Perkins calls this the memory dividend — the return an experience keeps generating every time you remember it. A thing depreciates. A memory compounds.
— Not the Epilogue, 21. Experiences Over Hoarding
The tension isn’t really about spending. It’s about what your future self will thank you for, and you can’t ask him yet. He’s not born. So you’re making a bet on a stranger’s behalf, using only your present self’s judgment, which is notoriously bad at imagining what will matter later. That’s the real problem. Not “things versus experiences” as a slogan, but the fact that we’re terrible forecasters of our own gratitude.
Look at your own closets. An object bought to feel like an heirloom can end up in a drawer, stirring nothing when you see it. A trip you almost didn’t take can become a story you’ve told so many times it’s practically load-bearing in a relationship. The object depreciates the moment you start using it. The trip keeps appreciating. Same bank account. Wildly different returns.
Ask what you’ll be telling, not what you’ll be having
Objects sit still. Experiences move through time with you, picking up meaning as they go — you tell them at dinners, you half-remember them wrong in flattering ways, you use them to explain who you are to people who weren’t there. That’s the compounding — what Bill Perkins, as Not the Epilogue reports in 53. Experiences Over Hoarding, calls the memory dividend. Each retelling is a small deposit that makes the original moment worth slightly more.
So before a purchase, try asking a blunt question: will you still be telling this in five years? Not whether you will still have it — whether you will still be telling it. A kitchen renovation might get one telling, at a dinner party, about the contractor who disappeared for six weeks. A father-daughter trip to see a total solar eclipse might get told a hundred times, at weddings, at funerals, to grandchildren who weren’t born yet when it happened.
Try this: Before your next non-essential purchase over a modest threshold — you pick the number — write one sentence answering “What will you say about this in ten years?” If the honest answer is “nothing, it’ll just be there,” that’s useful information. It doesn’t mean don’t buy it. It means you now know what kind of purchase you’re making.
Depreciation is a feature of matter, not a moral failure
Careful here, because this line can curdle into guilt about wanting nice things. That’s not the point. Objects depreciate because they’re physical — they get scratched, they go out of style, your taste changes, or you simply stop noticing them, which is its own kind of depreciation even if the object is fine. This isn’t a character flaw in you. It’s a fact about matter and attention.
The mistake isn’t owning things. It’s expecting an object to do a memory’s job. A good coat keeps you warm; it was never going to make you feel connected to your life story. When we’re disappointed by purchases, it’s often because we asked a physical object to deliver an emotional or relational payoff it was never built for.
Once you see it that way, the fix isn’t asceticism. It’s matching the tool to the job. Want comfort, function, reliability — buy the object, buy it well, and don’t apologize for it. Want a story you’ll carry — that’s a different budget line, and it usually involves other people, some discomfort, and a specific place and time you can’t buy twice.
Build a small ledger of replays
Here’s a practical habit: keep a short, running list — a note in your phone is fine — of moments from the last few years you find yourself replaying unprompted. Not moments you think you should be grateful for. Moments that actually surface, uninvited, while you’re doing dishes or falling asleep.
Look at that list. It will almost never contain a possession. It will contain a conversation, a trip, a risk you took, a meal that ran too long. That list is your actual balance sheet of what compounds. Most people have never looked at it directly, which is why they keep spending against a hunch instead of evidence they already have.
Try this: Once a season, spend ten minutes adding to that list. After a year, you’ll have a rough but honest picture of your own compounding assets — and a much clearer sense of where the next dollar or the next Saturday should go.
None of this is a rule against buying things. It’s a request to notice, honestly, what’s actually paying you back over time. Not the Epilogue goes further into how to build this into an actual second-half plan — planning experiences early, valuing time over money, sharing experiences, and giving while you’re alive. But the noticing has to start somewhere, and a phone note is as good a place as any.
Not financial advice.
Go deeper. Not the Epilogue takes this further. See the book.