The author is flat out wrong. The Hedonic Treadmill has been disproven. Moreover, the author seems to be conflating the concept of the treadmill, with adaptation. The former denotes the subject returns to the original state. The latter recognizes that while we become accustomed to new things, we still improve in happiness.
The author is also misquoting, or misunderstanding, Kahneman. Kahneman isn't talking at all about the treadmill. He's talking about what he called the "Focusing Illusion"-- a fancy way of saying "the grass is always greener on the other side..."
Kahneman tried to explain the hedonic treadmill via with his own aspiration treadmill. He claims that he not only failed, but the data were opposite to his hypothesis.
>'Kahneman tried to explain the hedonic treadmill via with his own aspiration treadmill. He claims that he not only failed, but the data were opposite to his hypothesis.'
Uh... what that Edge article you are linking shows is that 'experienced happiness' which he thought would be a better measurement of happiness than life satisfaction is even more immune to your life circumstances:
>"This was the first of many such findings: income, marital status and education all influence experienced happiness less than satisfaction, and we could show that the difference is not a statistical artifact. "
This only strengthens the OP's opinion...
He does tell us at the end of the article that GDP correlates with the happiness levels of countries. But that doesn't really detract from the OP's reasoning. (Who knows if that's even causative, instability & war could cause both GDP & happiness to drop.)
Even the study you are linking suggests revisions, and is far from 'disproving' the hedonic treadmill theory.
I'd rather we not get bogged down in downstream minutia. Instead let's focus on the fallacy in the OP's core argument:
The original Treadmill Theory has been discredited--or at least fallen out of favor. Why? Because the original Treadmill theory is about people returning to the same baseline level of happiness. That's why the originators called it a treadmill - you don't go anywhere / change / improve / make progress etc.
That's why the "adaptation" analogy is preferred. After an initial rush of either happiness or sadness, you do return to a baseline...but this baseline is different that what it was before.
The reality, and summary, is this: nice things do make your life better. At first there's a rush of excitement over your upgrade. When that initial rush goes away, you backtrack a little bit, but still realize a life which is better than what it used to be. The inverse is true for tragedy.
For whatever reason, instead of the succinct description I gave, the author chose a long winded piece, added some charts with questional data, and slapped on a link bait title.
>For whatever reason, instead of the succinct description I gave, the author chose a long winded piece, added some charts with questional data, and slapped on a link bait title.
That's because their post this way got much more illuminating than the "succinct description" which does not even cover the same ground.
> This was the first of many such findings: income, marital status and education all influence experienced happiness less than satisfaction, and we could show that the difference is not a statistical artifact.
Is that saying affect of (income, marital status and education) on experienced happiness < affect of (income, marital status and education) on satisfaction, or is it saying affect of (income, marital status and education) on experienced happiness < affect of (satisfaction) on experienced happiness ?
> The material standard of living of a homeless person in modern-day Manhattan is several dozens of times higher than the wealthiest of kings ten thousand years ago.
Why? It seems true for some of the decent definitions of "material standard of living" although certainly not all. What they really lack (relatively) is social power, kinship tie quality, and many other more important things than internet access, smart phones, and technology (all of which may correlate with depression.
The hundreds of hours of dieting, going to the gym, and putting on make-up (or flexing, for men) increase happiness by a colossal 7%.
nope nope nope
exercising does much more than make you look jacked at the club. It makes your brain release endorphins for immediate mood improvement, and also improves thinking, sleep, and overall well being. The happiest I've felt in my life is when exercising regularly. Actually exercising and diet are probably _the most_ influential on our chemistry which in turn influences mood and happiness.
also not sure why all these things were lumped in together and how they could possibly calculate the 7% increase considering there is such a wide range of diets and exercise plans. Seems hyperbolic
And even then, is 7% supposed to be a little or a lot? They say "hundreds of hours of dieting & exercising" but really that only affects an hour a day, maybe? I'd say that if I could spend 1 hour a day and get a 7% gain in happiness, it probably is worth it.
And perhaps there are other activities that require 1 hour that result in a 7% increase. Say: reading, socializing, writing. Then you've got 4 hours a day and get a 1.07^4 = 1.31 or 31% increase in happiness.
I find that actual metric here to be the most dubious part of the whole argument. I can easily understand making qualitative claims about happiness and maybe even some of the arguments presented by the author are good ones, on a qualitative basis.
But trying to quantify this is just so bogus. What do they think they're even measuring? They're just making statistical claims about questionaire results as far as I can tell. The author doesn't qualify that nearly enough. He is treating this like there's some kind of discrete quanta of happiness. "My current happy level is 7.453 kiloJoys" or something like that. Its just weird.
well the article seems to imply that 7% is low: "by the colossal 7%"
and there is this:
But that same survey found that those with a low level of education were 47% more likely to be the happiest than those with a high level of education.13
so low level of education makes almost 7x more impact than diet + exercising combined. something is seriously wrong with this happiness calculus
Check out The True Beleiver by Eric Hoffer or Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich for some explanations for this long observed effect.
Schooling trained myself and my best friends to expect to be able to use what we learned, even though there were no roles in society for us. We are national merit finalists, calculus users, programmers, 99th percentile GRE scorers... one friend is nearly homeless. Another bags groceries. The best off has a programming job only because his father was higher up in the company. I spray herbicides and pesticides and feed cattle and do whatever I am asked and more at our family veterinary clinic and on our family farm. I am extremely lucky. But I feel intensely guilty that I am not using anything I learned at university. No one owes me anything. But I sacrificed and suffered so much for academic success, debating championships, math team and programming victories, and it has never paid me back with a livelihood and now I am emotionally and energetically burnt out before ever landing an entry-level programming job. I can do all the Cracking the Coding Interview questions. I've never ran into anything in CS I couldn't understand. I'm just very emotionally fragile when it comes to interviews due to being on the autism spectrum and feeling so abjectified. If I had not been so successful in school I would not feel so terribly guilty about my failure at life. I would like a romantic relationship and a family. But I would feel guilty and to ashamed starting one without a career to provide for at least private schooling or more likely homeschooling for my kids. But I am unable to escape my social bankruptcy or move out of my parent's basement. Life seems to complicated and I feel so far behind in non-school skills I feel trapped. I feel I will never gain the prestige to feel desirable enough to make friends much less a wife. I come up with software ideas but I get so depressed at the likelihood of their failure that I feel guilty working on them (and yet guilty not working on them). Education causes higher expectations. Needing more people at university for social reasons has made them so easy that they no longer discipline people enough for success. More importantly, there simply aren't enough role slots people trained to expect those roles. Please give me counsel if you can. I want a mentor or someone to apprentice with so badly. My parents love me but they are very dysfunctional. They have no friends either. I had a genius uncle who got top marks in school, made all sorts of interesting gadgets, could solve a Rubik's cube in seconds... he ended up a derelict and I am so worried I will end up like him even though it might be a self-fulfilling fear... I think he is too. He wanted to see a game I made but I've never gotten one polished to the point I felt I could share it. My closest friends are all failing to launch, too, so I have no role models. And I am down to three people from undergrad that I can still talk to (through infrequent texting). I want to be able to spend real time with someone who has things figured out about a bit so that my mirror neurons might hurt me rather than harm me.
I was having an internal tug-of-war about whether to visit the gym when I read this comment. Although I knew this already, this just gave the activation energy to get out of my chair and out the door. Thanks!
My sentence is simply an example of the word 'jacked' being used in a way that is synonymous with muscular. 'Jacked' is sometimes used with this meaning, regardless of your approval. Slang is often ephemeral, I would try not to get upset when it changes.
I have only given disapproval so far. Your personal approval on the other hand is pretty important to yourself. By the line of your argument, you do draw approval from others', so mine is slightly important, too, as evidenced by your attentive answers. I might just have been wrong, which is still more agreeable than accepting two concurrent opinions.
"The material standard of living of a homeless person in modern-day Manhattan is several dozens of times higher than the wealthiest of kings ten thousand years ago."
Can someone explain to me what their definition of "standard of living" is in this context?
I get that they might have access to cleaner water, but surely easy access to food prepared for you and having a roof over your head in a snowstorm would sound really appealing to someone without a home.
(Maybe I need to know what they use as the definition of "homeless"...)
10,000 years ago, we were living in a pre-agricultural society (or, perhaps, only somewhat agricultural) Lots of wandering tribes, moving around following the food, hunting with sharp rocks. Hunger and starvation would be common, everything would be scarce, even for "kings" (which were really just tribal leaders) Modern construction wasn't a thing, dwellings were constructed out of sod, animal skins -- at the best, stacked rocks or mud bricks. As a king, you'd still have to do back-breaking, dangerous work to maintain your position and value in society.
There's no possibility of going to a homeless shelter to get out of the cold, or sleeping in a well-constructed subway station to shield yourself from the elements. If you were injured, you couldn't just walk into a nearby emergency room with a team of nurses and doctors required to treat you. No soup kitchens or food pantries or SNAP benefits. Even digging around in a city garbage can or restaurant dumpster would yield an easy and delicious feast compared to spending days tracking prey, killing it with a spear, cleaning and skinning it, and cooking it with primitive tools over a fire. I would much rather be homeless today than in any sort of position 10,000 years ago.
I know the work of Jared Diamond has some problems, but as a counterpoint:
"While the case for the progressivist view seems overwhelming, it's hard to prove. How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they abandoned hunting and gathering for farming? Until recently, archaeologists had to resort to indirect tests, whose results (surprisingly) failed to support the progressivist view. Here's one example of an indirect test: Are twentieth century hunter-gatherers really worse off than farmers? Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of so-called primitive people, like the Kalahari bushmen, continue to support themselves that way. It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania...While farmers concentrate on high-carbohydrate crops like rice and potatoes, the mix of wild plants and animals in the diets of surviving hunter-gatherers provides more protein and a bettter balance of other nutrients. In one study, the Bushmen's average daily food intake (during a month when food was plentiful) was 2,140 calories and 93 grams of protein, considerably greater than the recommended daily allowance for people of their size. It's almost inconceivable that Bushmen, who eat 75 or so wild plants, could die of starvation the way hundreds of thousands of Irish farmers and their families did during the potato famine of the 1840s."[1]
Obviously this isn't representative of all hunter-gatherer societies, but a >20 hour work week, high-protein 2000 calorie diet seems pretty nice. Of course there are some other nice benefits of modernity but saying being homeless in the US have a categorically higher quality of life is a stretch.
The homeless aren't hungry. The leading causes of death for the homeless aren't starvation or malnutrition -- it's drug abuse, cancer, and heart disease: http://pschousing.org/news/drug-overdose-1-cause-homeless-de... Sure, they're not the healthiest bunch in the world, and they have much shorter lifespans than the average non-homeless person, but they sure have a much longer lifespan than even the well-off did 10,000 years ago.
The homeless survive off the infrastructure of society, where food is relatively plentiful because of the massive commercial agricultural system we have in place. Not only is commercial agriculture in the US completely different than the small agriculture in rural Africa, that the Diamond essay is talking about, but the homeless aren't farmers! They're consumers of agriculture, but not producers of it. So, while I agree with the essay, and think it makes some interesting points, it's just not applicable to the homeless.
Also, the 20 hour week it mentioned is entirely devoted to obtaining food, and note that they say that's "during a month when food was plentiful" If the only work we did was for food, I'd only have to work one day a month!
While access to food, shelter, and other amenities we take for granted may be "insecure" for the homeless, they're still available. The homeless congregate in cities because that's where the food banks, homeless shelters, sources of sporadic income, public restrooms, and convenient places of shelter from the elements are. They have the ability (although, again, an inconsistent and insecure one) to be warm when it's snowing, receive medical care when they need it, eat a variety of food, and hang out in the library surfing the Internet during the day.
Thanks, I like this point of view. I guess something like ratio of modern day comforts / modern day stress vs that ratio from past could be a useful measure.
Not Manhattan, but I work in a ritzy part of downtown Chicago and see homeless people literally eating garbage from dumpsters now and again. Yeah, I think the richest kings of Europe were doing a little better than that.
I don't think the author understands what homelessness really looks like in dense urban areas and seems to have a Hollywood version of homelessness as his reference.
I don't think you understand what 10,000 years ago looks like. These weren't rich European kings, they were leaders of tribes on the cusp of discovering agriculture. In Europe, they lived in caves and tents and hunted with sharp rocks -- they arguably had it worse even than some of the other prehistoric groups in the Middle East and parts of Asia.
Eating freshly cooked meat from a domesticated or game animal is miles better than a rotting piece of garbage in a dumpster sitting in the hot sun.
I don't think we're understanding how filthy dumpsters are and how our bodies are not engineered to handle the types of bacteria that grow in those circumstances or just how dangerous and unhealthy urban areas are for the homeless. Even days old dried meat is going to be healthier, tastier, and safer to eat that whatever you find in a dumpster. Opening a dumpster and seeing a freshly cooked steak that has only one bite out of it is pure Hollywood bullshit. Its a major health risk to eat what you find in garbage cans. Hunting and gathering is infinitely better and safer.
You are romanticizing the hunter-gatherer past. Constantly being on the verge of starvation, eating under-ripe fruit, and scavenging rotten meat off week-old corpses was not a good or 'healthy' life.
"Ian Hodder of Stanford University said, "Göbekli Tepe changes everything". It shows that the erection of monumental complexes was within the capacities of hunter-gatherers and not only of sedentary farming communities as had been previously assumed."
That doesn't look like the work of people perpetually on the verge of starvation.
Another example is from the contemporary historical accounts and depictions of early Europeans in North America. Plain Indians seemed to have been in very good health. They were taller, had a more varied diet, were in better physical shape, and enjoyed longer lives (save accidents/violence).
I'm not personally familiar with the anthropological evidence, but I strongly, strongly doubt that 'constant verge of starvation' accurately characterizes even a small percentage of the past reality.
Constant verge of starvation is a very accurate characterization of the reality of the past. Until the 20th century, economists almost universally used population growth and decline as a measure of agricultural (and overall) productivity, because people would have as many children as they could feed. This measure only works if you are on the verge of famine. A quick glance at anthropological evidence will show you that cultures which developed (and advanced) agriculture had much higher population densities; this was not a lifestyle choice, it was a sign that they could feed more people than the hunter-gatherers. Other resources (such as salt and water) also played a part in what population size could be supported, but efficiency of food production was the predominant occupation and concern up until very recently.
The hunter-gatherers were not awash in delicious artisanal wild venison jerky.
Exactly! I remember reading firsthand accounts from, even 150 years ago, in the US, like Little House on the Prairie, and they all seemed to think it was pretty normal to just "not have food" sometimes. Many many pages were devoted to discussing how long food would last, what they would do when food ran out, how fantastic it was that someone saved the day by killing a food, etc. And they weren't even poor by the standards and culture of the day! They had incredibly advanced (relatively speaking) technology, specialization, and societal support!
I've been downvoted a ton in this thread, but I just think there's so much delusion here about the lifestyle and living standards of prehistoric man...
Famines were certainly common and devastating. I recommend Braudel's The Structures of Everyday Life: Civilization & Capitalism: 15th-18th Century: Volume 1:
"Famine recurred to insistently for centuries on end that it became incorporated into man's biological regime and built into his daily life. Dearth and penury were continual, and familiar, even in Europe, despite its privileged position... It could not have been otherwise. Cereal yields were poor; two consecutive bad harvests spelt disaster... France, by any standards a privileged country, is reckoned to have experienced 10 general (nation-wide) famines during the tenth century: 26 in the 11th... 13 in the sixteenth; 11 in the seventeenth, and 16 in the eighteenth."
"For when they are extreme, demographic increases lead to a deterioration in the standard of living; they enlarge the always horrifying total of the underfed, poor, and uprooted. A balance between mouths to be fed and the difficulties of feeding them, between manpower and jobs, is re-established by epidemics and famines... these extremely crude adjustments were the predominant feature of the centuries of the ancien régime."
Contrast this with Germany taking over a million migrants in during 2015, with none starving. How can agriculture be so much different now to be able to support something like this? Crop yields are much greater now due to artificial selection and technology:
"From the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, the results were disappointing. For every grain sown, the harvest was usually no more than five and sometimes less. As the grain required for the next sowing had to be deducted, four grains were therefore produced for consumption from every one sown..." In Poland, Hungary and Slovakia between 1550 and 1650, yields were between 2 or 4 grains per 1! For 10% of Polish harvests, yields were below 2 to 1!
Things have improved greatly:
England 1200-49: 3.7 for 1
England 1750-1820:
And growth over the last century truly means we don't understand how drastically easier it is to grow food now. In Missouri, bushels per acre increased from about 10 in 1915 to about 55 in 2015! (src = http://crops.missouri.edu/audit/images/WheatYields_MO.jpg)
Agreed. In particular, the social support for physical/mental disabilities that often fuel homelessness was probably nonexistent then. And yes, it's fair to scoff at the social support when comparing nations among one another at the present. But the trend among all of them at present is light years ahead of what it was 10000 years ago.
Yeah, I can't see how that could possibly be true. Kings would have had access to huge amounts of man power. People to build their castles and supply them with food.
I suppose you could argue that the homeless person might have better access to healthcare. But I still think the author's statement is very false.
" Material standard of living can be seen in the increase of real incomes that would increase the purchasing power of consumers, and is characterized by the ability to consume goods and services. Non-material standard of living is more qualitative, and refers to the improvements in quality of life and the environment."
So (assuming that's the same definition they used) yeah, I guess the material standard of living is higher. Seems like that's ignoring quite a bit to sound really optimistic though.
I understand they are trying to make a distinction between "relative to others" vs. "by absolute measures," and how we are prone to thinking only in terms of the former, but I'd still argue they are indeed ignoring quite a bit. Using our exponential increases in GDP as a measure of comparison seems a bit irrelevant.
Both of those (material and environmental) fail to encompass fully other important aspects of a monarch's life, like power and sovereignty/independence, things which modern homeless certainly lack.
Well then, to be fair, they are not defining "homeless" as someone without an income. That's just my poor assumption. With that assumption, I have a hard time seeing how material standards do anything for someone without a home or income :)
So I'm not sure I agree with the original author but a modern homeless person can wander into a hospital emergency ward and get treated for a variety of diseases that would have killed a medieval king. Assuming we mean 1,000 years ago and not 10,000 years ago which may actually pre-date kings.
One of my favorite little know facts about how much has really changed with medical treatment...
Only 90 years ago, President Calvin Coolidge's 16 year old son died from a foot blister he got while playing lawn tennis on the White House grounds, something that would have probably been easily treated with an OTC anti-bacterial or a quick trip to the doctor nowadays.
We hardly have the get "medieval" to see the radical advancements in health and how we all greatly benefit from it.
I'm equally confused. I wonder if he meant to say 10,000?
My understanding of human history pretty much stops at what we all learned about Egypt in history class, and that time period was ~6,000 years ago IIRC. I have no concept whatsoever of what life was like before then.
Mesopotamia would have had farming [0], but if you consider the requirements just a group of people, I think there were settlements of sorts back well into the paleolithic. but not kings-with-castles-and-princesses.
Yes, Sumeria and Mesopotamia is basically the oldest recorded history we have, but this way predates what we know about that. The author is talking about what we know from archaeological evidence, not recorded history.
The claim that losing weight won't make someone happier always surprises me. To be sure, there are those who have deep seated issues that won't be solved by losing weight, or for those who lose a little it won't make a big difference, but I can state with confidence the fact that I am happier and my quality of life is better for having lost weight. Just getting better sleep (and not needing a CPAP to do it) has made a world of difference for me. Anecdotal, I know, but still.
I think that point needed to be deconstructed (by the author of the article) in a lot more detail. It strikes me as both obviously true in many ways but also obviously false in many other ways.
It is obviously true that losing weight won't make you feel any better about being stuck in a shitty marriage, or a job you hate, or being estranged from your parents, or any number of other things that can cause deep-seated unhappiness.
It is also obviously true that losing weight will make you feel better physically, and probably result in you being treated better by most of the people you interact with face-to-face on a daily basis. Being treated better by people definitely makes me feel happier.
On that note, I should really go to the gym more often.
It's common, though, for people to feel guilty about not working out enough even if they do it quite a bit (perhaps even more likely). That can lead to less happiness. The endorphins are great... but I feel there is still a hedonic treadmill effect there with that.
> It's common, though, for people to feel guilty about not working out enough even if they do it quite a bit
ha, I'll bet. almost anything where there's a notion of "leveling up" or some kind of progress over time can lead to this treadmill feeling.
in my case though, I mean, I'm at like once or twice a month at the gym. I'm pretty sure that's just objectively not enough, regardless of whatever treadmill effect is going on there.
Your first link is paywalled, but the second study hardly seems to "cast doubt" as you say.
While we're taught to think about science in terms of "one experiment can disprove a whole theory!", the actual probability of getting an experiment wrong is much higher than the probability of a very established theory predicting an opposing effect to what's actually the case.
"The top 1% own 48% of global wealth, but even they aren’t happy. A survey by Boston College of people with an average net worth of $78m found that they too were assailed by anxiety, dissatisfaction and loneliness. Many of them reported feeling financially insecure: to reach safe ground, they believed, they would need, on average, about 25% more money. (And if they got it? They’d doubtless need another 25%). One respondent said he wouldn’t get there until he had $1bn in the bank." [0]
>>But sunshine after sunshine is correlated with nothing.
>> Because if every day was warm and sunny, you would get use to it.
That seems really really wrong. I see they cite studies but it just finally got warm and sunny here after a long cold winter and it feels, well, happy :-) Maybe, just maybe, if it was sunny all the time I'd get used to it. But some days wouldn't be sunny, or I'd travel someplace with no sun, or people would visit and say how awesome the weather is... I dunno, I'd be reminded all the time how awesome it is. Or I'd complain because there's no rain and everything is dry and dead and we're running out of water... damn hedonic treadmill.
Moved to the Peninsula from Chicago a couple years ago after becoming increasingly fed up with and depressed by winter (despite trying to "medicate" with a full-spectrum lamp).
Everyone I knew commented on how much happier I seemed. Sure some of that may have been job-related, but it is amazing how much I notice it every day, even a couple years later now.
The most noticeable thing for me in my day-to-day is that I no longer feel guilty during nice days when I just want to chill inside and play a computer game or something. In Chicago, since there were only a handful of truly gorgeous days per year, I'd have immense guilt. The flip side is that I need to motivate myself more to go outdoors, but because I can garden pretty much year round, I have an enjoyable hobby that keeps me outside.
Sure, some days I get a bit tired of the sun (particularly when we have heat waves), but the lack of humidity means I can usually hide in the shade and be fine, which can't be said of Chicago in it's 100% humidity summers.
I'm not sure if I'll ever get to a point where I take it for granted because it energizes me. However I do appreciate and look forward to a good rainy day which we rarely get. I even sat outside on my deck in the rain at one point because it felt so nice.
Honestly--I don't miss winter. If I want snow I'll drive to Tahoe. We get a gorgeous extended fall, and those three are enough seasons for me.
I'm fortunate to commute on 280 (vs. 101) and driving home in the evening I get to watch the hills go from a peaceful lush green in the winter/spring to a glowing gold in the summer and fall as the sunset lights them up. It really is something to watch the landscape change like that, and I certainly don't miss the ugly stage of black slush and dangerous white out conditions I lived through in Chicago.
Same, but from Seattle. Maybe it's just those of us who are broken, but I'm immensely happier when it's sunny. I'll grant you, I find reasons to be grumpy sometimes when it's nice out (too damn hot, no AC in the house, whatever), but overall I'm vastly happier. Anyone who knows me would say the same. The thrill of a really nice day is gone, but on balance my situation is improved. Not only that, but after a decade or so, I've come to even appreciate the rare grey or rainy day for what it reminds me of, rather than kicking off a cycle of despair.
I think that's what it comes down to. Sure we might get used to the sunshine and not have as great an emotional lift as when you first see it after months of bleak gray, but the constant positive impact in the day-to-day is by far and away the greater benefit.
That stress reduction and mood enhancement cascades into other aspects of your life such as your sleep, relationships, overall stress level, etc.
I'd make the move again any day of the week. If anything I regret not moving here sooner (largely due to housing prices).
I've lived very close to the equator for a couple of decades. I never had to care about weather forecasts at all, because I alway knew what the weather would be like: 30 degrees celsius (86F), +/- a couple of degrees. Sunny. Too hot under direct sunlight, but completely fine under a tree shade even at noon.
If anything, you get fed up with the single season and will welcome rainy days. There is this mountain nearby that was hugely popular because it was a few degrees colder. So I guess even nice beaches under perfect weather get boring, given enough time.
I live in LA. The last time I noticed myself wanting a change in the weather was a rare day when it was overcast AND I was bored. I realized that it wasn't that I wanted more interesting weather, it was that I was bored, and interesting weather is interesting.
Most days I have at least one moment where I love the weather.
Where I live, everyone celebrates the start of winter (because they're tired of summer), and then then start of summer (because they're tired of winter).
My favorite part of winter is, a warm fire literally never feels better than when it's freezing outside.
I grew up in the Northeast US (New York suburbs) but spent 4 years in California.
People practically do not care about the sun at all in SoCal... because it is always sunny.
It ended up feeling very strange to my brain... I missed the "rhythm" of seasons to mark the passage of time... I felt like I was drifting in a vacation I couldn't escape.
I ended up coming back to NYC :)
And now I appreciate the spring, fall, and winter here more, to boot!
> That seems really really wrong. I see they cite studies but it just finally got warm and sunny here after a long cold winter and it feels, well, happy :-) Maybe, just maybe, if it was sunny all the time I'd get used to it.
I live somewhere where it's sunny almost all the time. I grew up somewhere where it's sunny almost all the time. I still love going outside into the sunlight for a break.
I've read the claim over the years that plastic surgery actually defies the usual reasoning of the hedonic treadmill. Those having plastic surgery tend to stay more-happy over an indefinite period of time.
I've got impression that the author has somehow conflated adaptation to pleasure and monotonicity. Adaptation doesn't imply that people will always want more stuff, monotonicity [0] does.
What adaptation implies is that all gains in subjective happiness are short-term gains. Hence the "treadmill" image: though striving forward, people go nowhere.
It's not a treadmill, it's a ladder, even if it's a small step at a time. I bet people will be less happy if they follow the advice and stop seeking more happiness.
preaching to the choir. happiness is the derivative of circumstance thus ultimately unachievable. Unless you can sustain exponential growth in your current circumstance. Option two, hop on a sinusoid, and sometimes you will be happy and sometimes you wont.
I don't agree. We don't really seem to notice the happiest times until later reflection, and most of my own I find there was stasis and mostly, a certain unconscious contentment. Once it becomes conscious it falls apart.
In addition to the other criticisms in the comments,
> The material standard of living of a homeless person in modern-day Manhattan is several dozens of times higher than the wealthiest of kings ten thousand years ago.
I'd be curious to see how chronic pain fits into the equation.. I developed a fairly severe neuralgia and it dropped my quality of life about 3 or 4 points on a 1-10 scale.
What strikes me about the article is that a gratitude journal is recommended because of its effect, with no real discussion of the cause of the increased happiness. What could possibly explain a strong, common desire regardless of life-circumstances to thank an external source for the good things in our lives? If we're merely products of genetic mutation, this seems like a very bizarre psychological phenomenon.
The Hedonic Treadmill may be a phenomenon but it can be rendered irrelevant to your decision making process with a couple simple guiding principles which many people actually do in practice (some don't but it is an overgeneralization to say everyone does this so don't try to make more money). Principle 1: All Raises Go to Savings (invest those in whatever suits your risk tolerance). Principle 2: Begin With The End In Mind. The end of course is the end of working life (free to do more work of course if you so choose beyond a certain point). If you want to be financially independent at age 50 plus or minus 10 years you need a high net worth, so ensure that these savings habits result in a high net worth (definitions of high net worth of course vary). Kind of tired of hearing about the hedonic treadmill at this point.
This is such a terrible argument, even by its own data.
For instance:
"The good-looking are on average 7% happier than the bad-looking."
...from which it draws the conclusion that being beautiful doesn't make much of a difference. But 7% doesn't seem like a small difference at all. Spending hundreds of hours for a 7% improvement doesn't seem like such a terrible deal to me. Of course it's a bad deal if that's time you're taking from other things that make you happy. But exercise, for instance, has the benefit of improving your health and creating happiness in its own right.
Likewise the fact that 30% of unemployed feel 10% less happy years after becoming employed again. A 10% reduction in happiness doesn't seem minor at all.
I guess if you have some absurd expectation, like some notion that a simple intervention will make you twice as happy, you'll be disappointed by the effects of all these various things. But a lot of these changes are pretty substantial, and they're not even taking into account things that I would expect to really affect happiness--professional accomplishment, one's love life, etc. People are complicated, happiness is complicated, and of course no single thing is going to instantly grant you contentment. That's no reason not to work for small improvements; the small improvements add up.
And I think this kind of fatalism is really pernicious, akin to writing arguments that suicide is a good idea or that heroin actually isn't very dangerous. Most people are sensible enough to dismiss them, but others develop this feeling of learned helplessness which really harms them. The authors arguing this are always hypocrites; they know that they'd be unhappy living on the street, that's why they keep going to work every day. But they're perfectly happy to confuse and harm others with their disingenuous rhetoric.
> But exercise, for instance, has the benefit of improving your health and creating happiness in its own right.
That and losing weight. I honestly believe that many don't understand the effects of being obese (or even overweight) because they've been that way for so long, they've forgotten what healthy feels like. I for one didn't realize it until I lost the weight and no longer needed a CPAP to sleep through the night.
And, if I may: what does 7% happier, 20% increase in life satisfaction exactly mean anyway? My 5% might be or feel very different than someone else's.
See, I have a hard time with all this self-help stuff. What's so difficult about it that needs hundreds of books and blogs to be expounded?
You either want to do something or you don't. Be grateful for what you have and try to improve a little at a time. Remember that everyone is out to get money from you. Try really hard not to be an asshole.
Seems like common sense to me, and everything else feels like a lot of unnecessary junk.
You're right, quantifying happiness is nonsense, but that doesn't stop people trying. I think it's a reflection of a common mindset that sees science as universally applicable.
It's really not. Science, or rather the scientific method, applies only to that which can be quantified, as otherwise you'll have no way to accurately verify the success of a scientific experiment. You can try to quantify happiness, but only superficially, it doesn't accurately describe what happiness is. For example, if I said I was 72% happy today, what does mean objectively (i.e. outside from my personal context)?
Insofar as we can never really know the internal state of anything, and yes, from chemistry, to particle physics to psychology. All we can know for sure is that a machine (we did create) spat out a bunch of numbers and a text book (written by people we don't know) said those numbers were 'correct'.
(Moreover, we already know a lot more about the measurement of internal mental states than you appear to be aware:
Measuring happiness with an MRI is the sort of folly I'm referring to. Scientific knowledge needs to be objective, happiness is subjective. To illustrate what I mean, imagine we could directly stimulate areas of the brain. If we stimulate the same areas of the brain across a group of people, do we expect the resulting experience to be exactly the same across the group?
Sorry I just skimmed the article and liked it but didn't really see any alternatives except for a gratitude journal. What else does the author suggest? Gratitude journals appear to be his shtick.
Yes, I consider that section of pop-psychology fluff literally below contempt or discussion. But by all means, if it interests you, try it; on another page, he promises that keeping a gratitude journal will grant you "spiritual transcendence."
"That's no reason not to work for small improvements; the small improvements add up."
But dismiss the idea of using some sort of heuristic to prioritize said small improvements? Because that's what I got out of this slightly verbose piece: prioritize what will actually make you happy, not what you assume will make you happy. Though, I agree, it's not particularly profound.
twenty kilograms of high-grade worthless, without devoting my life to writing the anti-statement: "even a treadmill can benefit a person, it is the perspective of the person on the treadmill that matters" - you sweat, you win, no sweat, you lose.
>The material standard of living of a homeless person in modern-day Manhattan is several dozens of times higher than the wealthiest of kings ten thousand years ago.
When your analysis leads you to a conclusion that is obviously false, it is time to reconsider some of your steps along the way.
update: there seems to be disagreement, but no comments. My assertion is that the manhattanite homeless the author references are in the running against Eqyptian pharaohs, and I dispute the quoted claim as obviously false.
Didn't you know? Women's hands are more capable of changing diapers due to physiologic differences. /s
No but really it'd be foolish for a man to set aside his endeavors and aspirations and engage in childcare duties like changing diapers; women actually have extra hours built into their day to take care of shit work so in the end it's equal. /s
Seriously though, what a repulsive statement (the quote).
I've been thinking about this lately. The common meme is that people who say "I'll be happy when I do $thing" should try to be happy in the moment rather than looking towards their next goal(s).
I think we always need micro-goals to strive towards. A new job can improve your life, a new partner can improve your life, and even when you find new $thing, there are still goals to work toward there. Like being a better employee or a better partner.
And as you've said, the effect of some changes is long-term at least until you feel a need for growth/expansion again. Everything else outside of moving forward in life is complacency.
The author is also misquoting, or misunderstanding, Kahneman. Kahneman isn't talking at all about the treadmill. He's talking about what he called the "Focusing Illusion"-- a fancy way of saying "the grass is always greener on the other side..."
Relevant links:
"Beyond the Hedonic Treadmill: Revising the Adaptation Theory of Well-Being" http://www.factorhappiness.at/downloads/quellen/S9_Diener.pd...
Kahneman tried to explain the hedonic treadmill via with his own aspiration treadmill. He claims that he not only failed, but the data were opposite to his hypothesis.
https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10056
Kahneman's paper where that OP misquotes Kahneman from:
http://psiexp.ss.uci.edu/research/teaching/Schkade_Kahneman_...