A few months ago, I backed my car up to the edge of a giant pit at the town dump and hurled Billy into the abyss.
I shed no tears. Though Billy stood by me for 12 years, it’s hard to get too worked up about the death of an IKEA bookcase.
But looking down at the shards of broken particleboard that once sheltered all the books I never finished in college, I did feel a faint pang of remorse. “Remember me,” the shelf called out like a birch-veneer version of the ghost in “Hamlet.” “Remember me next time you go shopping.”
Billy had a point. We rarely think about it when we open our wallets, but everything we buy is garbage, eventually. Most stuff only worsens with age — it breaks down, breaks our heart and sits in the basement for 30 years until finally we force our children to throw it out for us.
This is hardly a new idea. From St. Anthony to Marie Kondo, gurus of decluttering have preached for two millennia that the path to salvation begins in the department of sanitation. But is it really fair to blame the fullness of our garages for the emptiness of our souls?
Far more compelling to me is recent psychological research showing we’d all be better off — happier, in fact — if we spent more of our money doing things than buying things.
Faced with a choice between purchasing a thing or an experience, most people will choose the material item in the belief that it will last longer, Cornell University psychologist Tom Gilovich told me. But they’re wrong. “The tie should go to the experience,” he said.
The ephemeral quality of experiences is precisely why we find them ultimately more satisfying than stuff, he said. Unlike gadgets, clothing and even furniture, experiences don’t age into obsolescence: When you make a trip to the Eiffel Tower, there’s little danger that six months later Paris will release the Eiffel 7s.
Who can really argue it isn’t nobler to do things than collect them?
And yet I can’t help but feel stuff is getting a bad rap here.
Consider the two most absurdly extravagant purchases I made in the past year or so: (1.) tickets to the musical “Hamilton” and (2.) a Vitamix blender.
I know this is a ridiculous comparison. “Hamilton” is a work of genius, the show so burned into my brain it’s the music I hear whenever I put my thoughts on hold. The Vitamix is, well, a kitchen appliance.
But, here’s the thing: If I am really honest with myself, dollar for dollar, the Vitamix may have given me even more pleasure than Lin-Manuel Miranda.
Hear me out.
I first experienced “Hamilton” on a morning jog just after the original-cast recording was released on Spotify. I popped in my earbuds, set off toward the park, and broke into a 40-minute smile. “You have to listen to this,” I told my wife and twin 7-year-old boys as I panted back into the house. Halfway through the opening number, they, too, had joined the revolution.
I first beheld the Vitamix at Costco COST, -0.16% when a pitchwoman shouting into a wireless microphone enumerated the wonders of the $400 machine, mixing up whole fruits and vegetables with such showmanship she even convinced my kids to suck down samples of kale smoothies. “We may have to get this,” my wife said to me. “They’re drinking vegetables.”
“Hamilton” consumed us. The kids traded their lightsabers for flintlock pistols, performed whole scenes using their stuffed animals. We cheered a horrific traffic jam on the New Jersey Turnpike because it allowed us to listen to the entire 2-hour-and-45-minute recording in one go, reaching the heartbreaking finale just as we drove past the actual Weehawken grounds where Hamilton threw away his shot.
The Vitamix had us consuming a liquid diet. I’d flip the satisfyingly fat switches, turn up the rotor speed and watch kale, bananas, pineapples, cashews and mangos merge into something far more delicious than the sum of the parts. (Alas, the kids refused to drink anything green outside the confines of Costco.)
“Hamilton” up to this point was free (well — free, except for my $10 monthly subscription to Spotify). The sheer joy of those pajama dance parties in the kitchen didn’t cost me a dime. The endless discussion of the lyrics cost us nothing. The moment during our visit to Independence Hall in Philadelphia, when my son Sawyer tapped the tour guide on the shoulder and asked, “Is this where Cabinet Battle No. 1 happened?” cost us nothing.
Impromptu performance of @HamiltonMusical in the kitchen. http://pic.twitter.com/Ire2CkZeTI
— Jeremy Olshan (@jolshan) February 7, 2016
But around the time the boys started asking me to read them Ron Chernow’s biography of Hamilton as a bedtime story, I decided I might have to sell a kidney and buy tickets to the show.
The Vitamix, meanwhile, produced daily, consistent servings of deliciousness. We made smoothies. We made cocktails. We even made soup — the blades on this thing are so powerful they not only mix the ingredients but cook them!
“Hamilton” is a smoothie. All great art is. Lin-Manuel Miranda remixed ingredients from different genres and eras into something entirely new.
After scouring the secondary market, I found four seats in the middle of the rear mezzanine for $270 apiece, far more than I had ever spent on tickets to anything, though far less than many people were paying.
To dull my shame at the purchase, I blended up the best piña colada ever.
I knew we’d made the right choice when, on Christmas morning, as the boys tore open presents, Finn started mumbling to himself, “Please be ‘Hamilton’ tickets…please be ‘Hamilton’ tickets.” The picture of their faces at that moment alone may have been worth a thousand bucks.
Granted, the kids were nearly as impressed when I dumped a bunch of ice cubes in the Vitamix and made snow.
Every experience we buy pays off three times:
1. The joyful weeks spent daydreaming about the coming event can sometimes be more wonderful than…
2. The thing itself.
3. In our memories — which, research shows, tend to edit out the aggravations and disappointments of that family trip to Disney, leaving only the good bits.
“Hamilton” was no different. After weeks of talking and listening to little else, the four of us skipped up West 46th Street toward the Richard Rodgers Theater.
This family is finally in the room where it happens, @HamiltonMusical. http://pic.twitter.com/h6Sx6qaQ9B
— Jeremy Olshan (@jolshan) February 11, 2016
It was worth every penny. The orchestra burst into the show’s opening notes, Lin-Manuel stepped into the spotlight to a rock star’s ovation and proclaimed, “My name is Alexander Hamilton,” and for the first time I could see a performance I had previously only heard.
But something also seemed off. Everything looked smaller than I expected — and not just because we were in the nosebleed seats. The 18th-century New York City streets and battlefields on the stage were not nearly as expansive and wondrous as they were in my imagination.
This sensation reminded me of Shakespeare’s prologue to “Henry V,” when the chorus begs the audience’s pardon for daring to cram the “vasty fields of France” onto “this unworthy scaffold.”
Yes, live theater is always better than any recording. And, yes, the staging, the choreography and certainly the Schuyler sisters were magical to behold — but was this experience really worth $1,080? I wasn’t sure.
No regrets here. No buyer’s remorse. To everyone who asked, I said that, yes, the show had been worth every penny, had lived up to every ounce of hype. But sitting in the theater made me realize what I loved most about “Hamilton” was what had cost me the least: the music and lyrics.
So did the Vitamix ultimately bring me more pleasure than the tickets to the show? Well, in a kitchen cabinet battle, “Hamilton” could easily outduel my burr grinder. “Hamilton” would eviscerate my old Hamilton Beech blender. But I think the Vitamix might actually match Hamilton’s practical tactical brilliance.
When I posed my dilemma to Tom Gilovich at Cornell, convinced I had found an exception to his rule, the psychologist assured me that the musical was in fact better than the blender. “Part of the issue here is that you already were a full-fledged Hamiltonian long before you paid for the tickets,” he said.
But the fact that I had squeezed so much pleasure from the show before ever spending money won’t diminish how I feel in the long run, he said.
“Let me put it to you this way: Imagine you are on your deathbed and you are reviewing this decision,” he said. “Would rather have bought this blender, or would you have rather have gone to ‘Hamilton’?”
Fair enough. I guess Sam Spade and William Shakespeare had it all wrong — it isn’t the stuff that dreams are made of, but the experiences.
I love my Vitamix, but I never would have written about it were it not for “Hamilton.” Just as I never gave a moment’s thought to Billy the shelf until I had the profound experience of throwing him away.
Jeremy Olshan
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