Your Work Habits and the Happiness Treadmill

He raised interesting questions, but mostly forgot to also supply answers.

The question of hedonic bias is more complex than the article indicates. I would recommend Game Theory Evolving by Herbert Gintis. Gintis talks about human short-term bias and hyperbolic discounting and shows that this is often not as "irrational" as it seems (look especially at Chapter 11).

Still it's a great discussion, I'd love to see it much more developed, hopefully the article's author reads here.

It's certainly documented that people have a short-term bias in their happiness choices.

However ... I started to listen to tunes on my machine about two months ago and I think I can look back on those two months and say I've been happier and more productive during that time. There are times to turn off the tunes - I never walk around with headphones - but music is cool and the article's argument about lottery tickets won't change that.