Yes, you can be too tight-fisted. From Anat Keinan and Ran Kivetz in the Harvard Business Review:
One of our studies—published in the Journal of Consumer Research—explored the regret felt by college students over their conduct on recent winter breaks and by alumni remembering winter breaks of 40 years ago. Regret about not having spent or traveled more during breaks increased with time, whereas regret about not having worked, studied, or saved money during breaks decreased with time. We saw a similar pattern in a study of how businesspeople perceived past choices between work and pleasure. Over time, those who had indulged felt less and less guilty about their choices, whereas those who had been dutiful experienced a growing sense of having missed out on the pleasures of life.
People who unduly resist self-indulgence suffer from an excessive farsightedness, or hyperopia—the reverse of typical self-control problems. Rather than yielding to temptation, they focus on acquiring necessities and acting responsibly and they see indulgence as wasteful, irresponsible, and even immoral. As a result, these consumers avoid precisely the products and experiences that they most enjoy. Their hyperopia can inhibit consumption in ways that are bad both for their own well-being and for marketers’ bottom lines. We don’t advocate trying to motivate consumers to make ill-considered purchases, of course, but marketers can help customers make appropriately indulgent choices that they’ll appreciate over the long term.
I love the little bit of pro-luxury “libertarian paternalism” in that last sentence. The very existence of hyperopia of course points to the problem in trying to design one-size-fits-all policy designed to save people from excess. Some people drink, gamble, and shop too little. It needs to be easier for them. And some people do too much. It needs to be harder for them. There is no way a planner can design a set of incentives that hits everybody’s sweet spot.
[Thanks to DWAnderson for the pointer in the comments.]
My greatest regret concerning college was that I didn't party enough. Everyone always went out, while I always said I'd join them “next week, as soon as I get over this organic chemistry to physics or something else hurdle.” By the time I graduated, I wondered where the four years went. I'm only in my late 20s, and am a pretty happy med student, but I feel a bit like I squandered my youth. And I'll continue squandering it until I finish the end of my residency in my early to mid- thirities. My advice to anyone considering a career that requires a lot of formal education: think about how short life is, and whether or not you could be happy in a job that requires less training, yet provide similar fulfillment (PA or nurse practitioner for med students).
I don't want to live in a world designed to eliminate regrets. The emotion is indivisible from freedom.
I think measuring regrets about the past tells us more about the sorts of things that people tend to regret than it does about the sorts of things people would be better off choosing. People aren't necessarily good at estimating the costs and benefits and probabilities of outomes in alternative histories in an unbiased manner.
But, I agree with the conclusion that having a planner deciding for everyone would be even worse.
More than just mistaken costs and benefits, its very easy to create unreal alternatives. I would have loved to travel to Europe and have a fling with S____ over my sophomore winter break. Neither were real alternatives, but the regrets remain.
Yeah, that's what I meant by the “probabilities of outcomes”. I suspect that it's pretty common to overestimate the probabilities of good outcomes and underestimate the probabilities of bad outcomes when we consider alternative histories.
Nah, stay in America and have a fling with a fellow seminar student at a classical liberal foundation function . Cheaper, and might very well be from Europe anyway.
Seneca says somewhere (one of his letters, I think) that everything should be done in moderation, including over-indulgence. That's not quite the same thing the article seems to be on to, but an important truth along the same lines, I think.
isn't there a selection bias here? the people who have real bad regrets might be too dead to talk about it, eh?
It's worth noting, of course, that people who feel these regrets (and I count myself among them) are not really in a position to know what would have happened in their lives had they partied more and studied less.
It's worth noting, of course, that people who feel these regrets (and I count myself among them) are not really in a position to know what would have happened in their lives had they partied more and studied less.