The Fulfillment Curve: An Ultimate “Enough” Alarm

Going back to my frugal learning roots, I ran across this information while reading Amy Dacyzyn’s Tightwad Gazette books long ago, then followed them up with an acquired copy of Your Money or Your Life by Vicki Robinson and her now-deceased husband, Joe Dominguez. More recently, a CNN article reminded me of this phenomenon.

As you can see by the graphics here and here, the fulfillment curve is an intersection of spending and enjoyment gained from the purchases—the more (and more often) you spend, the less satisfaction and fulfillment you gain from each purchase after a certain point. It doesn’t matter what you buy, and it applies to more than just purchases and material goods.

Recently, I’ve found that it applied to my writing these articles—the alarm has sounded, and I’m backing away from the computer. As my husband would say, my “fun meter” has pegged. It would seem that this is to be the summer of my discontent...or disCONTENT, as the case may be.

This “fulfillment curve” can be applied to just about anything: careers, foods, houses, furnishings, cars, people and relationships, you name it. “Buying” doesn’t just mean financial transactions, but can cover physical, emotional, personal, political, or just about anywhere you can “buy into” as well as “buy.”

Many of us also read and heeded the advice in the book Unplug the Christmas Machine, because it pointed out an excellent example of annual extravagance that we all pretty much thought was expectation and took for granted. Now we know better—it was all a baby shower (for Jesus) gone awry.

We’ve also learned (and are still learning) where else we’ve gone awry with our spending and expectations. In fact, the book Great Expectations is another excellent example of spending and emotional dependence on others gone awry—it’s an oldie, but a goodie…or at least the TV version on A&E with the actor Ioan Gruffud was.

My personal alarm has sounded as far as computer use, the internet, and books. If I back away now, I’m hoping I might become drawn to them again in the future—we can’t live without some sort of input and output (hopefully intelligent). Has an alarm gone off for you yet, dear reader? If so, by all means go start a “fulfillment curve” discussion in the comments section or even in your own cyber realms.