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Hacking the Hedonic Treadmill

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31–40 of 148 posts

Re: Hacking the Hedonic Treadmill

#31

"Commercial breaks––people actually enjoy TV more with commercials". Maybe most people, but i hate forced commercials. I rather pause the video, do something else for a while and resume the video. "Setpiece escape room experiences, like climbing into a coffin " I have been in a real coffin a few hours once for a halloween fright night. Pretty comfy things. Felt quite relaxed.

I clicked the link, took the first name in the publication, looked him up and is a professor in business and marketing.

The things a professor of marketing needs to publish to thrive professionally these days seems to have become surreal.

Re: Hacking the Hedonic Treadmill

#33

"Commercial breaks––people actually enjoy TV more with commercials". Maybe most people, but i hate forced commercials. I rather pause the video, do something else for a while and resume the video. "Setpiece escape room experiences, like climbing into a coffin " I have been in a real coffin a few hours once for a halloween fright night. Pretty comfy things. Felt quite relaxed.

> Maybe most people, but i...

You are Most People:

> Though people say they prefer to watch television without ads, they sometimes enjoy programs that have commercial interruptions more.

The surprising claim isn't that most people say they enjoy commercials, it's that TV programs with commercial interruptions tend to correlate with people reporting higher enjoyment of the TV program despite claiming that the would prefer less commercials.

Re: Hacking the Hedonic Treadmill

#34
post #14

Awareness of the hedonic treadmill meshes quite well with my 'frugal' Yorkshire tendencies. A favourite on HN seems to be coffee, and spending ever more on 'good' coffee. I mainly just drink instant coffee, filter coffee for the weekend. I still get my 'good' coffee and I appreciate it. Same goes for wine and chocolate. It's also led me away from expensive experiences to unique/different experiences. It's also helpfu…

I'm right there with you! I just recently bought some Ersatz coffee and thought to myself "Well, what sounds more like a unique experience. Coffee, or a blend of roasted chicory, wheat, barley, figs and acorns?" This stuff is pretty great, and regardless of how much it resembles coffee (which it does to a surprising extent), this was a really solid purchase.

And if you don't like it, you enjoy the real coffee all the more when you go back to it!

Re: Hacking the Hedonic Treadmill

#35
Oh yes Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. This article kind of mixes different definitions of happiness. There’s the constitutional reference which comes from ancient greek roman philosophy and its origin is Aristotelian

Happiness as “Evdemonia” in Aristotelian scripts (Eudemonia in wikipedia) which more accurately translates as having “good demons” with you, which can be interpreted as feeling content/lucky for what you have.

Happiness as “Joyfulness” which is smily face marketing and instant gratification and hedonistic stuff aka buying the new iphone each year and getting bored at it and buying afterwards the next one because under a microscope the photo of the dark side of the moon looks better, when somebody else takes it.

So if one needs to repeat escalate: hedonism usually exploited by marketing, if you need to pay probably a facade of happiness and unfulfilling. Hedonism is nice to have tho.

If one is feeling lucky for his life and future: happiness aka lucky for parameters of ones life that would be deemed important 300 years ago and should be important in 300 years, conative with a sense of purpose. usually exploited by social and political systems (e.g.to be happy you need good health, very expensive if politics fights life) happiness is a must have

This article conflates one definition of happiness to the other while only discussing affective optimisation of hedonism.

Re: Hacking the Hedonic Treadmill

#36

"Commercial breaks––people actually enjoy TV more with commercials". Maybe most people, but i hate forced commercials. I rather pause the video, do something else for a while and resume the video. "Setpiece escape room experiences, like climbing into a coffin " I have been in a real coffin a few hours once for a halloween fright night. Pretty comfy things. Felt quite relaxed.

I think those things are like eating your fill on sugar, it is maybe a bit tasty to eat but you feel awful afterwards. Some people just doesn't connect the eating to the awful feeling so they continue consuming even though its just crap. And I bet there are plenty of studies showing that people actually eat more and like the food better when you add sugar in it.

Re: Hacking the Hedonic Treadmill

#37
post #20

Anna Lembke’s “Dopamine Nation” has a lot of interesting takes on the subject. One takeaway I got is that dopamine seeks a balance. Opting for pleasure seeking often ends up getting experienced as pain. An example of that is drug tolerance. Oddly, the reverse is also true: seeking pain can often lead to an experience of pleasure. The invigorated feeling after a cold shower, or how hard exercise leads to highs. She is…

A book developing similar ideas: The Hacking of the American Mind.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34237719-the-hacking-of-...

Re: Hacking the Hedonic Treadmill

#38
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really like to work and the area I've chosen. What makes it annoying is that I have to work on what upper management thinks is important at any given time. They want me to design a high level software architecture now but I want to code. Next week they want me to code but I want to design. It very rarely aligns. If ever. That annoys me and probably causes management a great deal of anxiety when I go off path. It fe…

> It feels so childish of me. It is. "Capitalism is for children" said Adam Phillips [1] You cannot be a fully fledged adult, a self-determined being, under conditions of wage slavery. Education is set up not to allow graceful separation into adulthood, as most cultures have historically done, but to transfer dependency to a new set of masters. Late capitalism in particular, with its intrusive lack of boundaries, neu…

> Education is set up not to allow graceful separation into adulthood, as most cultures have historically done, but to transfer dependency to a new set of masters.

Most cultures historically didn't have any education (as we understand it now), with some rare exceptions (wealthy people hiring tutors for their children). Children just started working very early and learned via observation and on-the-job training.

Re: Hacking the Hedonic Treadmill

#39
The ultimate hack is weaning yourself off the pull of the hedonic treadmill itself. And the best way I’ve found for that is to optimize for meaning. Of course, meaning is a difficult goal that is individual and prone to change.

However, it is also a lot more robust than the desires generated by the treadmill. Another way to think about it is learning to practice being content where you are (however imperfect) and sinking your attention into things that engage you and leave you feeling energized.

The treadmill will always be in the back of your mind, but it isn’t fit to drive.

Re: Hacking the Hedonic Treadmill

#40
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It feels so childish of me. It is. "Capitalism is for children" said Adam Phillips [1] You cannot be a fully fledged adult, a self-determined being, under conditions of wage slavery. Education is set up not to allow graceful separation into adulthood, as most cultures have historically done, but to transfer dependency to a new set of masters. Late capitalism in particular, with its intrusive lack of boundaries, neu…

> Education is set up not to allow graceful separation into adulthood, as most cultures have historically done, but to transfer dependency to a new set of masters. Most cultures historically didn't have any education (as we understand it now), with some rare exceptions (wealthy people hiring tutors for their children). Children just started working very early and learned via observation and on-the-job training.

> Most cultures historically didn't have any education

I'd say that's untrue.

What I am particularly thinking about is rites of passage in primitive cultures. Education may have been as simple as learning to hunt, light a fire, fight, play with children, and cook food - but there were teachings and tests the tribe provided.

> (as we understand it now)

My point would not be that that's trivially true (nothing is as we understand it now if history implies progress), but that education as we understand it today is precisely the functional slight of hand I describe. A study of Mann, Dewey and the Prussian system introduced in North America will bear that out.

Of course, for the fully self-actualised person of good social conscience, learning does not have to align with the formula of state school and higher education. People with the courage to follow different paths are rare, or they have unusual parents who push them down that route (home-schooling, Steiner/Waldorf etc).

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