The hedonic treadmill?

There’s this concept called the hedonic treadmill that has received a lot of support from the philosophy community.

Definition

The idea (if you’re familiar you can skip to below) is that an individual’s happiness remains pretty constant throughout life. We might experience extremely positive or negative moments that shift our current happiness by a decent margin, but, over time, our happiness will fall back to its normal level.

That part is a reasonable argument to make. Think about the last time something really good or bad happened to you. It could be getting into school, winning a position or being rejected from something that you cared a lot about. In the immediate, the elation or depression of the situation most likely shifted your happiness levels. Over time, though, whatever happened becomes normal and you regress back towards your mean happiness.

Critique

My issue with the hedonic treadmill is the impact that larger lifestyle changes have on happiness. Many philosophers would argue that even if you quit your shitty job and do something that you enjoy much more that your happiness levels will eventually regress. Or, even if you make bigger lifestyle changes that your happiness will not increase significantly.

I would argue that in many cases this hedonic treadmill idea holds. I agree that getting a job, getting into school or getting broken up with by somebody that you love will not change your life happiness after a little bit of time.

The place where I would disagree is if you orient your life towards doing more of what you love. Many people make life choices based on what others think or based on what society says we should do. That could create an orientation towards making a lot of money or partying a lot.

This semester, in my personal life, I oriented more towards doing what I wanted to do and my happiness levels have spiked significantly. When we make choices based on what we want to do and we love ourselves for those choices, we tend to be happier each day. It leads to time being spent doing more of what we love and feeling less anxiety in any given moment.

I would concede that this lifestyle change happened recently enough that I could not say definitively that my happiness will not recede to its normal level.

Overall?

The concept of the hedonic treadmill definitely messes with people, though. Think about a life in which your happiness is going to remain within a pretty small range no matter what you do. It becomes compounded in difficulty given how challenging it is to quantify happiness.

In the meantime, I suppose the best thing is to just continue doing more of what we enjoy and appreciating what we have. I’m still ambivalent about whether we can change our happiness levels over time. I do know that we can improve other areas of life, though. You can do work to become more present, to be healthier, to spend more time with those that you love and to become more financially stable.

I’m curious to see how my thoughts about happiness and the hedonic treadmill will adopt over time.

If you have any thoughts, would love to hear them!

Onward and upward