Experiences work differently. They don’t just happen once; we replay them. We retell the trip, laugh again at what went wrong, and keep the memory paying out for years. Perkins calls this the memory dividend — the return an experience keeps generating every time you remember it. A thing depreciates. A memory compounds.
— Not the Epilogue, 53. Experiences Over Hoarding
The tension isn’t really spend-versus-save. It’s that both objects and experiences ask something of your attention afterward, and only one of them pays interest on that attention. A new jacket sits in the closet asking nothing. A trip you took with someone you love sits in your memory, and every time you return to it, it changes slightly, deepens, gets retold, gets folded into who you understand yourself to be. The hard part isn’t choosing experience over object in the abstract. It’s noticing, in the actual moment of spending, which kind of thing you’re really buying.
Ask what you’ll be doing with it in five years
Objects get used, then stored, then forgotten, then occasionally rediscovered with mild surprise. Experiences get revisited — not literally repeated, but replayed, mentioned at dinner, woven into the story you tell about your own life. A simple test: imagine the purchase five years out. Are you using the thing, or are you telling the story? If the honest answer is “you’ll have stopped noticing it by then,” that’s useful information, not a judgment.
Try this: before a purchase over a certain size — pick your own threshold — ask “Will you be telling someone about this in five years, or will you just own it?” If you can’t picture a story, you’re probably buying depreciation. That’s not wrong, exactly. Some things need to be owned and not storied. But it’s worth knowing which category you’re in before the money leaves your hand.
Memory compounds because you keep adding to it
Here’s the part people miss: experiences don’t compound automatically just because they happened. A vacation you never think about again isn’t compounding anything. What makes memory compound is return — you go back to it, mentally or out loud, and each return adds a layer. This means the dividend isn’t really in the experience itself, it’s in what you do with it afterward.
So the second move, after choosing experience over object, is building small rituals of return. Write one paragraph about the trip when you get home — not a journal entry, just a paragraph, the kind you’d be glad to find in ten years. Put one photo somewhere you’ll actually see it, not in a folder of four thousand others. Tell the story badly at first, at a dinner table, and let it get better with practice. These aren’t sentimental extras. They’re the mechanism by which an experience turns into a holding that pays you back.
Try this: for your next meaningful experience — a trip, a reunion, a hard conversation that mattered — set a calendar reminder for six months out that just says “revisit.” When it pops up, spend ten minutes remembering on purpose. This is how compounding actually works: not through the size of the original event, but through scheduled, repeated attention afterward.
The real cost of objects isn’t the price, it’s the maintenance
There’s a second-order effect that rarely gets named: objects ask for upkeep. They need storage, cleaning, insuring, eventually disposing of. Every object you acquire adds a small, permanent line item to your attention budget, for as long as you own it. Experiences, by contrast, cost what they cost once, and then they’re done asking anything of you except the occasional moment of remembering, which is a cost you’d probably choose to pay anyway.
This matters more in the second half of life than the first, because by now you’ve likely accumulated enough objects to know how this goes. The garage, the closet, the storage unit — these are not neutral. They are small, ongoing taxes on your time and mental space, paid in exchange for things that are, on average, quietly losing value. Meanwhile the trip from eleven years ago costs you nothing to keep, and still shows up, uninvited, making you smile at a stoplight.
Try this: look at one object you’ve been meaning to deal with — sell, donate, repair, replace — and notice how much relief there is in simply deciding. That relief is the maintenance tax becoming visible. It’s useful data about where your money has been going.
None of this is an argument against owning things. It’s an argument for noticing, honestly, which purchases are investments in a life you’ll keep living inside, and which are just things you’ll eventually have to move out of the way. Not the Epilogue goes further, in 53. Experiences Over Hoarding. But the noticing itself, you can start tonight, with whatever’s in your cart.
Not financial advice.
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