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Normal financial advice tells us that skipping the bar tab saves money, but it may be costing us in mental health over the long run.  A new survey from the American Psychiatric Association found that 54% of adults cope with loneliness by watching TV, movies, or online videos. Another 54% listen to music. Thirty-eight percent turn to social media. All of these come under a thread of emotional regulation, ways of numbing discomfort without confronting it.¹
While Americans continue to retreat from social life, they're also paying for the privilege of doing so. Many households are pushing past $100 a month in digital media subscriptions. Meanwhile, the number of adults who say they drink alcohol has fallen to 54%, the lowest rate in nearly 90 years according to a 2025 Gallup poll.² Gen Z drinks roughly 20% less than millennials did at the same age.³ Honestly, on paper, this looks like progress. Less money on alcohol and nights out = more money in the bank. But the trend is signaling something far more worrisome: the migration from social spending to isolation spending costs an enormous amount in mental health.
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Happy Money Series Part 4 | How to Spend Well and Enjoy Your Money More  "First round's on me!"
It is one of the most universal phrases in adult life. It represents a small celebration, a way of saying I am glad we are here. Often, it's a fight between friends to put a card down for a round. Typically, our brains flinch at an $80 charge. In this scenario however, it feels like the money is well spent. Why? Because that bill carries much more weight than just the $80 paper value. Happy Money Series | How to Spend Well and Enjoy Your Money More  Every Saturday afternoon through my high school years, I mowed the lawn at my childhood home. Week after week, I'd push that mower around in the SoCal heat, across the multiple grass areas in the front and back yard. All in all, the job took a grueling hour and a half.
Now I live in a house with a much smaller, but still reasonably sized, patch of grass. Ask me if I mow it myself. Heck no. The way I see it, I pay for lawn care one way or another. I either a) pay money for someone else to do it, or b) pay with my time and suffer through the dread of a chore I can't stand. For most people, option b) is the default. We grind through the chores we can't stand because outsourcing them feels lazy, or because we figure the money is better spent on almost anything else. It rarely registers as a financial decision at all. As it turns out, behavioral finance research says otherwise. Happy Money Series | How to Spend Well and Enjoy Your Money More  In the winter of 2025, after five years of 'we should really do this,' my friends and I boarded a flight to Hokkaido, Japan. We were going to experience "Japow", the legendary powder snow that has made Hokkaido one of the most coveted ski destinations on the planet.
If you're not familiar, many ski resorts in Hokkaido (the north island in Japan) receive well over 500 inches of snowfall in any given winter. It's one of the snowiest places in the world, and we had been waiting years to finally ski it firsthand. The planning phase of this trip alone was a rewarding process; locking down the tour company, mapping out resorts, researching restaurants, building a loose itinerary for Tokyo and Kyoto. Months of excitement and anticipation materialized on a shared google doc, building toward our January departure date. Then, in the week before we left, a dry spell appeared in the forecast. We weren't too worried… a few days without fresh snow wouldn’t completely ruin the trip. But it was not a just few days… Happy Money Series | How to Spend Well and Enjoy Your Money More  There's a personal finance cliché that has been running for decades: stop buying lattes, invest the money instead, and you'll retire with an extra $170,000. David Bach, a renowned financial author who coined "The Latte Factor," was not wrong in pointing out the massive effect of compound interest over a long period.
Skipping the morning coffee run can indeed save us thousands over the long run, but the argument fails to address an even larger problem. Buying a latte every single day costs more than a few dollars — it costs us the enjoyment of the treat itself! When that $6 coffee becomes an everyday habit, we slowly kill the dopamine boost that made it worth buying in the first place. From denial to acceptance: A guide to moving through the five stages of grief during an inflation shock.  I recently walk into a Chase Bank branch, which, yes, is still a sentence in 2026. The teller I was talking with has a family of 4. While discussing the astronomical cost of raising kids in this day and age, he jokingly said “Every time I leave the house, it costs me $200”. While I'm sure he was embellishing a bit, the statement rings true for a lot of Americans.
Gas is $5/gallon. A casual dinner out for two means $100 with tip. Movie theatre tickets are $20 each (before concessions), and you can forget getting a decent seat at a live sporting event. I mean I just bought a $30 polo from Target for goodness’ sake. What on earth happened? Sadly...the prices we knew are gone. The consumer price index has risen roughly 26% over the course of this decade¹. That's cumulative, and it's permanent. 5% inflation for services and healthcare. 3% inflation on goods. The sub 2% inflation of the 2010s is long gone. Around 46% of Americans in a recent Politico survey said the cost of living is worse than ever². YouGov has tracked inflation as Americans' most important issue every year since 2022³. What makes this dynamic even stranger: the economy, by most measures, is holding up. GDP grew 2% in 2025 despite everything thrown at it⁴. Unemployment has stayed near 4%. Private sector wages grew close to 4% year over year⁵. Leisure travel is booming. Many asset classes are hitting record highs. From a pure data standpoint, we should mostly feel better. But that’s just not the case. Americans are still intensely grieving the prices of the past, and unable to fully move on. The standard retirement calculator gives you a simple output and a false sense of certainty. The reality, hidden inside that 7% CAGR assumption, is a wide distribution of outcomes that can span millions of dollars. How timing luck can shape your retirement balance regardless of how well you saved.  Meet two retirees. We’ll name them Linda and Mark.
Linda retired at the end of 2008. Mark retired at the end of 1999. Both worked for 40 years. Both contributed the same amount to their 401(k)s. Both invested in a basic S&P 500 index fund. Neither panic-sold during crashes nor tried to time the market. They simply just invested their savings in their retirement accounts for the entire span of their careers. Linda finished with roughly $1.52M in today's dollars. Mark finished with roughly $4.97M. Same strategy, same discipline, same 40-year horizon, and a $3.45M gap between them. The only variable difference was the years they started and ended their careers. Now, go open any standard retirement calculator. Plug in their identical inputs: same contributions, same 40-year horizon, same 7% average assumed return. The calculator will spit out one number for both investors. It has no way of telling you that there is a wide range of outcomes somewhere between $1.52M and $4.97M, and that where you land inside that range is drastically attributable to the whims of the stock market. It's a structural problem with how retirement planning is oversimplified in its presentation. It only gets worse when you layer on what the behavioral research says about how people like Linda and Mark actually behave during their careers. The fear of running out of money often results in an overly conservative retirement plan. The flat-line spending model doesn't properly reflect the math behind a typical retirement spending glide path. Here's what the research suggests we do instead.  Open up almost any retirement planning tool, run a projection, and 99% of the time you’ll see a flat withdrawal rate (usually 4%) from 65 to 90, adjusted for inflation. It’s predictable and tidy.
It's also entirely oversimplified. The problem with the flat withdrawal rate is that it implies you, at 65, will have the same spending behavior as you at 85. Do you think you’ll have the same appetite for life, same desire to travel, same interest in a new car, same urge to go out for a drink at these vastly different ages? Probably not, right? Aging is dynamic. Every stage of life looks very different at its beginning versus its end. When your financial plan is built on a flat line, the math often tells you there's a crisis looming at 90 that demands significant restraint today. The result is a scarcity mindset that isn't entirely reflective of your evolving financial wants and needs.
A 5% market dip is one of the most normal events in investing. So why does it reliably send sentiment off a cliff?
Every market drawdown, you'll see the same red banner headline: “Stocks sell off as Wall Street worries about X”.
The S&P 500 drops 4–5% from a recent high, and the tone notably shifts. Pundits start talking about caution, allocations get “reassessed,” and risk becomes the focus. Scroll through investment forums and it sounds even worse: “Bear market incoming”. “Market is officially broken”. “The smart money got out weeks ago”. Somebody always has a thesis. What makes this so remarkable is how routine the trigger is. Since 1980, the S&P 500 has declined 5% or more in 93% of all calendar years.¹ These dips occur 4-5 times per year on average.² The event that sends investors into crisis mode is, statistically speaking, closer to a scheduled occurrence than a warning signal. Yet, sentiment data shows the same thing over and over: bearishness spikes quickly and sharply the moment one of these pullbacks arrives. Why do these dips always feel so worrying? Why is our emotional response so consistently out of proportion to what the data suggests?
Research from Stanford Medicine reveals that aging happens in sudden shifts — not gradual decline. Here is a roadmap for deciding when your money should be used when factoring in good health.
When Your Body Peaks vs When Your Money Peaks
I’ve sat across from a lot of people who spent their financial lives doing everything right. They contributed significantly to their 401(k). They stayed the course through volatile markets. They deferred and saved and planned.
Then, they retired at 65 and watched their nest egg continue to grow; the habit of not spending had calcified into the default mode of their lives. What most current and prospective retirees don’t know, and what many financial plans don’t factor in, is that there’s a risk in financial planning that doesn’t show up in projections or Monte Carlo simulations: Capability Risk, or the risk that your wealth arrives after your ability to fully use it. Money compounds, but your ability to enjoy it doesn’t. |
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