The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Humans vary a great deal, and the hedonic treadmill and recalibration has strong evidence even if it doesn't overwhelm literally every human. Consider yourself lucky it doesn't seem to be an issue for you.
Besides, those concepts do not claim that happiness and joy can't exist. Otherwise opioid addicts would eventually stop outright as they get bored. They certainly develop tolerances, but the actual enjoyment remains the same with ever increasing doses, it's downregulation in other aspects that makes them need bigger doses till the point the side effects become lethal.
Plus the recalibration works both ways, it might well be that even a day or two is enough to reset your enjoyment of a cheeseburger, whereas if you were (somehow) given a dozen cheeseburgers in a row and an infinite stomach, you'd be rather bored of them by the end if you went through like a train.
The problem is the application of downregulation theory to subjective experiences. The hedonic treadmill applies to opioids, the suggestion that TikTok is more pleasurable than some arbitrary other kind of media is complete, evidence-free conjecture, because unlike opium the amount of enjoyment obtained from media is very dependent upon many different factors. You’re also confusing the hedonic treadmill with novelty. They’re related but not the same thing. The hedonic treadmill is solely about returning to a biological baseline happiness, it says nothing about differences between media or why using TikTok everyday would make looking at a sunset less fun.
I think people are largely happy or unhappy, and the ‘hedonic treadmill’ is mostly about the ways in which that naturally unhappy proportion of the population cope.
What is the hedonic treadmill but a consequence of a series of subjective experiences?
A disabled person experiences the utter horror of being disabled. He's still disabled later, and subjectively experiencing all the issues that brings (alongside coping mechanisms), and yet his mood trends back to where it began. The same for the suddenly rich lottery winner, though presumably the more modest but sustained gains from those who earn a lot of money (I don't think the studies were on net worth, rather income) leads to higher well-being longterm.
These are almost certainly not the same as the downregulation of opioid receptors in addicts, but they're all examples of the body's stubborn desire to achieve homeostasis. It's the ultimate Nothing Ever Happens Chud of all time. Then when shit does happen, I come in.
It's all homeostasis, be it becoming inured to a single form of once novel stimuli, or to the gestalt impression of all the things that act on your mood.
Some people are certainly happier or unhappier by default than others. What the hedonic treadmill claims is that they tend to revert to whatever that default is. It does not rule out variance between people or even within the same person, simply that in the latter case it will almost inevitably converge.
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I guess this is the core of what I'm objecting to. As mentioned, I buy that the claim that the treadmill and recalibration are real, but I am very skeptical of any purported evidence for the idea that it's totalizing. To be a bit snarky about it, I think it's basically a coping mechanism, similar to the misinterpreted evidence that happiness and satisfaction don't improve above a certain income. That might be nice if it were true, that once you're above some threshold it doesn't matter anymore, but when I search both myself and the people I see around me, it just seems pretty clearly false to me. Does it not feel that way to you?
The hedonic treadmill is very much not a cope. Paraplegics recover to baseline happiness in months and so do lottery winners. It's one of the more robust findings in psychology.
But claims that money doesn't buy you happiness are bunk, it does, even if it has diminishing returns and is more of a log scale. There have been plenty of recent papers on it, of pretty high quality. Obviously when you get into the realm of multi millionaires and then billionaires, good luck getting a proper sample size, but for anyone who doesn't have 7 digits or more, money will make you happier, just not linearly.
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