Among Dutch millionaires — people for whom cost is irrelevant — just under half spent nothing on outsourcing disliked tasks, according to Whillans et al.’s PNAS study. That non-outsourcing fraction is the closest available proxy for inaction in this domain: roughly half of those who could easily afford to outsource cleaning choose not to. Importantly, the paper does not report that non-outsourcers have lower life satisfaction — it reports a positive association for those who do buy time, so the 50% here is a behavioral non-use figure, not a measured regret rate. On the action side, Whillans et al. surveyed 6,271 working adults across four countries and found that those who spent on time-saving services reported higher life satisfaction; a field experiment gave 60 adults $40 to spend on a time-saving purchase one weekend and a material purchase the next, and the time-saving weekend produced higher positive affect (mean 4.00 vs 3.71 on the SPANE scale, d=0.33). The benefit was not moderated by income or wealth (Z=−0.35, P=0.729), and subsequent research found that time-saving spending also improved relationship satisfaction regardless of whether the specific purchase was practical or indulgent.
The paradox is that almost nobody acts on this. When 98 working adults were asked how they would spend a $40 windfall, only 2% chose time-saving. Among 818 Dutch millionaires — people for whom cost is irrelevant — nearly half spent nothing on outsourcing disliked tasks in a typical month. Trübner (2024) catalogued the barriers in a German sample of 1,479 couples: guilt about perceived laziness, gendered expectations that housework is a domestic duty, privacy concerns about strangers in the home, and discomfort with anything resembling “servant culture.” These are psychological barriers, not economic ones, and they track cleanly with Gilovich’s inaction-dominance pattern: people forgo a well-documented happiness gain, and the status quo persists because the cost of inaction is diffuse and invisible.
The caveat worth flagging is that this entry measures well-being and behavior, not regret. The evidence shows that buying time tends to raise happiness; it does not show that people who clean their own homes feel worse off, and it certainly does not measure whether they regret the choice — some genuinely prefer the routine, the exercise, or the sense of control. The rates here are proxies, not direct survey findings, and the ratio between the two sides should be read as a well-being-and-behavior asymmetry rather than a regret asymmetry in the strict Gilovich sense. The directional finding is clear: outsourcing time-draining tasks improves well-being for most people who try it. Whether not doing so constitutes “regret” depends on how much you trust revealed preferences over stated ones.