Among Dutch millionaires — people for whom cost is irrelevant — roughly 50% still spent nothing on outsourcing disliked tasks in a typical month, and that non-outsourcing group reported measurably lower life satisfaction than those who did, according to Whillans et al.’s PNAS study. This well-being gap is the closest available proxy for inaction regret in this domain: roughly half of those who could easily outsource cleaning choose not to, and the satisfaction data consistently favors those who do. 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 0.77 points more happiness on a 10-point scale. The effect held across income levels, 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, not regret. People who clean their own homes may report lower life satisfaction on average, but that does not mean they experience regret — some genuinely prefer the routine, the exercise, or the sense of control. The rates here are well-being proxies, not direct survey findings, and the 5.6:1 ratio between inaction and action should be read as a well-being 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.