“Life is about creating memories” reads like something printed on a throw pillow, the kind of line that sounds true without anyone quite explaining why. A specific line of psychological research on how people actually feel about their own past purchases gives the sentiment a real, tested mechanism behind it.
The foundational study is a 2003 paper by Leaf Van Boven and Thomas Gilovich, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The researchers asked people to think back on a significant purchase, sometimes something they’d bought to have, like furniture or clothing, and sometimes something they’d bought to do, a trip, a concert, a meal out, and rate how happy that purchase actually made them, both at the time and looking back. Across their studies, experiential purchases consistently produced more happiness than material ones. The researchers pointed to a few specific reasons why, but the one most relevant to how memories actually function was this: experiences are far more open to positive reinterpretation over time than possessions are. A vacation that involved a canceled flight and a mediocre hotel tends to get remembered, and retold, as a funny story rather than a disappointment. A couch that turned out to be the wrong color mostly just stays the wrong color. Experiences also became a more meaningful part of how people described their own identity, and gave people more to talk about with others, both of which fed back into how positively the purchase was remembered.
A second study helps explain why that positive reinterpretation holds up so well for experiences specifically. In a 2010 paper by Travis Carter and Thomas Gilovich, published in the same journal, the researchers ran eight separate experiments testing why material and experiential purchases seem to hold up so differently over time. The core finding was that satisfaction with a material purchase is far more vulnerable to comparison: people who bought a physical object were more likely to keep thinking about the options they didn’t choose, to compare their purchase to the same item at a different price, and to measure their own purchase against what other people had bought. People who’d made an experiential purchase did much less of this. They tended to settle into their choice rather than keep re-litigating it against alternatives. The researchers describe this as material purchases inviting people to maximize, endlessly checking whether a better option existed, while experiential purchases more often let people simply be satisfied with what they chose.
Put together, these two studies describe a specific, mechanical reason why a life built more around doing than having tends to leave behind better memories. An experience isn’t just enjoyable in the moment. Its memory keeps getting reworked afterward into something more positive, retold and reframed rather than picked apart, and it isn’t constantly undercut by wondering whether some other purchase would have been better. A possession’s satisfaction, by contrast, stays exposed to exactly that kind of ongoing comparison for as long as the object sits in the room.
It’s worth being honest about where this research is more limited than the tidy version of the finding suggests. Both studies rely on retrospective self-report, asking people to recall how a past purchase made them feel, which introduces the real possibility of memory bias working in both directions rather than being purely explained by it. The samples in both studies were also drawn largely from American, college-educated populations, and it’s an open question how well the pattern holds in cultures with different relationships to consumption, ownership, or storytelling. The line between an “experiential” and “material” purchase isn’t always as clean in real life as it is in a lab study either; a guitar is a physical object, but buying one might lead to years of experiences that the original happiness ratings in these studies weren’t really built to capture. And the studies compare purchases people already made and chose to reflect on, which can’t fully separate whether experiences build better memories, or whether people who already lean toward valuing experiences are simply happier people to begin with.
Within those limits, what this research adds up to is a more specific and more defensible version of the fridge-magnet line. It isn’t that memories matter more than things in some vague, sentimental sense. It’s that the memory of an experience appears to behave differently over time than the satisfaction tied to an object, growing more positive and more settled rather than staying open to constant comparison, which is a fairly concrete, testable reason why what a person spends their time doing tends to outlast, in how it’s remembered, what they spend their money buying.