We’ve been taught a fairly persuasive rule about happiness and spending: Buy experiences, not things.
Spend your money on the trip to Paris, not another handbag. Go to the concert. Take the cooking class. Book the ridiculous treehouse in Costa Rica. Research has repeatedly found that experiential purchases tend to produce more enduring happiness than material ones, in part because experiences become intertwined with our identities, strengthen social connection, and are less vulnerable to comparison with what everyone else owns.
But maybe we’ve been a little unfair to stuff… especially stuff with glittery PARIS stamped on it.
Emerging research suggests that souvenirs can do something psychologically useful: They can keep an experience alive after it has ended.
A little portal back to the trip
In a recent study, researchers examined whether souvenirs could sustain travelers’ well-being after they returned home. Across three studies, they found that souvenirs strongly associated with the locality of a destination—its place, people, and past—helped carry elements of the travel experience into everyday life.
The benefit wasn’t simply about owning a nice object, though. Souvenirs appeared to support well-being partly through their sentimental value and their ability to reconnect people with meaningful aspects of the trip. The trinket worked because of what it represented, not because anyone desperately needed another miniature lighthouse.
A souvenir is technically a material possession, but psychologically it may behave more like an experience.
Researchers have found that “experiential products”—physical possessions valued largely for the experiences they facilitate—generate levels of well-being similar to life experiences and greater than conventional material purchases. The souvenir just might occupy a delightful loophole in the “experiences versus things” debate: It is a thing whose primary job is to resurrect an experience and twig the memory of the Morocco market.
In defense of the fridge magnet
This brings us, inevitably, to fridge magnets.
A 2024 study examined what happens to souvenir magnets after vacations. Researchers interviewed magnet owners about their everyday interactions with these exceptionally unglamorous objects.
It turns out the lowly fridge magnet punches considerably above its psychological weight.
Because magnets remain visible in the home, participants encountered them repeatedly during ordinary routines. Those encounters prompted what the researchers called “post-holiday memory work”: recalling places, people, events, and emotions from trips. These recollections were usually accompanied by positive emotional responses.
The magnet didn’t just say, “I went to Barcelona”; it said, “Remember that hot afternoon in Barcelona when we had all that sangria?”
That may be the real value of a souvenir.
Human memory needs cues. Experiences that once felt vivid gradually recede as grocery lists, deadlines, laundry, and the ho-hum moments of life occupy our attention. A physical object can interrupt ordinary life and retrieve a piece of a life we might otherwise stop accessing.
Buy better souvenirs
This doesn’t mean the path to flourishing involves buying snow globes at every airport you fly through.
The research suggests that the most psychologically valuable souvenirs may be those with real sentimental meaning: something connected to a specific place, person, experience, or a meaningful story.
A handmade bowl bought from the woman who taught you to cook in Oaxaca probably has more memory-retrieval power than a generic T-shirt bought in a panicked sprint through the terminal.
Visibility may matter, too. A souvenir buried in the back of a closet has limited opportunity to jog your memory. Something incorporated into everyday life—a photograph, piece of art, ornament, magnet, mug, or strange ceramic donkey strategically positioned beside the coffeemaker—gets repeated chances to remind you that your life extends beyond whatever small stuff you might be sweating.
Happiness Essential Reads
So yes, still prioritize experiences over accumulating possessions. But while you’re having the experience, buy the souvenir. Not because you need another thing, but because someday, standing half-awake in your kitchen on an otherwise forgettable Tuesday, that goofy little donkey may transport you somewhere wonderful.