My colleague Liz Dunn at University of British Columbia and I have been studying the relationship with between money and happiness.
我同事利兹·邓恩在英属哥伦比亚大学工作，我和他一直在研究金钱和快乐之间的关系
And it seems like a simple relationship, which is: we want more money and we want more happiness, so maybe if we get more money we’ll get more happiness.
它们之间的关系似乎很简单：我想要更多钱，我也想更快乐，所以如果我们有更多钱，那我们也一定会更快乐
And it turns out that the relationship is really a lot more complicated than that.
事实上它们之间的关系远比这要复杂得多
It’s not too surprising to say that money can’t buy you happiness, we’ve heard that phrase a lot.
我们对金钱买不到快乐这句话习以为常，耳熟能详
But that doesn’t help us understand then what kind of spending will actually make us happy and what kind won’t.
但这并不能帮助我们理解哪种花钱能让我们快乐，哪种不能
What we tend to find when we look at the data is that the biggest category of things that people spend on is stuff for themselves.
我们看看数据后会发现，人们的购物对象中类别最庞大的是为自己买的那些东西
Of course we need to pay rent or our mortgage, we need to have a car, we need to have food and clothes,
当然了，我们需要付房租或还贷款，我们得买车、买食物和衣服

but it seems as though people are spending an inordinate amount of their money on stuff for themselves,
但是即便人们毫无节制地花钱给自己买东西
and the biggest problem from our standpoint as psychologists is the percent of money that you spend on stuff for yourself is completely uncorrelated with how happy you are with your life.
但从心理学家的角度来看，你为自己花钱的百分比与你在生活中得到的快乐并不完全成比例
It doesn’t make you unhappy, it’s not like if you buy a lot of stuff you’re miserable, which sometimes we think is the case—it’s just the case that it’s flat.
它不会让你不开心，并不是说如果你买很多东西你就会很痛苦，虽然有时候确实是这样——只是说它不会产生什么影响
No matter how much it seems you buy for yourself, nothing really seems to happen.
无论你给自己买多少东西，都不会发生什么特别的事
And so in our research, and other researchers as well, we’ve tried to look at,
所以在我们和其他研究人员的研究中，我们想过
well, if stuff for yourself doesn’t pay off are there other things that you can spend your money on that actually do pay off in more happiness?
如果给自己买东西不会带来快乐，那有没有其他花钱的事情会让你更快乐呢？
And what Liz and I have focused on the most is this idea that instead of focusing on yourself all the time, which doesn’t seem to pay off in happiness,
而我和利兹聚焦的一个想法就是，不要总是关注自己，这不会让你快乐
when you focus on other people you sort of reverse the arrow from me to you, it seems that on average when people give to others—
当你关注别人的时候，相当于你把焦点从我变成了你，似乎人们在赠予别人东西的时候——
which can be giving to charity, it can be treating a friend to lunch, it can be buying people gifts—
可以做慈善、请朋友吃顿午饭或者给别人买一份礼物——
that those actions of giving rather than keeping seem to be associated with more happiness.
这些赠予行为能比保留行为产生更多的快乐
And when we send people out and give them money and tell them to spend it on themselves or spend it on somebody else,
我们给人们一些钱，让他们可以给自己花，也可以花在别人身上
people who spend it on themselves kind of have the same day they would’ve had anyway, but people who spend on other people actually have a happier day.
花在自己身上的那些人只不过是过了平平常常的一天，但是把钱花在别人身上的人却过了更加快乐的一天
So, if you think about the idea that stuff for yourself doesn’t make you happy you can think of two opposites of that.
所以，如果你觉得给自己买东西不能让你更快乐，那你可以想想它的两种对立面
One is stuff for other people, so that’s kind of giving makes you happier than keeping,
第一种就是给别人买东西，也就是说给予比保留更能让你快乐
but another opposite of stuff for yourself is to think about: you can still spend on yourself but change from stuff to something else.
另一种给自己买东西的对立面就是想想：你依然可以把钱花在自己身上， 不过不要买东西，而是买些其他的东西
And lots of research over the last decade has shown that on average when people buy experiences it tends to pay off in more happiness than buying stuff for themselves.
过去十年中的很多研究表明，一般来说，人们花钱买经历的时候比花钱给自己买东西要快乐得多
And if you think about it there’s a lot of reasons for that.
仔细想想，这里面有很多原因
One of them, which is really critical, is often when we buy stuff for ourselves we end up by ourselves with our stuff.
其中很重要的一点就是，我们给自己买东西的时候，结果就是我们多出来了一些东西而已
Think of yourself on your phone playing a video game or whatever else it might be, you’re often alone with your stuff.
试想一下，你拿着手机玩着游戏，或者玩任何其他的东西，你就只是孤孤单单地和你的东西待在一起
Whereas experiences, yes we do some experiences solo, but many, many experiences have built into them that they’re social.
但如果你买的是经历，没错，有时候经历也只是一个人的，但很多情况下，经历都是社会性的
If we go out to dinner or go see a movie or go on a hike or whatever else it might be,
如果我们出去吃个饭或看个电影或爬山，或者做任何其他事
now we’re with other people and even though people sometimes annoy us a lot it turns out that talking to other people makes us happy,
我们就会和其他人一起，虽然有时候别人会烦我们，但事实证明跟别人交流会让我们很快乐
even casual interactions with other people make us happier than sitting by ourselves in a room.
即便是跟别人随便聊两句也比独自坐在屋子里要开心
So experiences are more interesting and all those things, but they also actually kind of serve to commit us to spending time with other people,
所以经历之类的东西更有趣，但它们也会让我们跟别人一起相处
and that’s partly why experiences pay off in so much more happiness.
这也是经历能让我们更快乐的原因之一