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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. 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.
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.  I recently watched Jay Kelly on Netflix, where George Clooney plays a fictional movie star who dedicates his life to his craft and succeeds by every external measure. The catch? He later admits to choosing his career over his family, only to realize he’s missed many of life’s most meaningful moments and relationships.
I don’t generally sit down to watch a movie looking for financial metaphors, that would be weird. But every so often, a story brushes up against a question I already spend time thinking about. In this case, Jay Kelly’s story happened to remind me of the FIRE movement. Whether it’s Coast, Lean, or Fat FIRE, the core philosophy is the same: front-load sacrifice in your early years to buy freedom later. The math is sound. Saving aggressively from an early age is essentially the equivalent of a financial superpower. The appeal is also undeniable. Who doesn’t want the freedom to do whatever they want in their 40s? I’ve always joked that my dream job is retirement, and FIRE is a good mechanism for getting me there. But the FIRE movement raises a complicated set of questions. What are the movement’s disciples missing by deferring their lives in their 20s and 30s? And how do we find the "goldilocks" zone between saving responsibly for the future and actually living along the way?  Budgeting may easily be the least sexy habit in personal finance. And to be honest, it can really suck. It’s tedious, it’s boring, and it often confronts us with truths we’d rather keep in the background.
In my line of work, I routinely hear clients say: “Well, we tried tracking our spending, but life just got in the way and we couldn’t keep it consistent. If things ever get tight, we’ll hunker down then.” But that’s just kicking the can down a road paved with hidden stress. Eventually, a "surprise" expense or heavy financial decision reveals that we weren't as prepared as originally thought. We avoid facing the discomfort for the sake of "ignorant bliss," but as with any bad habit, the cost of that clarity-avoidance compounds.  When you hear the word advertisement, what comes to mind?
A TV commercial? Maybe a billboard on the highway or a bus? The painfully unskippable 30 seconds before a YouTube video? For decades, advertising announced itself. And over time, we learned how to ignore it. Popups, sponsored news content, promoted websites. We’ve become increasingly attuned by filtering out the noise. But of course, every time we adapt to a new style of advertisement, a more effective one takes its place. Today, social media has essentially erased the boundary between content and advertisement, making it increasingly difficult to spot an ad six inches from our face. One moment we’re watching a humor-filled reel. The next, we're being pitched products by an influencer in their messy (but familiar) bedroom. We don’t brace ourselves for a sales pitch because it doesn’t feel like one. After all, who expects an ad from someone who looks like a friend? Ads have never been this well camouflaged, and the numbers prove it's working: social media advertising hit $276 billion in 2025 and shows no signs of slowing down¹. Companies are following the returns, and those returns are staggering. In this article, I want to unpack why social media ads are so profitable for companies, how they’re getting increasingly invasive, and what we can actually do about it. |
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