Comment by rockostrich | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rockostrich | Hacker News Reader

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> It turns out that climbing on the hedonic treadmill is practically effortless, but sliding down it is full of splinters.

Not sure if I'm missing a joke, but the whole point of the analogy being a treadmill is that there's nothing to fall down. Regardless of positive (running forward) or negative (going backward on the treadmill) life changes, your happiness will probably stay relatively consistent because you're on a treadmill and there's nowhere to go.

The live out of a backpack lifestyle is definitely a unique way to experience the modern world and I'm sure it's fulfilling for the author, but you can even tell in their post that life caught up with them somewhat and they needed to start staying in one place a little longer in order to maintain social relationships. Their linked post about walking every block of Manhattan and tracking all of their movement since 2015 feels like the exact opposite of a minimalist lifestyle and it seems to me like they live out of a backpack not out of some anti-materialism lifestyle, but instead just as a practical way to fuel this obsession with traveling and tracking.

I admit, I've seen the author's Instagram story about walking 100k steps in a day in NYC and watched the whole thing because it's interesting, but I also take that and posts like this with a grain of salt. I'll happily take my horde of shit I need to get rid of in the garage over obsessing about how I can optimize tracking my every movement.

>Not sure if I'm missing a joke, but the whole point of the analogy being a treadmill is that there's nothing to fall down. Regardless of positive (running forward) or negative (going backward on the treadmill) life changes, your happiness will probably stay relatively consistent because you're on a treadmill and there's nowhere to go.

That's not the point of the treadmill analogy.

It's rather that you need to keep walking to maintain your stationary position, just like on a treadmill.

Meaning the level of headonism you become accustomed to fades/blunts with time, and you want more, so you need to keep moving forward to stay at the same (hedonic) position (level).

What the parent said, then, is valid: "climbing on the hedonic treadmill is practically effortless", being on a hedonic treadmill is our default psychological state. But to slide off and accept less hedonic level is very difficult.

rockostrich says >"but the whole point of the analogy being a treadmill is that there's nothing to fall down."<

Spoken by one who obviously has not fallen on a treadmill! Allow me to correct your misunderstanding:

Falling on a treadmill is almost precisely the same as being drunk and disorderly and falling while facing the door of a saloon: that is, as if two thugs had grabbed your arms and thrown you unceremoniously and bodily out the door legs first and face down. Meanwhile you are (unsuccessfully) struggling to right yourself for some unknown reason [it's like a reflex response].

Not a nice experience: it taught me to always use a treadmill that had the safety clip that stops the machine if you move too far.

As for the comparative experience (being thrown out of a bar by thugs), the less said, the better.

Perhaps the joke is that the valence of going backward or forward isn't equivalent. IIRC, some studies show that people will generally accept smaller gains to avoid the possibility of loss. Eg, loss has a greater (negative) emotional impact than equivalent (positive) gains.

> I don't think it's reasonable to compare the risk of suffering a large loss with the risk of missing out on a large gain. If your annual income is $N, missing out on a gain of $N is bad, but not nearly as bad a suffering a loss of $N.

- A comment I saw elsewhere on HN today

It's quite rational, in many cases, to consider loss of an object X worse than gain of X. A less rigorous example I like to use: it's far easier, and unequal, to kill a person than revive a person.

This, in a nutshell, is why Effective Altruism sucks.

Isn't this the accepted advice for investment. Putting money in something that gains X% consistently with years of proven sustained growth vs putting money in something with potential 100X% growth but could give you negative growth if it fails has always been the advice in long term financial planning

> A less rigorous example I like to use: it's far easier, and unequal, to kill a person than revive a person.

People's intuitions aren't going to work right for situations that are impossible. I don't think you should use that example. (Or if you mean medical revival from the edge of death, then it's very difficult to visualize a "kill" that's actually an equal amount of damage.)

And things you own are fungible while people are not, which is itself enough to ruin the analogy.

It also relies on all your intellectual and creative persuits being digital in nature, otherwise all you have is the social and the travel.

The lifestyle appealed to me too and I even worked towards it, but I don't think it could be a full time thing for someone who loves making things, "building a life" does in a sense require some permanency past your laptop.

I don't know if you use some sort of safety treadmill but on many, you will fall if you don't/can't run anymore. There's your metaphor for life. Also, running on a treadmill is/can be viewed an image for not moving forward despite all the running you do.

Yeah, I thought the treadmill image was about having to keep running just to stay in the same place (a Red Queen’s race) rather than anything about falling down.

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