The Hedonic Treadmill

On my run this morning, I was listening to a podcast about cultivating happiness. I didn’t even intend for it to relate to this challenge, but what do you know – it did anyway! The host and his guest talked about the “hedonic treadmill” that most of us live our entire lives on. We go from moment to moment just looking for pleasure, which on the face of it doesn’t sound that bad. However, constantly seeking pleasure is a futile endeavor. The more pleasure we get, the more our brain has to bring us back to homeostasis. Then, as you might guess, the more we seek out the next hit of pleasure.

We’re always in a state of wanting, which is pretty much the opposite of true happiness (which is believed to be a mix of enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose). So you get the momentary enjoyment, but satisfaction is fleeting at best and there is essentially no purpose beyond unbridled hedonism.

This really made me think about how many things in my life I do that have purpose other than changing my immediate emotion. Now that I think about it, this blog has given me a sense of happiness – I really enjoy writing, I’m satisfied when I push that “post” button, and it does give me a sense of purpose. I don’t know if anyone is reading this or will ever read it, but the possibility makes me feel that it has purpose.

Oh one more nugget of wisdom from this podcast. I thought it was a really interesting point. Mother Nature does not care about our long-term happiness. She cares much more about our search for immediate pleasure since that is more likely to lead us to eat, survive, and reproduce. So basically, we’re working against nature if we want to get off the treadmill. Fortunately, humans have the capacity for metacognition and we can think our way off of it. Other animals, to our knowledge, can’t do that. We can have instinctual urges to behave a certain way but can decide that it’s not serving us in the long-term. That’s pretty cool. Alright, that’s it for today. Enjoy the rest of the weekend!