“Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of the origin of suffering: it is this craving which leads to renewed existence, accompanied by delight and lust, seeking delight here and there; that is, craving for sensual pleasures, craving for existence, craving for extermination.”
Beautifully written! I've had the same worries on my mind recently, I'm glad to see someone else express their hatred for the Boogyman that haunts us all. Hope I live to see the day we move past it, where we can fully enjoy what we've built.
I think a turkey tribal people are/were pretty happy. At least, everything I can tell from any documentary I've ever seen, they actually seem very happy. I also live among a lot of Mormons, who get sent on missions around the world including to a lot of third world countries where they live for two years...and most of them will tell you that people in those places seem either just as happy or more happy than here. A friend lived in an African country where he would occasionally see horrific things like everyone chase down a petty criminal they didn't like, put a tire around his neck, and set it on fire. He claimed the people there were SIGNIFICANTLY more happy than in the US. I don't know if it's true, but that's what he reported.
So anyway, I agree with you.
I seem to have mostly lucked out on this. Whether it's just my genetic temperament or way I was raised or just my own habits of thought, I tend to be a much more cheerful person than most. I get over bad things easily, feel a lot of gratitude for small things, get delighted by little things daily, and am generally happy with life. Which is weird because I also have an extremely dark view of the world, far darker than most people can deal with, and agree with you that it sucks. 😂😂 Perhaps that's just the contrast between how much better my life seems than 99.9999% of other conscious beings.
Anyway, despite me being mostly a cherry person, one thing that I have always thought was an absolute tragedy is how the "in love" (or limerence, or new relationship energy, whatever you want to call it) doesn't last. I understand why, but that is just such a gigantic, huge bummer. Just imagine how much freaking happier people would be if they could take a pill to stay as starry-eyed, lustful, and in love with their partner their whole life instead of just like a year or so. Once again I feel I have gotten fairly lucky in this regard, and yet still, I just find this to be such a cruelty. Nature gets people together and sends them to this heavenly place of joy for a few months, and then they commit to each other so that that relationship can degrade and get just a tiny bit less lovely and less compelling every single day. Sucks.
Very nicely written and totally agree. Why don't more people see this?
The other day I was realizing this: if you are in pain for years, and then all of a sudden the pain disappears. You will be happy for a day, then that will fade. And is only when the pain comes back that you'll again be able to think: oh dear, I was painless for all that time.
We are so made, Freud wrote, that we can only drive intense pleasure from contrasts, and only very little from states of mind.
in his lectures thich nhat hanh would refer to "the experience of the non-toothache," something I try to think about when I'm healthy but I admit is easier to keep in mind when laid low
If you could structure society such that most people were happy and contented, I expect that there would be increased selective pressure for unhappy and discontented personalities.
You're totally right and also that is maybe the most depressing bummer of a sentence ever. Really makes the author's point that it just seems like an evil system if that's the case.
There's other evidence in this vein too. I won't bore you with the details but TLDR this seems to be a capitalism thing. It looks like 'mental health' is a common good capitalists are more than willing to burn to maximize shareholder value (e.g. the 24 hour 'news' cycle), which means it's something we'll get rid of when we implement FALGSC (or a democratic socialist economy, if you're boring).
> The hedonistic treadmill is the theory that there’s a baseline happiness we return to.
One obvious objection is chronic pain. Rates of chronic pain are decreasing thanks to modern medicine. Chronic pain is at the tail end of the (happiness) distribution so perhaps you think this doesn't effect the median too much, but I think that even a pessimist must admit that this does improve the average.
Another objection is lifespan. Even if we assume it's true that we'll always be reset to a slightly positive happiness baseline, the *length* of a life is undeniably increasing, so we get to enjoy that slightly happy life for longer.
was also thinking, if only we would all realise that x doesn't make us happier, so we could stop striving, but of course we don't. we're running on the treadmill knowing full well we won't get anywhere, and we can't not run. horrible system.
I loved this. Someone asked me what the smallest thing I was grateful for and I said it was that the press gang never showed up to the bar I was in to beat me up and force me to join the royal navy. I'm American and under 250 years old so this has never been a real concern of mine, but I'm grateful all the same. Just trying to hop off the treadmill when I can.
I feel spending time with your loving partner, or with friends brings one happiness. Doesn't matter if it's 10000 bc or now. So in that sense it makes sense that technological progress has a limited impact on your happiness. But it's really good and removing tragedies. Your entire family won't die of the black plague, you're healthy and you don't need to work your ass off to survive, thanks to that progress. That definitely brings us happiness.
We should have a strong prior that rising living standards improve happiness. People want higher living standards and it's just very intuitive that when people get what they want, they will be happier than when they don't get what they want.
The intuition is even stronger when you consider the scale of the improvement in living standards over the last 10,000 years. People are very sad when their child dies. 10,000 years ago, 50% of children died before adulthood. Now, very few children die before adulthood. It would be very shocking if this change did not make people happier.
Even today, comparing across people, the strongest predictor of happiness is physical health. Improvements in material living standards and technology can meaningfully advance physical health. So why wouldn't we expect that to improve well-being? Why wouldn't that be true progress?
I suspect this post will appeal to some people, because it aligns with a strange negativity bias that people seem to have. But this post doesn't actually make a compelling argument against the value of human progress. You are very lucky to have been born today.
Yeah, the treadmill is a thorny-one, but I think it might be an illusion. Human beings can experience happiness just fine, we just can't form appreciation for it. They don't "stick" to us, the good experiences that we have; they don't do much to inform our subjective impressions of our own well-being -- which is what the various "hedonic treadmill" studies are measuring.
Like, for example, it's reasonable to expect that someone in a happy relationship who has enough extroversion to go adventuring now and again is going to be experiencing more good feelings on average than a loveless introvert, even if both are accustomed to their lives. Their brains can't do the math, but if you hooked them up to wires and measured the neurotransmitters there's going to be more in column B than column A. Or uh, in other words, we *can* be happy; our brains just don't let us appreciate it, lest we rest on our laurels.
Is there a difference between happiness and appreciating one's happiness? I think there is, but it's a shame we can't have both.
How good is the evidence that the hedonic treadmill is that strong?
As Toby Ord and others have pointed out, life satisfaction indices show diminishing returns by construction. If someone ranks themselves 7/10, when their income doubles they *can’t* say 14.
Imagine we couldn’t measure wealth, health, or education directly, so we asked people to rank their own out of 10. I’m pretty sure you’d see *exactly* the same thing you see with happiness - lots of people ranking 7/10, with much less improvement than we see on objective measures.
It doesn’t help that the questions build in subjectivity (“10 is the best possible life *for you*”).
I think there’s a related but more important phenomenon, that people care as much about their relative as their absolute position. That eats a lot of the benefits of growth.
“Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of the origin of suffering: it is this craving which leads to renewed existence, accompanied by delight and lust, seeking delight here and there; that is, craving for sensual pleasures, craving for existence, craving for extermination.”
- Saṃyutta Nikāya 56.11
I thought about Buddhism here! Tons of agreement.
Beautifully written! I've had the same worries on my mind recently, I'm glad to see someone else express their hatred for the Boogyman that haunts us all. Hope I live to see the day we move past it, where we can fully enjoy what we've built.
I think a turkey tribal people are/were pretty happy. At least, everything I can tell from any documentary I've ever seen, they actually seem very happy. I also live among a lot of Mormons, who get sent on missions around the world including to a lot of third world countries where they live for two years...and most of them will tell you that people in those places seem either just as happy or more happy than here. A friend lived in an African country where he would occasionally see horrific things like everyone chase down a petty criminal they didn't like, put a tire around his neck, and set it on fire. He claimed the people there were SIGNIFICANTLY more happy than in the US. I don't know if it's true, but that's what he reported.
So anyway, I agree with you.
I seem to have mostly lucked out on this. Whether it's just my genetic temperament or way I was raised or just my own habits of thought, I tend to be a much more cheerful person than most. I get over bad things easily, feel a lot of gratitude for small things, get delighted by little things daily, and am generally happy with life. Which is weird because I also have an extremely dark view of the world, far darker than most people can deal with, and agree with you that it sucks. 😂😂 Perhaps that's just the contrast between how much better my life seems than 99.9999% of other conscious beings.
Anyway, despite me being mostly a cherry person, one thing that I have always thought was an absolute tragedy is how the "in love" (or limerence, or new relationship energy, whatever you want to call it) doesn't last. I understand why, but that is just such a gigantic, huge bummer. Just imagine how much freaking happier people would be if they could take a pill to stay as starry-eyed, lustful, and in love with their partner their whole life instead of just like a year or so. Once again I feel I have gotten fairly lucky in this regard, and yet still, I just find this to be such a cruelty. Nature gets people together and sends them to this heavenly place of joy for a few months, and then they commit to each other so that that relationship can degrade and get just a tiny bit less lovely and less compelling every single day. Sucks.
Idk how the word turkey got in there!
Very nicely written and totally agree. Why don't more people see this?
The other day I was realizing this: if you are in pain for years, and then all of a sudden the pain disappears. You will be happy for a day, then that will fade. And is only when the pain comes back that you'll again be able to think: oh dear, I was painless for all that time.
We are so made, Freud wrote, that we can only drive intense pleasure from contrasts, and only very little from states of mind.
in his lectures thich nhat hanh would refer to "the experience of the non-toothache," something I try to think about when I'm healthy but I admit is easier to keep in mind when laid low
exactly. so the non tooth ache is easiest to experience after and before a toothache, but very hard in the longer period in between :)
If you could structure society such that most people were happy and contented, I expect that there would be increased selective pressure for unhappy and discontented personalities.
You're totally right and also that is maybe the most depressing bummer of a sentence ever. Really makes the author's point that it just seems like an evil system if that's the case.
> The Easterlin Paradox (awesome name) notices that within any given country, happiness stagnates once GDP per capita passes ~$20k.
Worse, there's some evidence that it actually *decreases* after a while! According to the following study, the relationship between GDP and life satisfaction is 'hump shaped', life satisfaction seems to peak at around $30,000-$33,000 and then slightly but significantly decline among the richest countries: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259208570_A_Reassessment_of_the_Relationship_between_GDP_and_Life_Satisfaction
There's other evidence in this vein too. I won't bore you with the details but TLDR this seems to be a capitalism thing. It looks like 'mental health' is a common good capitalists are more than willing to burn to maximize shareholder value (e.g. the 24 hour 'news' cycle), which means it's something we'll get rid of when we implement FALGSC (or a democratic socialist economy, if you're boring).
> The hedonistic treadmill is the theory that there’s a baseline happiness we return to.
One obvious objection is chronic pain. Rates of chronic pain are decreasing thanks to modern medicine. Chronic pain is at the tail end of the (happiness) distribution so perhaps you think this doesn't effect the median too much, but I think that even a pessimist must admit that this does improve the average.
Another objection is lifespan. Even if we assume it's true that we'll always be reset to a slightly positive happiness baseline, the *length* of a life is undeniably increasing, so we get to enjoy that slightly happy life for longer.
was also thinking, if only we would all realise that x doesn't make us happier, so we could stop striving, but of course we don't. we're running on the treadmill knowing full well we won't get anywhere, and we can't not run. horrible system.
I loved this. Someone asked me what the smallest thing I was grateful for and I said it was that the press gang never showed up to the bar I was in to beat me up and force me to join the royal navy. I'm American and under 250 years old so this has never been a real concern of mine, but I'm grateful all the same. Just trying to hop off the treadmill when I can.
Do you really get happy from buying a car though?
I feel spending time with your loving partner, or with friends brings one happiness. Doesn't matter if it's 10000 bc or now. So in that sense it makes sense that technological progress has a limited impact on your happiness. But it's really good and removing tragedies. Your entire family won't die of the black plague, you're healthy and you don't need to work your ass off to survive, thanks to that progress. That definitely brings us happiness.
This is poetic, but it seems wrong.
We should have a strong prior that rising living standards improve happiness. People want higher living standards and it's just very intuitive that when people get what they want, they will be happier than when they don't get what they want.
The intuition is even stronger when you consider the scale of the improvement in living standards over the last 10,000 years. People are very sad when their child dies. 10,000 years ago, 50% of children died before adulthood. Now, very few children die before adulthood. It would be very shocking if this change did not make people happier.
Even today, comparing across people, the strongest predictor of happiness is physical health. Improvements in material living standards and technology can meaningfully advance physical health. So why wouldn't we expect that to improve well-being? Why wouldn't that be true progress?
I suspect this post will appeal to some people, because it aligns with a strange negativity bias that people seem to have. But this post doesn't actually make a compelling argument against the value of human progress. You are very lucky to have been born today.
Yeah, the treadmill is a thorny-one, but I think it might be an illusion. Human beings can experience happiness just fine, we just can't form appreciation for it. They don't "stick" to us, the good experiences that we have; they don't do much to inform our subjective impressions of our own well-being -- which is what the various "hedonic treadmill" studies are measuring.
Like, for example, it's reasonable to expect that someone in a happy relationship who has enough extroversion to go adventuring now and again is going to be experiencing more good feelings on average than a loveless introvert, even if both are accustomed to their lives. Their brains can't do the math, but if you hooked them up to wires and measured the neurotransmitters there's going to be more in column B than column A. Or uh, in other words, we *can* be happy; our brains just don't let us appreciate it, lest we rest on our laurels.
Is there a difference between happiness and appreciating one's happiness? I think there is, but it's a shame we can't have both.
How good is the evidence that the hedonic treadmill is that strong?
As Toby Ord and others have pointed out, life satisfaction indices show diminishing returns by construction. If someone ranks themselves 7/10, when their income doubles they *can’t* say 14.
Imagine we couldn’t measure wealth, health, or education directly, so we asked people to rank their own out of 10. I’m pretty sure you’d see *exactly* the same thing you see with happiness - lots of people ranking 7/10, with much less improvement than we see on objective measures.
It doesn’t help that the questions build in subjectivity (“10 is the best possible life *for you*”).
I think there’s a related but more important phenomenon, that people care as much about their relative as their absolute position. That eats a lot of the benefits of growth.
I don't know I kind of like wanting things. Plus it seems hard to know when the right time is to change our brains to be blissed out and complacent.