"If I don't spend it, what's it for?"

There's a belief that answers the whole book with a shrug. Money's for spending. You can't take it with you. A person who asks the price of every evening and puts the difference in a pot is saving for a life they're not living, and the table is the life.

I'd agree that money is for spending. I'd ask what on. The wanted column in chapter 22 is the answer, and it's a list of things you'd spend on with pleasure if the money were there. The money is there. It's in the matched column. The shrug isn't a choice to spend rather than save. It's a choice to spend on the table's list rather than yours, and the table's list was written by whoever chose the restaurant.

Elizabeth Dunn's finding from chapter 6 is worth bringing back here. Spending on other people, chosen and given, made people happier than spending on themselves. That's a case for spending, and I'd make it gladly. Buy the round. Pay for the friend who's skint. Take your mother somewhere she'd never take herself. Those are the spends that Dunn's participants were happier for, and none of them is the split. The split is money that leaves you and lands on the far end of the table without anyone having given anything to anyone. It's the one kind of spending on others that the research doesn't show makes you happier, because it isn't giving. It's leakage.

The shrug also assumes that the alternative to the split is a pot, and that a pot is a kind of death. A pot is a fortnight in Italy. It's the course you've talked about. It's the thing for the house you've wanted for three years, bought and used. Money that doesn't go to the table on Tuesday isn't unspent. It's spent later, on your list, on purpose, and a pound spent that way buys more of a life than a pound that went into the split, because you chose where it went.

So keep the shrug. Money is for spending. Spend it on your list, and on the people you've chosen to give to, and let the far end of the table pay for the fish.