The conundrum that strikes every detailed thinker that starts to earn enough to have disposable income is how to spend it in a way that positively enriches their lives. But care must also be taken to avoid the consumerist mind trap of starting to believe the assumption that your life can be made better by adding things (that you can buy).

Everyone has done this at least once with Monopoly money

Instead of nebulous advice about the relation between money and happiness, I came across a useful corollary to the overused adage (in a Tim Ferriss podcast with Mr Money Moustache http://tim.blog/2017/02/13/mr-money-mustache/).

The thought-provoking line was, " Instead of using money to add more positives to your life, use it to first remove the negatives.
This simple shift of the goalposts (or rather simply repainting of it) brought about a flood of useful ideas about how to spend the money, and I invite you to try the exercise right now as well.

Gave it a thought? There are some useful examples in the podcast as well, but some of the easy ones that I came up with were:

Improve commute experience when necessary
Spend on tools that improve work efficiency because they pay back in the long run.
Consider hiring help for business admin work that you detest.

I've found a lot of these follow the theme of exchanging money for time, because in almost any body's calculus time is a far more valuable resource.

Especially for people who have just started earning, parting with that money for non-essential things might seem treacherous to do, but a lesson I quickly learned was that the best strategies for making money grow were to let it go into channels that allowed it to multiply. Simply storing it doesn't have much more than an additive effect but loss aversion is a hard demon to fight.

When you hear the phrase "Never gonna give you up", it usually not a good sign.

Investing it, (especially in yourself early on) seems to reap much greater returns in the long term. Whether that's through education (formal or informal) recreation, or just simply improving the quality of your life.