The Treadmill of Happiness

If I gave you a million dollars every month from today, would you be happier than usual for the rest of your life?  Maybe for those students, if I gave you an A in every class, would you be happier than usual for the rest of your school years? Even if some invisible hand solves all your problems every day, the truth is you won’t be happier than usual. I am in awe of human psychology, and this happiness equation comes from two psychologists: Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell. They coined it the Hedonic Treadmill. Hedonism simply is believing that pleasure or happiness is the sole purpose of life. You may ask, why say treadmill? If you’ve ever seen a treadmill, you probably know how it works: a conveyor-belt is running over and over again and again. It’s the same  50 or 70 inches but it seems like an endless road. Happiness is like that. You may seem happier or sadder under circumstances, but the mind adapts, and you even out again. I liken it to the stock market. Good investors invest in multiple stocks, so profits and losses even out, with one difference being that happiness has normal profit i.e. 0 profit. Let’s look at an example everyone is familiar with. Everybody, at some point in time, would have got their first phone or just a new phone. We all remember the first few days. If the phone had a mouth, it would scream. Except for breaking it apart, we would do everything with that phone. However, after a few days, that excitement, the happiness of using it, dies down. Why? The mind has adapted to the phone; being with the phone is the new normal. The problem starts when we go back the other way. Unfortunately, it takes significantly longer to even out sadness than happiness, which is why taking away phones has drastic effects on children. It will even out, but the mind will take its time. Coming back to my first question, a million dollars a month will not bring you more happiness; it will be the new normal after 3 or 4 months and then you will yearn for a few more million. Straight As will be the normal, and you will have other ‘problems’. Happiness goes in a loop forever, hence the name Hedonic Treadmill.

Happiness isn’t a smart bulb; Happiness is the sun.  A clear sky can make it seem brighter, and clouds can make it dimmer, but at the end of the day, in the long term, the sun is as bright as the sun.