Life as a hedonic treadmill
My friend’s name is Pete. He owns an IT business. His business is a drop in the ocean next to Apple, but Pete is okay with that.
Pete is happy.
John is my former customer. His company makes more in a day than Pete’s does in a year. And John is unhappy.
His therapist will soon be richer than John himself.
Pete often has a cheap pizza for lunch. John could buy a space rocket.
What’s the problem?
Hedonic treadmill
In 1978, a group of scientists conducted a study titled “Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative?”
They assumed that people who had recently won a lottery would be happy while those who had recently become paraplegics due to tragic accidents would be unhappy.
What they discovered surprised them. Both lottery winners and accident victims eventually returned to the emotional state they had before the change.
They call it the hedonic treadmill or hedonic adaptation effect.
The most natural state for our brain isn’t happiness. Evolution didn’t shape humans to be happy but to survive and reproduce.
Happiness doesn’t help in solving these tasks. The most natural state for our brain is calmness or emotional equilibrium.
And when something throws our emotional pendulum off balance, it swings right back. If we have a usual mood—say, melancholy—and something shakes us up, we’ll eventually settle back into it. We adapt to losses… but sadly, also to gains.
It’s easier for a camel to go through the needle’s eye than for a person to become happier through success.
Success brings bright emotions, but the pendulum swings back sooner than we expect.
A frustrated celebrity
A lot of people love to picture strategy like this:
But if:
– A means ‘a frustrated, unsatisfied person’
– B means ‘a rich celebrity’
– Strategy means ‘work like hell to become a celebrity’
this person will just end up being a rich, frustrated, and unsatisfied celebrity.
John built a successful business. But he started out frustrated by his poverty and did it just to get rich. He had his moments of glory, but the hedonic treadmill kept pulling him back to his psychological struggles—again and again.
Pete, on the other hand, was happy from the start. He built his business simply because he loved what he did. And he’s still happy.
Of course, money brings confidence and opens up some opportunities you wouldn’t have without it. But money and success can only get you so far.
Happiness is a garden. You have to cultivate it and take care of it. You can’t grow it through heroics or money.
To be continued
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Read also: Don’t Buy the Present by Paying With Your Future
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