We care more about experiences than possessions

Years ago to own a house and a car was the (American) dream of any young adult willing to start a successful life. Today many things has changed: we prefer to rent a house and to use carpooling.

This behavior has earned us the nickname Generation Rent. There has been a shifting in the value systems of many young people that decide to redefine the concept of “success” by giving importance more to experiences than to possession.
A general fear of commitment, basic human psychology and the internet age are some of the reasons of this shift. James Hamblin, from The Atlantic, wrote that psychology research has shown that experiences bring people more happiness than possessions. He cited learnings published in the journal of Psychological Science by Amit Kumar. He sustains that people don’t like hearing about other people’s possessions very much, but they do like hearing about experiences.
Social interaction is one of the most important determinants of human happiness and it’s what makes experiences more relevant than possessions. “Even a bad experience becomes a good story” said Hamblin in his piece. Besides the psychological reason related to happiness, we prefer experiences over possession thanks to the internet that has produced accessibility and impermanence.
We can have access to any media or information thanks to Spotify, Netflix and other platform like. You don’t need to own a cd player to listen to music as well as you don’t need anymore to own an hard drive because you can save your memories in the “cloud”. The aversion to ownership is an opportunity to emphasize the shifting from product to services. Several new businesses are focusing on offering an experience based on the people’s needs and lifestyles. We don’t want one single thing because we can have some of many other thing. A piece of fancy car with Uber, thousand album with Spotify, every kind of food with Just Eat and so on.
This shifting to the mostly intangible experience can be seen as a loss of certainty and a runaway of young people from responsibility, but the millennials (another nickname of our generation) have seen the consequences of economical crisis on their parents losing most of their material possessions and they have started to consider ownership more a liability than an attribute.
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