Meaningful Returns

Studies have shown pretty conclusively that your chances of being able to tell expensive wine from Three-Buck Chuck in a blind taste are essentially 50:50. In other words, you can’t really tell the difference. I’m not a wino myself, so this is hilarious to me, but winos aren’t amused (and often just flat out deny that this could possibly be true). That’s fine–I’ll keep buying Three-Buck Chuck.

But I can’t get too smug about this, because this dynamic plays out in a million other ways, and none of us is completely immune. We’re all lying, sort of. This is because whenever we have an experience that centers on wine, or food, or the Grand Canyon, or a set of golf clubs, or shoes, or anything, the thing itself is not the whole experience. Your mind, and the innumerable memories it carries, in combination with the environment and the social context surrounding the experience–all of this matters, and it all changes the nature of our experience.

So when a wino tastes an expensive wine and has an amazing experience, and I taste the same thing and can’t tell it apart from Three-Buck Chuck, the difference has almost nothing to do with the taste of the wine and everything to do with the fact that I am ambivalent about all wine, while the wino is thinking of the conversations they’ve had while drinking this particular vintage, or the trip to Napa Valley, or the owner of the wine shop that they’ve gotten to know over the years, and on and on. Remove the label and have us both taste it blind in a controlled setting, and you’ve stripped away all that context for the wino’s experience, while I had very little context to begin with.

There are two heavily related keys here:

1. Experiences are infinitely complex and incredibly subjective.
2. You will maximize your happiness by splurging on the things that you really care about, that you bring a depth of experience to. Don’t waste your money trying to conjure up experiences that others are having.