Rick glances at the display of his smart watch. It’s 5:14. Only one minute until he’s supposed to begin his nightly routine. As he dips under the crimson leaves of an oak tree, he starts to doubt his decision to take the scenic route home.
Sure, it’s important to spend time in nature. All sensible people know that. But walking through the park adds a couple of extra turns to a trip that could be a straight shot, and he has good reason to be in a hurry.
Just as the workday was ending today, Lisa had kept him waiting at the office way longer than he would’ve liked. She’s taking a cruise next week. And over the past few days, armed with social convention, she’s been holding people hostage to hear her monologue on relaxation, frog legs, and the few hundred dollars she’s carefully set aside for the casino. This afternoon, it was apparently Rick’s turn to hear her excitement.
Crossing a short, wooden bridge that overlooks a rushing stream decorated with angular stones and dead leaves, Rick begins to wonder why some people are so inconsiderate.
Can’t Lisa see that he wants to go home? He’s told her a dozen times about his freelancing business and his dream of financial freedom – namely, writing advertisements with his feet in the sand. He clearly has a lot on his plate, with no time to hear about 12-story, Gen-X infested floating resorts.
Above him, a flock of geese effortlessly rearrange their V formation, and a robin sings behind camouflaging brown leaves.
His attention turns to his evening plans. At this rate, he’ll be starting them about 15 minutes late. The 45 minutes he prefers to spend on cold emails must be cut to 30. A regrettable, but necessary choice. The 2 hours dedicated to current clients are non-negotiable, and the following half-hour must be spent studying industry trends if he wishes to stay relevant in such a competitive space.
After about 10 more minutes of walking, ruminating, and worrying, Rick gets to his apartment. Stepping into the one-bedroom, he turns and admires the picture above his kitchen table. Paradise contained in a $5 frame. Puerto Viejo – endless rows of palm trees, fresh coconuts, sufficient wifi, and water so clear you can spot a lost earring from the surface.
A glimpse into his dream is enough motivation. Time to start working.
Improve and Succeed
Rick is clearly a hard worker. His nightly routine involves 3 hours and 15 minutes of freelance work. And this takes place after he’s already worked an office job all day. If he keeps at it, he’ll become a very skilled freelance copywriter. And, who knows, maybe he and his laptop will inhibit paradise one day. Then, the stress he’s enduring now may be worthwhile.
What Rick needs to understand, though, is that whether the stress is worthwhile depends on more than whether he accomplishes his goal. If he ends up in Puerto Viejo, this doesn’t guarantee he’ll be happy. In fact, it doesn’t even suggest it.
Flaws in Paradise
Let’s assume Rick does succeed in his mission of becoming a freelance copywriter who resides in Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica. When he first settles in, he’ll smile uncontrollably at the screensaver-worthy scenery and the comforting sound of waves meeting sand. No more looking at pictures, listening to ambience, and longing for paradise. Instead, he’ll directly experience paradise.
Unfortunately, since Rick is human (or at least a fictional human), this period of overwhelming satisfaction is short-lived. Soon, the stress, rumination, worry, and dissatisfaction will resume, even in paradise. He may even start to identify problems with paradise and fixate on them, like David Foster Wallace hilariously did with his Carribean cruise in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again:
By now I notice that when Table 64’s towering busboy uses his crumb-scoop to clear crumbs off the tablecloth between courses he never seems to get quite all the crumbs… Mavourneen of the high seas or no, when Petra makes my bed not all the hospital corners are at exactly the same angle.
David Foster Wallace
What David Foster Wallace experienced on his cruise is bound to happen to Rick in Puerto Viejo too. After some time, Rick may complain that the beach is overwhelmingly hot. Or, maybe his days will be filled with worries about his work, just like they were before he moved to paradise.
He may still enjoy living there and be better off for moving. But paradise will not make Rick’s problems go away, and it won’t make him permanently satisfied, either.
The Hedonic Treadmill
In this situation, Rick would be experiencing what psychologists call the hedonic treadmill. This term explains how our level of happiness is relatively consistent regardless of our circumstances, just like our location remains the same regardless of our speed on a treadmill.
Psychology TodayThe hedonic treadmill is the idea that an individual’s level of happiness, after rising or falling in response to positive or negative life events, ultimately tends to move back toward where it was prior to these experiences.
At first glance, it may seem like the hedonic treadmill is a defect of human nature. After all, wouldn’t it make sense if we were permanently rewarded emotionally for improving our circumstances?
But, as author Mark Manson pointed out in The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck, our steady dissatisfaction is more of a feature than a bug. He explains that since dissatisfied people are more likely to find problems and solve them, dissatisfaction drives the survival of our species.
Additionally, though we may not be fans of maintaining a consistent level of happiness regardless of positive circumstances, this same maintenance helps us endure negative circumstances. If humans experienced the 200th day of war or famine just as intensely as they experienced the first, nobody would make it through such experiences.
Can We Stop Adjusting to Positive Changes?
It seems the benefits of the hedonic treadmill are progress and stability. But, despite these benefits, I imagine most of us find a life of steady dissatisfaction to be, well, dissatisfying.
If we wish to lessen the effects of the hedonic treadmill so we don’t become dissatisfied so routinely, what can we do?
According to Psychology Today, we have two options:
- Try new things
- Savor our experiences
Let’s explore both of these options.
Option 1: Try New Things
The thinking behind this option is that we return to our standard level of happiness because our circumstances get repetitive. Our improved conditions are like hit songs on the radio – captivating and satisfying at first, but just another song eventually. After enough exposure to our experiences, we take them for granted.
To counter our tendency to take things for granted, we can have new experiences often.
Let’s use Rick as an example. If he finds himself in paradise, yet no happier than he was listening to Lisa carry on about overrated vacation plans, what can he do?
Rick needs to experiment. He could try new activities like surfing or clubbing; new foods like coconut-infused seafood or Rondón soup; or new projects like print marketing instead of digital.
Doing any of these things would gift Rick with the experience of novelty. Each time he enjoys something new, he’ll be happier than usual. This means that so long as he can find new positive experiences, novelty will be an effective solution to the problem of the hedonic treadmill.
Downsides of Novelty
But Rick’s attempts to find new, enjoyable experiences won’t always be successful. He may, for example, try surfing. This could be a life changing positive experience for him. He may enter a deep flow state and become one with the waves. He may also do nothing but frustrate himself as he crashes into the water time and time again, getting water trapped in his ears and nose repeatedly.
The risk of having a bad time shouldn’t prevent us from trying new things. Really, the uncertainty is part of the fun. But the extent to which novelty improves our lives can be unpredictable and out of our control. Plus, there’s the inescapable fact that we will eventually adjust to the new things we introduce in our lives. This means novelty will help us weaken the hedonic treadmill, but only for a short time.
Option 2: Savor Our Experiences
Savoring our experiences is a completely different approach to maintaining happiness. Novelty is external – it involves experimenting with our environment and hoping for a positive outcome. Savoring our experience, on the other hand, is internal. It involves changing thought patterns and habits. This means that a major benefit of this option is that its effectiveness is largely in our control and not as dependent on external factors.
Let’s take the opening story of Rick walking through the park. What if, instead of reliving his frustrations at work and worrying about the busy evening that awaited him, he listened to the robins, felt the wind against his face, and admired the sunset?
Nothing is preventing him from doing this. It is, at least from a compatibilist perspective, well within his power to delight in the beauty of his walk home instead of ignoring it. And I doubt Rick or anyone else would prefer rumination and worry over delight. Yet, Rick and many of us experience the former more than the latter despite our preferences.
Getting Distracted from Delight
This happens because we lose sight of our preferences. Even if we know we’d rather appreciate nature, we tend to worry anyway. And if it’s not worrying, we get distracted by something else, like reliving past experiences or wondering what will happen next in our favorite show. This isn’t always a bad thing, but it’s a distraction nonetheless.
These distractions are more likely to occur in the face of familiarity than novelty. When we walk through a new place, we think about our surroundings; When we walk through a familiar place, we think about the character development of Daemon Targaryen.
Getting ourselves to pay attention to familiar, delightful things is easier said than done, and it can seem like our habits prevent us from really savoring our experience. Fortunately, there are ways to change these habits and thought patterns.
Negative Visualization
One way to be more appreciative is to imagine what our lives would be like without the things we take for granted. Philosopher William Irvine calls this thought exercise negative visualization.
The point of performing a negative visualization is to evoke a feeling of gratitude in ourselves. It involves using our imagination to enter a world where something or someone we appreciate no longer exists. Then, we snap back to reality with revived appreciation for what we just visualized not having.
If Rick performed a negative visualization during a bad day in paradise, he may imagine himself rushing from one inadequately heated building to another on a freezing, dreary day. He’ll feel himself grimacing as the wind rips through the Burt’s Bees he just applied. He’ll see dirt, snow, and ice clumped together in repulsive mounds along the road. Then, he’ll return to reality.
When his attention returns to Puerto Viejo, he’ll marvel at his paradise. Instead of worrying about his projects, he’ll compare the calming breeze of reality to the piercing wind of his negative visualization. This will make him grateful for where he’s at.
We can do this thought exercise with just about anything. If we imagine what our lives would look like if we lost our home, suddenly our studio apartment feels like a palace. If we imagine our lives without a loved one, we realize how much they mean to us and cherish our time with them.
With all negative visualizations, we see that things could be much worse than they are. Doing these visualizations regularly, like once a day, encourages us to savor what we normally take for granted. This makes negative visualization an effective tool for lessening the effects of the hedonic treadmill.
Mindfulness
A gradual, long-term solution to the hedonic treadmill is mindfulness. This is because the hedonic treadmill is largely a problem with attention, and mindfulness helps us manage attention.
To develop mindfulness, we need a habit, or a practice as they’re often called. These involve paying close attention to something while avoiding distraction and judgment. We can choose many things as the object of our attention, so long as our attention is on the present.
A common technique is to sit down and focus on the breath for some period of time. Usually meditation teachers recommend doing this for about 10 minutes. But the period can be much shorter or longer depending on people’s preferences.
During this practice, we’ll inevitably discover that it’s difficult for us to focus on something as simple as the breath for even a minute without becoming distracted. This realization is a key component of mindfulness. Our minds need practice to be able to focus and relax easily.
After practicing for a while, we’ll see that we can focus for a bit longer. And more importantly, when we’re distracted, it’s not for as long as it used to be. This is progress in meditation that helps us focus and relax not just within our practice, but in the rest of our lives, too.
If Rick sharpened his focus through a mindfulness practice, he could more easily appreciate paradise. In a moment of complaining about overwhelming heat or his work responsibilities, he may catch himself getting distracted. Then, instead of ignoring it, he could enjoy the scenery he worked so hard to experience.
Don’t Get the Wrong Idea
Still, though mindfulness, novelty, and negative visualization will help Rick with the hedonic treadmill, they won’t stop it completely. He will still take things for granted occasionally or feel unhappy while dealing with problems. This is normal. These occasions are not evidence that something is wrong with him.
Just like we shouldn’t expect a permanent state of happiness from improved circumstances, like a bigger house or a warmer climate, we shouldn’t expect it from forming good habits either. Experiencing sadness, fear, guilt, anxiety, and the remaining cornucopia of unpleasant emotions we’re acquainted with is not an indication that we’re not doing enough work on ourselves. It’s an indication that we’re human.
Recently, I was discussing the topic of this blog with my cousin, who is a therapist. When I mentioned the gray area of wanting to be happier, but not obsessed with happiness, she agreed and added that if she had a client who claimed to be happy all of the time, she’d be concerned for them.
If we’re happy while grieving or getting fired, then we’re likely not giving our emotions the attention they need. We’re trying to shove them down until we forget about them. This is like trying to push a ball underwater – the harder you push down, the more forcibly it resurfaces. Unpleasant emotions are not our enemy – they’re information. And they can be processed wisely or unwisely.
A Reasonable Goal
The goal, then, is not a life of only pleasant emotions. Instead, it’s a life where we’re less likely to let unpleasant thoughts, particularly those attached to the past or future, overstay their welcome. Then, free from rumination and worry, we can focus our attention on what we enjoy in the present.
Habits that, when appropriate, evoke appreciation are great tools for increasing happiness a reasonable amount. By pulling our attention to the present, they decrease perpetual dissatisfaction.
If Rick does move to paradise, he’d be wise to incorporate some of these habits. Because though he may prefer a sunset in Costa Rica to a sunset in Ohio, the key to enjoying any sunset is paying attention to it.
Summary
- Even as our circumstances improve, we tend to retain a level of dissatisfaction with our lives.
- We can become more satisfied with our lives by trying new things, performing negative visualizations, and developing a mindfulness practice.
- New things excite us and give us a quick boost in happiness.
- Negative visualizations make us imagine life without something, then appreciate life with it.
- Mindfulness helps us focus on the present rather than unproductive memories or worries.
- Though we want to be happier, a life of only happiness isn’t a wise goal. A better goal is to not let rumination and worry stick around for longer than needed. Then, we enjoy the moment.