Skip to main content

Hedonic Treadmill

 Learned the phrase Hedonistic Treadmill reading The Price of Civilization

Americans are running very hard to pursue happiness but are staying in the same place, a trap that psychologists have christened the Hedonic Treadmill. This article offers a simple explanation of the concept

The theory of the hedonic treadmill states that regardless of what happens to people, their levels of happiness will eventually return to their baselines. Take this theory with a classic example: say you get married, move into a new house, get a promotion, lose a job, suffer an accident, etc., over time, you’re likely to return to your set point of happiness. After some time passes, you’ll be back at the level of happiness at which you were before.

An interesting idea for sure that we are programmed with certain level of attainable happiness and no matter what good or bad life brings, we will return to that in time. It also makes sense that this set point is personalized

Personality traits play a role in someone’s happiness set point, and well-being is moderately heritable. So, different personality traits may predispose individuals to different levels of well-being.

An over-zealous pursuit of happiness could well be a fool's errand but there is value in trying adjust the set point of happiness a bit higher all the time so it is possible to get more value of from the good things that happen in our lives. Would be interesting to see this in the context of people who use faith or the practice of gratitude as their anchor - that should serve the role of a rappel anchor, inch that set point a bit higher every day

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t
111 comments
Read more

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha
5 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques
6 comments
Read more