The Hedonic Treadmill
happierhuman.com
happierhuman.com
The author is also misquoting, or misunderstanding, Kahneman. Kahneman isn't talking at all about the treadmill. He's talking about what he called the "Focusing Illusion"-- a fancy way of saying "the grass is always greener on the other side..."
Relevant links:
"Beyond the Hedonic Treadmill: Revising the Adaptation Theory of Well-Being" http://www.factorhappiness.at/downloads/quellen/S9_Diener.pd...
Kahneman tried to explain the hedonic treadmill via with his own aspiration treadmill. He claims that he not only failed, but the data were opposite to his hypothesis.
https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10056
Kahneman's paper where that OP misquotes Kahneman from:
http://psiexp.ss.uci.edu/research/teaching/Schkade_Kahneman_...
https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10056
Uh... what that Edge article you are linking shows is that 'experienced happiness' which he thought would be a better measurement of happiness than life satisfaction is even more immune to your life circumstances:
>"This was the first of many such findings: income, marital status and education all influence experienced happiness less than satisfaction, and we could show that the difference is not a statistical artifact. "
This only strengthens the OP's opinion...
He does tell us at the end of the article that GDP correlates with the happiness levels of countries. But that doesn't really detract from the OP's reasoning. (Who knows if that's even causative, instability & war could cause both GDP & happiness to drop.)
Even the study you are linking suggests revisions, and is far from 'disproving' the hedonic treadmill theory.
Is that saying affect of (income, marital status and education) on experienced happiness < affect of (income, marital status and education) on satisfaction, or is it saying affect of (income, marital status and education) on experienced happiness < affect of (satisfaction) on experienced happiness ?
The original Treadmill Theory has been discredited--or at least fallen out of favor. Why? Because the original Treadmill theory is about people returning to the same baseline level of happiness. That's why the originators called it a treadmill - you don't go anywhere / change / improve / make progress etc.
That's why the "adaptation" analogy is preferred. After an initial rush of either happiness or sadness, you do return to a baseline...but this baseline is different that what it was before.
The reality, and summary, is this: nice things do make your life better. At first there's a rush of excitement over your upgrade. When that initial rush goes away, you backtrack a little bit, but still realize a life which is better than what it used to be. The inverse is true for tragedy.
For whatever reason, instead of the succinct description I gave, the author chose a long winded piece, added some charts with questional data, and slapped on a link bait title.
<shrug>
That's because their post this way got much more illuminating than the "succinct description" which does not even cover the same ground.
It was here that I stopped reading.
nope nope nope
exercising does much more than make you look jacked at the club. It makes your brain release endorphins for immediate mood improvement, and also improves thinking, sleep, and overall well being. The happiest I've felt in my life is when exercising regularly. Actually exercising and diet are probably _the most_ influential on our chemistry which in turn influences mood and happiness.
also not sure why all these things were lumped in together and how they could possibly calculate the 7% increase considering there is such a wide range of diets and exercise plans. Seems hyperbolic
And perhaps there are other activities that require 1 hour that result in a 7% increase. Say: reading, socializing, writing. Then you've got 4 hours a day and get a 1.07^4 = 1.31 or 31% increase in happiness.
Isn't that GOOD? I'd say that's AWESOME.
But trying to quantify this is just so bogus. What do they think they're even measuring? They're just making statistical claims about questionaire results as far as I can tell. The author doesn't qualify that nearly enough. He is treating this like there's some kind of discrete quanta of happiness. "My current happy level is 7.453 kiloJoys" or something like that. Its just weird.
and there is this:
But that same survey found that those with a low level of education were 47% more likely to be the happiest than those with a high level of education.13
so low level of education makes almost 7x more impact than diet + exercising combined. something is seriously wrong with this happiness calculus
"Ignorance is bliss" is a pretty old idiom; who's to say it's not rooted in some truth?
Schooling trained myself and my best friends to expect to be able to use what we learned, even though there were no roles in society for us. We are national merit finalists, calculus users, programmers, 99th percentile GRE scorers... one friend is nearly homeless. Another bags groceries. The best off has a programming job only because his father was higher up in the company. I spray herbicides and pesticides and feed cattle and do whatever I am asked and more at our family veterinary clinic and on our family farm. I am extremely lucky. But I feel intensely guilty that I am not using anything I learned at university. No one owes me anything. But I sacrificed and suffered so much for academic success, debating championships, math team and programming victories, and it has never paid me back with a livelihood and now I am emotionally and energetically burnt out before ever landing an entry-level programming job. I can do all the Cracking the Coding Interview questions. I've never ran into anything in CS I couldn't understand. I'm just very emotionally fragile when it comes to interviews due to being on the autism spectrum and feeling so abjectified. If I had not been so successful in school I would not feel so terribly guilty about my failure at life. I would like a romantic relationship and a family. But I would feel guilty and to ashamed starting one without a career to provide for at least private schooling or more likely homeschooling for my kids. But I am unable to escape my social bankruptcy or move out of my parent's basement. Life seems to complicated and I feel so far behind in non-school skills I feel trapped. I feel I will never gain the prestige to feel desirable enough to make friends much less a wife. I come up with software ideas but I get so depressed at the likelihood of their failure that I feel guilty working on them (and yet guilty not working on them). Education causes higher expectations. Needing more people at university for social reasons has made them so easy that they no longer discipline people enough for success. More importantly, there simply aren't enough role slots people trained to expect those roles. Please give me counsel if you can. I want a mentor or someone to apprentice with so badly. My parents love me but they are very dysfunctional. They have no friends either. I had a genius uncle who got top marks in school, made all sorts of interesting gadgets, could solve a Rubik's cube in seconds... he ended up a derelict and I am so worried I will end up like him even though it might be a self-fulfilling fear... I think he is too. He wanted to see a game I made but I've never gotten one polished to the point I felt I could share it. My closest friends are all failing to launch, too, so I have no role models. And I am down to three people from undergrad that I can still talk to (through infrequent texting). I want to be able to spend real time with someone who has things figured out about a bit so that my mirror neurons might hurt me rather than harm me.
Do you mean jagged, as in jagged edge? That is how new words are born, people accept it as if words wouldn't have to mean anything.
"I grunt when I get my swell on at the gym. That's 'cause everyone should see how jacked and tan I am."
I have only given disapproval so far. Your personal approval on the other hand is pretty important to yourself. By the line of your argument, you do draw approval from others', so mine is slightly important, too, as evidenced by your attentive answers. I might just have been wrong, which is still more agreeable than accepting two concurrent opinions.
Can someone explain to me what their definition of "standard of living" is in this context?
I get that they might have access to cleaner water, but surely easy access to food prepared for you and having a roof over your head in a snowstorm would sound really appealing to someone without a home.
(Maybe I need to know what they use as the definition of "homeless"...)
So (assuming that's the same definition they used) yeah, I guess the material standard of living is higher. Seems like that's ignoring quite a bit to sound really optimistic though.
I don't think the author understands what homelessness really looks like in dense urban areas and seems to have a Hollywood version of homelessness as his reference.
I don't think we're understanding how filthy dumpsters are and how our bodies are not engineered to handle the types of bacteria that grow in those circumstances or just how dangerous and unhealthy urban areas are for the homeless. Even days old dried meat is going to be healthier, tastier, and safer to eat that whatever you find in a dumpster. Opening a dumpster and seeing a freshly cooked steak that has only one bite out of it is pure Hollywood bullshit. Its a major health risk to eat what you find in garbage cans. Hunting and gathering is infinitely better and safer.
The hunter-gatherers were not awash in delicious artisanal wild venison jerky.
I've been downvoted a ton in this thread, but I just think there's so much delusion here about the lifestyle and living standards of prehistoric man...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines
Bear in mind these are just the most famous famines, there were constant localised famines going on all the time.
"Famine recurred to insistently for centuries on end that it became incorporated into man's biological regime and built into his daily life. Dearth and penury were continual, and familiar, even in Europe, despite its privileged position... It could not have been otherwise. Cereal yields were poor; two consecutive bad harvests spelt disaster... France, by any standards a privileged country, is reckoned to have experienced 10 general (nation-wide) famines during the tenth century: 26 in the 11th... 13 in the sixteenth; 11 in the seventeenth, and 16 in the eighteenth."
"For when they are extreme, demographic increases lead to a deterioration in the standard of living; they enlarge the always horrifying total of the underfed, poor, and uprooted. A balance between mouths to be fed and the difficulties of feeding them, between manpower and jobs, is re-established by epidemics and famines... these extremely crude adjustments were the predominant feature of the centuries of the ancien régime."
Contrast this with Germany taking over a million migrants in during 2015, with none starving. How can agriculture be so much different now to be able to support something like this? Crop yields are much greater now due to artificial selection and technology:
"From the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, the results were disappointing. For every grain sown, the harvest was usually no more than five and sometimes less. As the grain required for the next sowing had to be deducted, four grains were therefore produced for consumption from every one sown..." In Poland, Hungary and Slovakia between 1550 and 1650, yields were between 2 or 4 grains per 1! For 10% of Polish harvests, yields were below 2 to 1!
Things have improved greatly: England 1200-49: 3.7 for 1 England 1750-1820:
And growth over the last century truly means we don't understand how drastically easier it is to grow food now. In Missouri, bushels per acre increased from about 10 in 1915 to about 55 in 2015! (src = http://crops.missouri.edu/audit/images/WheatYields_MO.jpg)
72 percent of the American workforce was in farming was 72 percent in 1820. (src = http://www.nytimes.com/1988/07/20/us/farm-population-lowest-...) Now it seems to be between 1-2 percent.
E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Göbekli_Tepe
"Ian Hodder of Stanford University said, "Göbekli Tepe changes everything". It shows that the erection of monumental complexes was within the capacities of hunter-gatherers and not only of sedentary farming communities as had been previously assumed."
That doesn't look like the work of people perpetually on the verge of starvation.
There's no possibility of going to a homeless shelter to get out of the cold, or sleeping in a well-constructed subway station to shield yourself from the elements. If you were injured, you couldn't just walk into a nearby emergency room with a team of nurses and doctors required to treat you. No soup kitchens or food pantries or SNAP benefits. Even digging around in a city garbage can or restaurant dumpster would yield an easy and delicious feast compared to spending days tracking prey, killing it with a spear, cleaning and skinning it, and cooking it with primitive tools over a fire. I would much rather be homeless today than in any sort of position 10,000 years ago.
It's amazing how much has changed in 10,000 years. I didn't have a good grasp on the timeline.
edit: note* this comment should be viewed through the "obesity pandemic" prism.
I'll take living as a potter in 8000 BC China over being homeless in NYC today, thanks. I don't have to be the King.
"While the case for the progressivist view seems overwhelming, it's hard to prove. How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they abandoned hunting and gathering for farming? Until recently, archaeologists had to resort to indirect tests, whose results (surprisingly) failed to support the progressivist view. Here's one example of an indirect test: Are twentieth century hunter-gatherers really worse off than farmers? Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of so-called primitive people, like the Kalahari bushmen, continue to support themselves that way. It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania...While farmers concentrate on high-carbohydrate crops like rice and potatoes, the mix of wild plants and animals in the diets of surviving hunter-gatherers provides more protein and a bettter balance of other nutrients. In one study, the Bushmen's average daily food intake (during a month when food was plentiful) was 2,140 calories and 93 grams of protein, considerably greater than the recommended daily allowance for people of their size. It's almost inconceivable that Bushmen, who eat 75 or so wild plants, could die of starvation the way hundreds of thousands of Irish farmers and their families did during the potato famine of the 1840s."[1]
Obviously this isn't representative of all hunter-gatherer societies, but a >20 hour work week, high-protein 2000 calorie diet seems pretty nice. Of course there are some other nice benefits of modernity but saying being homeless in the US have a categorically higher quality of life is a stretch.
The homeless survive off the infrastructure of society, where food is relatively plentiful because of the massive commercial agricultural system we have in place. Not only is commercial agriculture in the US completely different than the small agriculture in rural Africa, that the Diamond essay is talking about, but the homeless aren't farmers! They're consumers of agriculture, but not producers of it. So, while I agree with the essay, and think it makes some interesting points, it's just not applicable to the homeless.
Also, the 20 hour week it mentioned is entirely devoted to obtaining food, and note that they say that's "during a month when food was plentiful" If the only work we did was for food, I'd only have to work one day a month!
While access to food, shelter, and other amenities we take for granted may be "insecure" for the homeless, they're still available. The homeless congregate in cities because that's where the food banks, homeless shelters, sources of sporadic income, public restrooms, and convenient places of shelter from the elements are. They have the ability (although, again, an inconsistent and insecure one) to be warm when it's snowing, receive medical care when they need it, eat a variety of food, and hang out in the library surfing the Internet during the day.
My understanding of human history pretty much stops at what we all learned about Egypt in history class, and that time period was ~6,000 years ago IIRC. I have no concept whatsoever of what life was like before then.
Were there even "kings" 10,000 years ago?
I suppose you could argue that the homeless person might have better access to healthcare. But I still think the author's statement is very false.
Only 90 years ago, President Calvin Coolidge's 16 year old son died from a foot blister he got while playing lawn tennis on the White House grounds, something that would have probably been easily treated with an OTC anti-bacterial or a quick trip to the doctor nowadays.
We hardly have the get "medieval" to see the radical advancements in health and how we all greatly benefit from it.
It is obviously true that losing weight won't make you feel any better about being stuck in a shitty marriage, or a job you hate, or being estranged from your parents, or any number of other things that can cause deep-seated unhappiness.
It is also obviously true that losing weight will make you feel better physically, and probably result in you being treated better by most of the people you interact with face-to-face on a daily basis. Being treated better by people definitely makes me feel happier.
On that note, I should really go to the gym more often.
ha, I'll bet. almost anything where there's a notion of "leveling up" or some kind of progress over time can lead to this treadmill feeling.
in my case though, I mean, I'm at like once or twice a month at the gym. I'm pretty sure that's just objectively not enough, regardless of whatever treadmill effect is going on there.
So a core element of this post may not even be an actual phenomenon.
[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17469954 [2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3289759/
While we're taught to think about science in terms of "one experiment can disprove a whole theory!", the actual probability of getting an experiment wrong is much higher than the probability of a very established theory predicting an opposing effect to what's actually the case.
Such as the RICE treatment for illnesses, which has finally been denounced by its creator. [1] http://www.drmirkin.com/fitness/why-ice-delays-recovery.html
The pressure to publish new results and the low attention given to validation experiments drives a lot of unreliable outcomes.
I had heard (in a TED talk I think) that humans typically need only three months or so to get back to "feeling normal" after a terrible life event.
Then I had my one terrible life event (widowed two days after marriage). Boy was that TED talk wrong! The next few years were a desolate wasteland.
[0]: https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy?...
[0] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/14/age-of-...
That seems really really wrong. I see they cite studies but it just finally got warm and sunny here after a long cold winter and it feels, well, happy :-) Maybe, just maybe, if it was sunny all the time I'd get used to it. But some days wouldn't be sunny, or I'd travel someplace with no sun, or people would visit and say how awesome the weather is... I dunno, I'd be reminded all the time how awesome it is. Or I'd complain because there's no rain and everything is dry and dead and we're running out of water... damn hedonic treadmill.
Most days I have at least one moment where I love the weather.
I've lived very close to the equator for a couple of decades. I never had to care about weather forecasts at all, because I alway knew what the weather would be like: 30 degrees celsius (86F), +/- a couple of degrees. Sunny. Too hot under direct sunlight, but completely fine under a tree shade even at noon.
If anything, you get fed up with the single season and will welcome rainy days. There is this mountain nearby that was hugely popular because it was a few degrees colder. So I guess even nice beaches under perfect weather get boring, given enough time.
My favorite part of winter is, a warm fire literally never feels better than when it's freezing outside.
I live somewhere where it's sunny almost all the time. I grew up somewhere where it's sunny almost all the time. I still love going outside into the sunlight for a break.
People practically do not care about the sun at all in SoCal... because it is always sunny.
It ended up feeling very strange to my brain... I missed the "rhythm" of seasons to mark the passage of time... I felt like I was drifting in a vacation I couldn't escape.
I ended up coming back to NYC :)
And now I appreciate the spring, fall, and winter here more, to boot!
Everyone I knew commented on how much happier I seemed. Sure some of that may have been job-related, but it is amazing how much I notice it every day, even a couple years later now.
The most noticeable thing for me in my day-to-day is that I no longer feel guilty during nice days when I just want to chill inside and play a computer game or something. In Chicago, since there were only a handful of truly gorgeous days per year, I'd have immense guilt. The flip side is that I need to motivate myself more to go outdoors, but because I can garden pretty much year round, I have an enjoyable hobby that keeps me outside.
Sure, some days I get a bit tired of the sun (particularly when we have heat waves), but the lack of humidity means I can usually hide in the shade and be fine, which can't be said of Chicago in it's 100% humidity summers.
I'm not sure if I'll ever get to a point where I take it for granted because it energizes me. However I do appreciate and look forward to a good rainy day which we rarely get. I even sat outside on my deck in the rain at one point because it felt so nice.
Honestly--I don't miss winter. If I want snow I'll drive to Tahoe. We get a gorgeous extended fall, and those three are enough seasons for me.
I'm fortunate to commute on 280 (vs. 101) and driving home in the evening I get to watch the hills go from a peaceful lush green in the winter/spring to a glowing gold in the summer and fall as the sunset lights them up. It really is something to watch the landscape change like that, and I certainly don't miss the ugly stage of black slush and dangerous white out conditions I lived through in Chicago.
That stress reduction and mood enhancement cascades into other aspects of your life such as your sleep, relationships, overall stress level, etc.
I'd make the move again any day of the week. If anything I regret not moving here sooner (largely due to housing prices).
This is the best survey I could google-up;
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/hollywood-phd/201403/do...
What adaptation implies is that all gains in subjective happiness are short-term gains. Hence the "treadmill" image: though striving forward, people go nowhere.
Maybe I've got the wrong impression.
> The material standard of living of a homeless person in modern-day Manhattan is several dozens of times higher than the wealthiest of kings ten thousand years ago.
That statement is pretty clearly silly and false.
And the whole book is precised in the following eight-minute rap: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyryRRYty4Y
(I find the visuals distracting and unhelpful.)
For instance: "The good-looking are on average 7% happier than the bad-looking."
...from which it draws the conclusion that being beautiful doesn't make much of a difference. But 7% doesn't seem like a small difference at all. Spending hundreds of hours for a 7% improvement doesn't seem like such a terrible deal to me. Of course it's a bad deal if that's time you're taking from other things that make you happy. But exercise, for instance, has the benefit of improving your health and creating happiness in its own right.
Likewise the fact that 30% of unemployed feel 10% less happy years after becoming employed again. A 10% reduction in happiness doesn't seem minor at all.
I guess if you have some absurd expectation, like some notion that a simple intervention will make you twice as happy, you'll be disappointed by the effects of all these various things. But a lot of these changes are pretty substantial, and they're not even taking into account things that I would expect to really affect happiness--professional accomplishment, one's love life, etc. People are complicated, happiness is complicated, and of course no single thing is going to instantly grant you contentment. That's no reason not to work for small improvements; the small improvements add up.
And I think this kind of fatalism is really pernicious, akin to writing arguments that suicide is a good idea or that heroin actually isn't very dangerous. Most people are sensible enough to dismiss them, but others develop this feeling of learned helplessness which really harms them. The authors arguing this are always hypocrites; they know that they'd be unhappy living on the street, that's why they keep going to work every day. But they're perfectly happy to confuse and harm others with their disingenuous rhetoric.
"That's no reason not to work for small improvements; the small improvements add up."
But dismiss the idea of using some sort of heuristic to prioritize said small improvements? Because that's what I got out of this slightly verbose piece: prioritize what will actually make you happy, not what you assume will make you happy. Though, I agree, it's not particularly profound.
Well, we don't want to moralize or anything. (Because somehow drawing shaky conclusions from perfectly good data is worlds better than moralizing...)
Like one of those corny people who tells you to keep a gratitude journal. Let's not be that guy.
But you should _really_ keep a gratitude journal.
Or you could just choose uglier friends :)
See, I have a hard time with all this self-help stuff. What's so difficult about it that needs hundreds of books and blogs to be expounded?
You either want to do something or you don't. Be grateful for what you have and try to improve a little at a time. Remember that everyone is out to get money from you. Try really hard not to be an asshole.
Seems like common sense to me, and everything else feels like a lot of unnecessary junk.
(Moreover, we already know a lot more about the measurement of internal mental states than you appear to be aware:
That and losing weight. I honestly believe that many don't understand the effects of being obese (or even overweight) because they've been that way for so long, they've forgotten what healthy feels like. I for one didn't realize it until I lost the weight and no longer needed a CPAP to sleep through the night.
When your analysis leads you to a conclusion that is obviously false, it is time to reconsider some of your steps along the way.
No other reason than adaptability, eh? Give me a break.
WTF?? Seriously? I mean, I assume he's trying to be funny, but really?
No but really it'd be foolish for a man to set aside his endeavors and aspirations and engage in childcare duties like changing diapers; women actually have extra hours built into their day to take care of shit work so in the end it's equal. /s
Seriously though, what a repulsive statement (the quote).
For example, I've recently moved to another city which made me happier and the effect did not wear off after four months and I don't think it will.
As another example, having a significant other versus being alone makes for such a huge difference that it's not ever up to discussion.
Maybe if we're restricting our talk to meaningless status symbols (like the mentioned Lexus), then it starts to make sense.
I think we always need micro-goals to strive towards. A new job can improve your life, a new partner can improve your life, and even when you find new $thing, there are still goals to work toward there. Like being a better employee or a better partner.
And as you've said, the effect of some changes is long-term at least until you feel a need for growth/expansion again. Everything else outside of moving forward in life is complacency.