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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

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