Eric Athas spent most of his life proud to call himself an early adopter. The essay he wrote for the Times Well newsletter is about why that stopped, and it is less a piece about shopping than about a loop the brain runs by design — which is what makes it more useful than the usual austerity advice.
His own description of the pattern is familiar: new things arrive with brief utility and enjoyment, then take up “permanent residence in the back of an already-cluttered closet,” and the wanting moves on to the next object. He expected the purchases to produce happiness and found the opposite, which is the point at which most essays of this kind reach for willpower.
The research says willpower is the wrong lever. Laurie Santos, a psychology professor at Yale who studies happiness, names the structure directly: “We can wind up on this treadmill of chasing after more and more new carrots in a way that doesn’t lead to sustained happiness.” The dynamic is hedonic adaptation, and it does not require you to be unusually materialistic. It only requires you to be a person who adapts.
Newness is a prediction error
David Eagleman, the Stanford neuroscientist, explains the mechanism in terms of what the brain is for. It is wired to attend to what it did not anticipate: a novel experience gets written down as a memory so it can be predicted next time, and once the prediction is in place the brain stops caring and looks for the next surprise.
“Newness is all about, ‘Hey, I thought I had a good prediction of the world, but in fact, there’s something that I didn’t see coming, and now I’ve got it,’” Eagleman says. The reward is the update, not the object. Researchers have also found that merely seeing something novel produces a dopamine response, which is why the next phone or appliance presents itself as genuinely interesting rather than as the fourth iteration of the last one.
This reframes the buyer’s remorse problem. The satisfaction was never going to last, because lasting was never the function. What the brain wanted was the correction to its model of the world, and it got it in the first week.
Friction instead of resolve
The practical section comes from Katy Milkman, a Wharton professor and author of How to Change, and its diagnosis is environmental: “As long as we are exposed to an onslaught of new things, we are set up to keep acquiring them, even if we’re trying to resist.”
Her method — Athas calls it a novelty audit — is to name the specific temptation first (an expensive shopping habit, viral products, ad-saturated scrolling) and then write rules that raise the cost of acting on it, which researchers call commitment devices. Delete the saved card details from the retail platform. Cancel the subscription that ships things monthly. Take the shopping apps off the phone. The logic, in Milkman’s words: “You basically want to insert extra costs right now so that things equalize or work out in favor of the ultimate long-term benefits.”
The intervention is deliberately small and mechanical, and it targets the moment of urge rather than the desire itself. Nothing in it asks anyone to stop wanting things.
The unheroic ending
The essay’s best quality is that it does not resolve. Athas still buys things he later regrets. What changed is the balance: he seeks novelty in experiences rather than objects, and rediscovers interest in what he already owns. The final scene has him scrolling through touch-screen coffee makers with built-in frothers and then considering the one-setting machine already on his counter — which, for making coffee, is sufficient. The urge is still there; the friction is what made room to notice it.
Two caveats are worth carrying. The piece is adapted from Athas’s own book, Saying No to New, disclosed in a single italic line at the end, so it reads as an extract rather than reported journalism — the research is linked, not described, and the evidence for the method as practised here is one anecdote about a coffee maker. And the framing stays entirely individual: the same loop is being engineered deliberately on the other side of the screen, by feeds and storefronts built to supply the next surprise. Friction is worth having regardless, but it is a defence mounted against a system that is not neutral.