The genre of habits of people who love their lives usually offers a checklist of small rituals: morning gratitude, a cold shower, a tidy desk, an early alarm. Some of those help a little. But when researchers look at what actually separates people who report high satisfaction with their lives from everyone else, a surprising amount of it is not mood management at all. It is something quieter and more structural, having to do with how they spend two resources most of us treat carelessly: their money and their time. Two of the best-evidenced habits are almost boringly practical, and both are about allocation rather than attitude.
They buy experiences, not things
The first habit concerns where the money goes. In a much-cited 2003 study, the psychologists Leaf Van Boven and Thomas Gilovich asked people to recall a recent purchase made either to acquire an object or to have an experience, and found that the experiences, the trip, the concert, the meal out with friends, made people reliably happier than the objects did.
A long line of follow-up work has explained why. Experiences behave differently from possessions. They fold into your identity and your story in a way a new gadget never does. They resist comparison, since your holiday is not parked in the driveway next to the neighbor’s the way two cars are. And, oddly, they tend to improve in memory, the discomforts fading while the good parts keep their color, whereas the possession is thrilling for a week and then becomes the ordinary furniture of the house. People who love their lives are not necessarily spending more money than anyone else. They are more often spending it on doing rather than owning.
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They buy time, not more stuff
The second habit is subtler, and for many people harder to practice: they treat time as more valuable than money. In a 2017 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Ashley Whillans and colleagues surveyed more than six thousand people across four countries and found that those who spent money on time-saving services, paying to have the house cleaned, a dreaded errand handled, a meal cooked, reported greater life satisfaction than those who did not. Because a survey alone cannot show which way the arrow points, they also ran an experiment, and found that people were made happier by a purchase that bought them free time than by spending the same sum on a material treat.
Modern life sets a particular trap, a sense of never having enough hours that researchers call time famine, and the finding is that buying a few of those hours back, then aiming them at what you actually care about, does more for wellbeing than another object would. The habit, at bottom, is a willingness to trade money for time when you can, rather than reflexively guarding the money and letting the time leak away.
The thread underneath both
Put the two habits together and a pattern shows through. People who love their lives tend to convert their resources into experience and into time, rather than into accumulation. And underneath both sits something the studies keep quietly bumping into: other people. The experiences that make us happiest are usually shared ones, and the time we manage to buy back is most often spent with those we love. So these are not really two habits about shopping. They are two habits about steering money and hours toward the people and moments a life is actually made of, which is why they feel less like tricks and more like a settled stance toward living.
What the evidence does and does not settle
Several honest limits belong here. Both lines of research lean partly on correlational surveys, so some of the pattern surely runs the other way, with already-contented people being the ones who choose experiences and buy back time, though both findings also have experimental support pointing to real effects. There is a fairness problem worth naming plainly: affording experiences and paying to offload chores is far easier with money, and while the time-over-money benefit appeared across income levels, having means clearly helps, and none of this should be read as a reproach to anyone who can spare neither. The experiential advantage has its boundary conditions too, since some possessions exist precisely to enable experiences, and the studies carry the usual limits of sample and replication. And “loving your life” is a soft target that no two researchers measure quite the same way.
Within those limits, the lesson is unusually usable, and gentler than the productivity posters suggest. If you want a habit or two borrowed from the people who genuinely seem to love their lives, they are not the dramatic ones. Spend on doing rather than owning. Buy back an hour when you can, and hand it to someone you love, or to something that matters to you, rather than to another task. Do that with a little consistency, and the small mood rituals can more or less take care of themselves.