Hedonistic Treadmill: What It Means to Be Happy With What You Have

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Basically, at some point or another we’ve probably heard of the saying count your stars or be happy with what you have. I recently learned about hedonistic treadmills and made me make a (probably not unique) connection to this saying. For those, unaware the hedonistic treadmill refers to the stability of one’s happiness regardless of events of positive and unhappy occurences. Essentially, the principle of the hedonistic treadmill says that after a positive or a negative event, we will feel some slight delta in happiness only to return back to where we were before. This is not to say that our happiness is the same regardless of our lives - improvements in living conditions of course improve happiness (generally) - but is more so to describe the fact that we are generally pretty stable.

Before we get to the adage in the title, it’s worth noting that the hedonistic treadmill (at least how I see it) is great at proving another adage about the journey and not the destination. By the hedonistic treadmill, if we wanted to maximize our happiness (like this is some sort of differentiable function idk?) working in jobs and progressing careers would be pretty irrelevant. However, many people find satisfaction from achieving their goals, even if they return to the same happiness before: this is pretty good proof that the journey leads to happiness more than the destination. Perhaps this is a higher-form of happiness like meaning or some other self-help buzzword. Ironically, this means that the hedonistic treadmill measuring happiness missed the fact that just traveling on this treadmill makes us happy. Who else is thinking that this type of satisfaction is an integral of the hedonistic treadmill’s sine waves??

I digress, but the returning of a baseline stands. We really can’t change this baseline happiness other than preventing negative events from taking hold and finding more positive events to genuinely celebrate. To do this, I guess it’s best to just be happy with have. I am still curious about its function though.

This article may have been kinda cringe 🙃 :D