The Hedonic Treadmill | Hacker News Reader

The Hedonic Treadmill

en.wikipedia.org

78 pointsbmc750539 comments

Ha! I'm familiar with the phenomenon, but I hadn't heard it described as a "treadmill" before. Most metaphors out there (eg most computer science jargon) fit well on a superficial level, but the analogy breaks down when you go deeper. But sometimes, someone comes up with a metaphor for something that's such a good fit that it just makes my day.

The Hedonic Treadmill is definitely one of those. It's not just the repetitiveness, but also the exhaustion, the endlessness, the pointlessness even to some extent. And, in some sense, maybe even the progress you can make over a long time when using a treadmill frequently. Like, you learn to embrace the pointlessness of being on a treadmill, running but going absolutely nowhere, and that insight in itself makes it so that you're not running nowhere at all. Kinda sorta.

A good story helps. Why does a millionaire athlete walk into a stadium day in day out to experience pain, emotional and physical, at a level most people cant take? Why don't single moms juggling multiple minimum wage jobs even bother? Why not just ditch the kids at an orphanage? There is always a story people tell themselves. Good stories can shift outcomes.

We are lucky to be alive at a time when information such as this is coming online and awareness is rising.

Camus had the same idea about Sisyphus

That's the worst name for the simplest thing. I'd call it 'illusion of impact'. What happens to you seems like it's affecting you but really doesn't. After a while you feel no happier or sadder that you have always been. It's because your happiness is biological and you can improve it or harm it lastingly only by affecting your biology. Getting more money won't affect it. Sleeping longer, moving more, eating with more variety or leaving people and places that cause immense daily stress, properly diagnosing and treating that reflux, fixing your teeth just might.

People are so keen to jump at the fact that mind somewhat affects the body, but often miss the fact that mind is the part of the body.

That's a good name for it

Just a comment under you is a description why it's a good analogy (by user skrebbel). Do you disagree (it's a newer comment than yours)?

Depends. Treadmill feels like a good analogy for suffering from seeking happiness the wrong way. For hoping that little happy events will somehow change how happy you feel in general.

But that's not a good analogy for the whole effect of events and actions that make you happy momentarily having not much to do with your long term happiness.

Reducing volatility and increasing security of health, food, and shelter makes me happy, and more money certainly is a way to achieve that in the environment I live in. I’m sure it’s biological as it’s still chemicals in the brain.

I define happiness as meeting one’s expectations, or maybe unhappiness as not meeting one’s expectations.

Lack of money prevents you from getting things that help keep your body in good condition. So it this sense money can improve your happiness. Just not directly. Having money does nothing for you. Spending money to improve your health, diet and leave the place that harms you is what makes you happier.

I don't think you can define happiness. It's a primary emotion. How do you define pain?

It’s definitely not a perfect definition, but I find it useful for myself most times. I would have to separate pain into two, one from injury or ailment, and mental pain from losing something such as a relationship or opportunity.

The way this is phrased makes it seem like this "treadmill" is a bad thing. I acknowledge that this is bad for an individual, but I actually think this is overall good for humanity and is a major reason why we've developed so much so quickly.

We know plenty of animal species are really smart, but they've never figured out how to build skyscrapers or generate electricity. We chalk this up to the fact that "humans are just smarter", but even in humans brains alone don't bring accomplishments. There has to be associated action, and people need motivation to actually take that action.

Our ancestors didn't say "well I've figured out how to grow some wheat and live in a straw hut, so I'm good now". Sure, they probably did for a while, but soon they started looking for easier ways to grind their flour and tastier ways to cook it because they stopped being satisfied with the status quo. Extend this for ten millenia and now we have billions of people connected to a global network from devices in their pocket.

If humans were always perfectly happy all the time, I don't think we'd have come as far as we have. The "return to dissatisfied normalcy" that comes over time is part of our nature and it may be one of the most important parts for explaining why we got here.

>because they stopped being satisfied with the status quo.

There were tribes that were satisfied with the status quo (or were unable to advance out of bad luck or environment or whatever), and they got wrecked by tribes who kept advancing.

I don’t thinks it’s a property unique to humans, all species try to gain more and more power, humans just have far more capacity. More power means more reliable food, shelter, and mating opportunity, thus more likelihood of procreating.

This can be to a fault. Even today, if a tribe (e.g. country) were to stop consuming to protect future generations, stop unnecessary weapons development and testing, trade, etc, they would be at a disadvantage in the short term power wise versus another country that kept going full steam ahead.

What’s good in short term might not be in the long term, and evolution doesn’t optimize for that.

I think most people referencing this term aren't really talking about a hedonic treadmill. There's a lot of talk about getting richer and not happier. But the key to me is adaptation. As we move from one situation to another we adapt to that situation, better or worse. We may think prison would be total hell, but then get there and find that it's tolerable. Similarly, we could get a windfall or major financial breakthrough and soon find that our state doesn't much change.

I find there's a certain texture to my day to day and it takes a lot to change that. There may seemingly be a lot of changes around me, but the texture of my day stays largely the same. A major increase of salary might open a world of options, but my time is my real bottleneck. I can make a list of things I would like to do and then come to the conclusion that it's best to do nothing. I imagine starting from a template for a painting session which is plain but not blank. I can paint all sort of wild possibilities but then realize that my reality is still that same plain template. I paint stories of dramas, ups, downs, victories, downfalls, etc and the realize that nothing has actually changed in the background. I just made all that other stuff up. Yes, the boss really did fly off the handle and I feared for my job, but I know that tomorrow will be business as usual.

Question for you guys. Do you feel that the hedonis treadmill is a thing which pushes us forward? I would argue that it does the opposite, it holds us back. I feel the greatest growth comes from the smallest period of being in adaptation. Just long enough to decide, act, observe and get back to orientation. It's just a long improv.

Sadly noone answered your question, but luckily I'm here a week later thanks to Kale's hacker newsletter.

No, I don't think the hedonistic treadmill is what pushes us forward, I think "necessity is the mother of invention." And it goes both ways in my opinion; to use your example, a person in prison will adapt and find it's not so bad, but then a lot of prisoners resourcefully create contraband to fulfill their needs, which "pushes them forward." Likewise a rich person may "need" a faster yacht, so they fund technology to invent one, thereby "pushing us forward."

In the way that being content is an evolutionary disaster, it makes sense that we always have an itch to scratch.

The trouble is advertising and marketing have irritated it so much that we have gone past the point where scratching was good. That itch has turned into a gaping wound filled with puss and blood.

but, are we really so susceptible to advertising and marketing now? I know the baby boomers were with their enormous cars, boats and house purchases and their materialism stuff homes and maxed out credit cards. But, I see the millennial not taking part in that quite to the same extent - i think their percentage of spending on cars, for example, is much lower. We may be in a turning point here where advertising affects us less and less.

Edit: https://www.forbes.com/sites/danielnewman/2015/04/28/researc...

The cynic in me thinks that’s because they have less disposable income.

Not being content can also be an evolutionary disaster. Imagine a specifies that consumes more than the environment can sustainability produce and collapses the whole environment (for that species). This can be on a bacteria/virus level, insect level, mammal level, and of course human level.

Last time this was submitted, it only got 2 upvotes. That just wasn't good enough.

probably next time it'll go even higher, it just needs more and more

The problem is that, even if it the score goes a bit higher each time, it will not satisfy us and we will be as frustrated with the new higher score than we were with the previous score.

I'm living non-monogamous and in the poly community we often talk about a similar phenomenon called "Relationship Escalator", which is less general than the "Hedonic Treadmill".

The idea is that most people see a relationship as an escalator where you move up somehow automatically. First you date, than you're going steady, then you move in together, marriage, kids etc. pp.

The hedonic treadmill is considered one of the reasons for this behavior. Many people are most happy at the beginning of a relationship, when they get less happy they try to do something to get back to the starting level.

Points here are:

1. The space of new things you can do with your relationships isn't one dimensional, you don't have to move in one direction to get happier.

2. Maybe you're just running in the hedonic treadmill and don't realize it, so take some time to evaluate your life before you do things that are hard to impossible to revert.

No offense, but aren't you guys the ones who keep on the hedonic treadmill by constantly changing partners and are never actually satisfied?

The ones actually chasing after that new relationship energy/dopamine rush?

Isn't it backwards to spin the normal progression of a romantic relationship as hedonic?

Are the people into poly some kind of saints/ascets and the people on the "relationship escalator" the hedonits? (this is not meant to be a straw man)

Just because you have multiple partners doesn't mean that you have to be "constantly changing partners".

You are totally right, there are many people who run after the "new relationship energy" as other people are ascending the "relationship escalator". I just wanted to point out that there isn't one right way to happiness in relationships :)

I think hedonism is a valid personal choice(if it's a culture-wide beneficial choice -- that's debatable), there's no need to paint other choices black(not saying you were doing directly).

Experiencing in myself and other what you call the "relationship escalator" -- I can assure you it's not driven by hedonism, it's just a functional necessity, at least in the vast majority of cases and history(sure there can be people doing it to brag on social media).

To me it seems that the term "relationship escalator" is pejorative and that you were conflating it with the "hedonic treadmill" and somehow contrasting it with polyamory.

The "hedonic treadmill" effect as described in the wikipedia should apply just as much to monogamy and polyamory or celibacy -- after all, it suggests you will revert to mean happyness after a while.

I have the impression that is just what I said.

I didn't mean to talk monogamy down, I just said I heard about the concept of a relationship escalator in my poly community and it reminded me of the hedonic treadmill.

Doesn't mean that I don't met polys that had the hedonic treadmill problem.

Perspective. There's no necessity to constantly change partners.

The point was that people adapt and keep wanting more.

I'm a stoic (largely by nature) and have enjoyed polyamory. Dated a hedonist.

The fact that you call it an escalator means you acknowledge that these relationships are headed upwards in a positive direction, even if they're sticking to the status quo.

A hedonic treadmill would be something like a couple feeling bored in their relationship, and opening the relationship up out the fear of missing out. They feel the spark of chasing something new and feeling desired and chased, but the new partners don't build anything deeper than what existed with the original partner. Thus the couple is no better off than before, hence time spent walking in place.

Funny. In my college days, one evening after a one too many drinks, my pals and me formulated what we called "Theory of constant happiness", and its core postulate was that perceived happiness was not proportional to satiation of individual needs, but to the derivation of such satiation in time. It was of course promptly forgotten.

It is nice to see there was a grain of truth in our theory.

Slightly OT, but does anyone have a digital copy of the original paper cited in the article? Would love to read it but I can't find a PDF or a doi to search for on Scihub.

Brickman; Campbell (1971). Hedonic relativism and planning the good society. New York: Academic Press. pp. 287–302. in M. H. Apley, ed., Adaptation Level Theory: A Symposium, New York: Academic Press

Closest I can come is finding the print copy of Adaptation Level Theory: A Symposium on Amazon and eBay for a few bucks.

This is a great name for the phenomenon. While running the metaphorical treadmill, not only we don't get happier, we are also heating up the planet at an unprecedented rate. Slow down people.

pieter levels wrote an article about it referencing to the bilzerian interview, you'll enjoy it https://levels.io/hedonic-treadmill/

Thanks for sharing this, interesting.

I remember reading this a few years ago.

Feels good to have read this again :)

But despite any positive or negative events, it still feels about as good as it did then, right? ;)

Surprised to see Schopenhauer not mentioned at all.

I just picked up a Sole treadmill. Gonna rig it up to my desk to see if I can work and walk.

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