The Problem with Pleasure

Or: How to Leave the Hedonic Treadmill

Photo by Intenza Fitness on Upsplash

The problem with pleasure is you get used to the things that provide it, so they don’t please you as much any more. Ice cream or sex once a month is a thrill; ice cream or sex twice a day is not.

I wrote about hedonic adaptation in the third of these weekly Pleasure Principle posts, on December 27, 2022, when many of us were sated with Christmas pleasures: food, wine, presents.

https://catherinehiller.substack.com/p/too-much-pleasure

Now lets consider how to get off the hedonic treadmill.

The “hedonic treadmill” refers to the idea that people soon return to a fairly stationary level of happiness, sometimes considered a happiness “set point,” regardless of either wonderful or terrible events. Basically, no matter what happens, you’re soon back in the place you once were (hence the “treadmill”). In a famous 1971 study, researchers Brickman and Campbell looked at a group of lottery winners as well as a group of people who’d experienced dreadful accidents that left them blind or paraplegic. Net result? “Lottery winners and accident victims both returned to their pre-event happiness levels within a few months or years.”

Fifty-two years later, that conclusion still knocks me out. How can it be that I might be hit by a car and you might win the Pulitzer Prize and quite soon we would each be more or less as happy as we are right now? It goes against all common sense, yet that initial study has been validated many times.

Your new bike or car or furniture will delight you the first month or two, but then the pleasure diminishes. Your rapture over a new person lasts longer but not forever—because that new friend or lover stops being new. Apparently, we do not remain in the obsessive, passionate stage of love beyond two years. There’s a reason Cupid is often depicted as a toddler.  

Cupid the Honey Thief by Lucas Cranach the Elder

So how can we thwart the hedonic treadmill? How can we keep our pleasures fresh and new?

 One way to do so is to curtail them. When my children were little, I would hide some of their toys for weeks at a time. They never missed them, but were delighted to get them back. (Meanwhile, I hid away another batch.) Perhaps I’ll go through my closet, relegating every other garment to the attic for a while, just to appreciate them anew in a couple of months.

Adding variety to an activity is another way to ward off boredom and heighten pleasure. Choose a different way to walk to the train. Buy your coffee from a new café. One day have a bagel, the next day have a muffin. Learn to cook.

For many years I served the same dozen or so meals for dinner. Then I began following new recipes and buying new ingredients: raw ginger, mirin, haloumi. Dinner isn’t boring any more!

We don’t often acknowledge that the changing seasons also serve to keep things new. It’s a pleasure to be reunited with the shearling coat in November, with the sundress in June. There are autumn sports and spring sports, and just when the pleasures of summer start to pall, we have the bracing new season of fall—and new exhibitions and movies to see.

Travel is another way to thwart hedonic adaptation. Travel forces us to confront new places, new people, new customs, new sensibilities. We do not get bored when we are trying to locate our hotel or make ourselves understood in a foreign country. We may be slightly uncomfortable, but we are living in the present. We are wholly alive. We have stepped off the hedonic treadmill.