happiness, but adding money to high income earners does not. So, the question is why does adding money to high income earners not increase happiness. It's generally assumed that high income earners are not spending their disposable income 'optimally'.

PS: Sure, perhaps their not measuring 'happiness' and if it makes you feel better call it fruitkerfluffle if you want. However, that does not invalidate the question.

Thank you, you have made me very fruitkerfluffle with your well-phrased response.

Actually I was thinking about this recently. I don't buy a lot of things, but occasionally I'll spend a fair chunk on a new bike or kayak. I realised that these things provide me with the experience (provided I get off my arse and use them).