#hedonistic treadmill

[auntbibby]

the hedonistic treadmill is a skill issue.

if i had my ideal body and infinite chocolate milk+thai peanut chicken with coconut rice and tons of friends and we culd all fly & shoot lasers i wuld simply enjoy it forever due to my special altered brain

[liskantope]

A weird thing happened where I got an email today about a Slate Star Codex article (”The Tails Coming Apart as Metaphor for Life”) that came out over 3 weeks ago, and I added a comment at the bottom without even noticing that most of the other comments were back from late September or October 1st. Since probably almost nobody is reading that comment and I thought it had the potential to evolve into an interesting discussion, I paste it below (although, to be fair, probably about as few people will read it here as on SSC!).

The main thesis here is interesting, but I’m not sure that the “happiness” example is a good one. Do the different survey questions (about how good we think we have it, how often we experience positive emotions, how much meaning we see in our lives, etc.) actually yield data that shows a positive correlation between them? I would guess there’s not much of a correlation at all, because it seems that the particular phrasings of the questions point to quite different things.

For instance, asking where on a scale from 1 to 10 would we place our lives in terms of how good we have it, people in more developed countries that clearly allow for better quality of life are almost certainly going to rate their lives highly. We grow up with a decent frequency of reminders about how bad conditions are in other parts of the world and through most of human history that came before us, and so any of us with the tiniest bit of awareness is probably not going to be inclined to answer with a low mark. And yet, I would imagine that objective quality of life (relative to other places of the world rather than others in one’s own environment) is correlated with true happiness (or satisfaction or frequency of positive/negative feelings) weakly at best, due at least in part to hedonistic treadmill effects. (I see that Baeraad made more or less the same point in a comment above.)

Meanwhile, evaluating the level of meaning in one’s own life strikes me as an obviously mostly independent question. I don’t suppose someone in a deep apathetic depression that doesn’t allow for many emotions at all would consider their life to be very meaningful, but a person whose life has been mostly intense suffering may very easily see profound meaning in their own life without being a very happy person in any normal sense of “happy”.

[kkharsa]

You get trapped by the money. Something dies inside. It’s very hard to preserve the quality in a kid that makes him jump out of a high-paying job to go write a book.

Brain Pickings - Part 6