The Hedonic Treadmill  
Joe Ferguson, PhD | July 3, 2009

      A theory of happiness called the Hedonic Treadmill proposes that people each have a particular level of happiness to which they quickly return after significant life changes render them briefly more or less happy, just as most of us quickly return to our usual weight after either a diet or a period of gluttony and dissipation. I have verified this repeatedly by personal experiment, out of commitment to the scientific method. Serious research has also demonstrated the homogeneity of happiness across diverse populations living under dramatically different circumstances. One famous study found that quadriplegic accident victims are only slightly less happy than major lottery winners one year after their accident or lottery win, and the lottery winners are indistinguishable from a random control group. On average, the impoverished residents of third world countries are just about as happy as the residents of Laguna Beach.

     This is not an argument for the termination of food aid to Sudan or for the abandonment of hope if you are depressed, but rather it is an important psychological insight with practical implications. The indisputable reality of the hedonic treadmill seems to imply that the attainment of things we want does not make us happy, which universal folklore confirms in innumerable maxims like “Money can’t buy happiness”.  But everyone knows that the attainment of things that we want does make us happy, and it is clear that the residents of Laguna Beach have attained far more of those things than the residents of Sudan. The problem is not that things like the acquisition of money don’t make us happy, but rather that that they don’t keep us happy; simply because we get used to them. This reality is the very essence of nonchalance: “Sure, I have all this stuff that you can never hope to attain, but you can see from my expression that I am really quite bored with it all.” Nonchalance and the misery that it conceals can be treated.

     The lesson of the hedonic treadmill is not that the attainment of things we want is pointless, but rather that we must attain new things regularly. Our relentless mistake is to presume that the thrill of some particular accomplishment or fortune will be lasting. The solution is to systematically disrupt our own stability with new initiatives, on an ongoing basis, so that our happiness can be temporarily enhanced by something new just as we get used to the last thing that made us temporarily happy. This is like cruising across the crest of the waves in a powerboat instead of bobbing up and down like a cork.