Hedonic Treadmill of Happiness
...and why the pursuit of happiness is futile
Humans are simple creatures. Irrespective of our professions, we all live roughly identical lives. We compete for food, shelter, and sex. Every time we succeed to level-up in any of these three domains, we feel a sense of achievement.
Eating in fancy restaurants, buying a new house, getting hooked with a smart and beautiful partner, all of these things have one thing in common—they make us happy.
The bigger, more important question, though, is not whether they make us feel happy or not. But it is regarding the time-span of happiness induced by these accomplishments.
I was very excited the time I bought my first vehicle. But, that excitement faded in a few months, and life was back to normal as it was before I made the purchase.
I lost my dad when I was seventeen. Initially, it was suffocating to imagine the entirety of my life without him. But as time passed, I adjusted to my new life and became used to his absence. I still miss him, a slight mention about his past is enough to wet my eyes, but it is not like that I feel a constant sense of pain and sadness as it was in the first year of his death.
The point is that extreme happiness and sadness do not last for a consistent period of time. Our happiness level tends to return to a neutral position after a while. And this is what Hedonic Treadmill is.
Hedonic adaptation is a concept studied by psychology researchers that refers to people’s general tendency to return to a set level of happiness despite life’s ups and downs.
It is referred to as the hedonic treadmill because we always end up where we started—constantly running to be at the same place.
No matter how good or bad something makes you feel, you will eventually return to your previous emotional state.
Disability and Happiness
Suffering an accident that left one disabled is one of the most agonizing trauma one can ever experience in his life. Researchers, in an attempt to understand the effect of traumatic events on our happiness level usually considered accident victims as prime subjects of their study.
One such research was conducted in 2011 by Christopher Boyce and Alex Wood (2011) that provides a nuanced way of understanding the impact of disability on life satisfaction. The researchers had available longitudinal data from a large and representative sample of German adults (n=11,680). Available measures included questionnaire items assessing life satisfaction as well as Big Five personality tests.
Here are the main findings of their study.
First, disability, in general, led to a decrease in life satisfaction. Second, by the fourth year following disability, some adaptation was evident; that is, life satisfaction scores began to return to pre-disability levels. Third, pre-disability life satisfaction robustly predicted post-disability life satisfaction.
Winning a Lottery and Happiness
One of the parable studies in positive psychology is an investigation reported by Phillip Brickman, Dan Coates, and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman (1978). These psychologists were then at Northwestern University, and the state of Illinois had just started to run a lottery.
The researchers interviewed 22 state lottery winners, each of whom had received at least $50,000 during the past year and some as much as $1,000,000. The winners were asked to rate their past, present, and future (expected) happiness on scales from 0 = not at all happy to 5 = very happy, as well as the pleasure they took in mundane activities like reading a magazine, again on 0-5 scales.
Brickman and his colleagues also interviewed a group of 58 individuals who had not won the lottery but lived in the same neighborhoods as the winners.
The results showed that lottery winners were scarcely more happy than the comparison research participants in terms of their present happiness (4.00 versus 3.82) and future happiness (4.20 versus 4.14). And winners found less pleasure in everyday activities than nonwinners (3.33 versus 3.82).
The message is clear that extreme financial accomplishments are not as exciting in the long-term as it appears to be. We usually overestimate the duration of pleasure induced by such accomplishments.
What’s Wrong With The Pursuit of Happiness
The problem with pursuing happiness is that it is an endless cycle that can even lead to moral and physical degradation.
You feel a little dull and decide to get up and do something that makes you happy. You have defined certain expectations from that activity. But it will not make you feel happy and alive for as long as you might expect, due to the Hedonic adaption.
Hence, the pursuit of happiness is nothing but a constant chase for one hit of dopamine after the other. The point is that when you do something only with an intention to be happy, with no other meaning involved, it bores you real quick. Since that task has no other meaning than to keep you happy, it becomes meaningless to continue doing it.
Humans have what Daniel Gilbert, author of the bestselling book Stumbling on Happiness, calls the Impact Bias. It is the gap between what we predict and what we ultimately experience—the errors we make in estimating both the intensity and duration of our emotions.
Would a twenty-percent raise or winning the lottery result in a contented life? You may predict it will, but almost certainly it won’t turn out that way.
So, What Should You Do?
Doing something just for the sake of happiness is one of the most shallow ways to be happy. Materialistic possessions may have a certain glamour to them, but they are certainly not ideal to achieve long-term fulfillment.
Happiness, instead of being the ultimate outcome, should be treated as a side-effect of doing something meaningful. Happiness for the sake of happiness will always leave you unfulfilled, and may even lead to addiction.
There are plenty of ways to be happy—binge-watch your favorite sitcom for hours, scroll Instagram reels until it hurts your head, do drugs and get high (don’t do it), or travel to a hill station you always wanted to, spend your time exploring things to find your passion, play a board game with your family, etc.
Roughly speaking, pleasure-inducing activities can be divided into two categories, which I call: passive indulgences and active undertakings.
Passive Indulgences are activities whose sole aim is to make you happy. There is no higher meaning attached to them.
Active Undertakings are activities that have a purpose that transcends beyond the boundaries of happiness. Playing a board game with your family may make you feel happy, but a higher, more profound goal is to strengthen the familial bond. They also involve a certain amount of discomfort to get started. It is as Ben Francia once said: “Great Things Never Came From Comfort Zones.”
Invest more of your time doing the latter. Consume high-quality rich dopamine induced by Active Undertakings that challenge you. Pleasure should not be the primary goal for doing something.
I appreciate your patience and dedication to read this overwhelming essay. I am glad you made it through the end. I hope I gave you a new tool that will help you to live a more meaningful and satisfying life.
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Thank you.
Great article.
Inspiring!