An entrepreneur friend of mine struggled to balance business and family. Business usually won, since professional demands often feel more urgent.

Miss a school event because of a shipping problem? You feel bad about it, but you promise yourself you’ll make the next one. Miss dinner with your family because you had to deal with a problem employee? You’re disappointed, but you tell yourself tomorrow is another day.

Generally speaking, research shows that when you buy material items, adaptation occurs relatively quickly. That new car is exciting at first, but the feeling quickly fades. The same for new clothes, new houses, new anything. Social scientists call the phenomenon hedonic adaptation, the rapid return to a stable baseline level of happiness after a major positive or negative life event.

And then there’s this. While making a purchase—or achieving a certain goal—rarely results in lasting happiness, the pursuit of that item or goal can actually make you less happy:

At a broader level, the often-cited 2010 study by two Princeton University researchers concludes, “Beyond $75,000 [toss in a little inflation and the figure is somewhat over $100,000], higher income is neither the road to experience happiness nor the road to relief of unhappiness or stress.”

Although other studies appear to at least partly debunk that finding, even so: Money (more specifically, spending money) does a lot of things, but it won’t make you happier.

In a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , researchers surveyed thousands of people who sometimes paid other people to perform tasks they didn’t enjoy or didn’t want to do.

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