That was an interesting blog post with a lot of fresh takes on the subject. Of course I have my quibbles:
From the article:
You have to try spending money on tons of different oddball things before you find what works for you.
...
There is no guide on what will make you happy – you have to try a million different things and figure out what fits your personality.
The obvious problems here are that:
1) By the time you've tried "a million different things" you've already gone broke, even if each thing only averages ten bucks.
2) If you try some things like drugs, social media, processed foods, streaming services, or luxuries you may become dependent upon them, and become less happy as a result. Some of the things that will addict you are mainstream products, so there's no way to know in advance how to avoid addictive things except to avoid most things by default.
In point #1, he uses the term "revenge spending" to describe conspicuous consumption, within the context of "post COVID-19" One, I have never heard of "revenge spending" as a scientific concept. Even if it did exist as a scientific term, spending "post COVID-19" just went back to normal. He doesn't provide any numbers to support irrational behavior, but I don't think it exists.
Perhaps the terms are referring to the large increase in retail spending which occurred in 2021-2022 and far exceeded the pre-COVID trend. Just to get back to the trendline at this point would require about a 13% decrease in spending. But keep in mind these are nominal numbers.
FRED no longer calculates real retail sales, so I subtracted monthyretailsales*monthlyCPI from monthlyretailsales to arrive at the following chart, which roughly demonstrates that until the past few months, most of the increase in nominal retail sales was due to inflation, and real sales have actually been on somewhat of a downtrend since the pandemic started. But in the past few months, real spending has gone up, perhaps as consumers pull ahead purchases to escape a perceived inflation that is no longer reflected in the numbers.