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Hacking the Hedonic Treadmill

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Re: Hacking the Hedonic Treadmill

#71

Post by thenerdhead »

balfirevic wrote: post #67
thenerdhead wrote: post #42

I think you can simplify this. Consider your wants and needs. Most of us get stuck in our wants. We want to get a promotion, we want a nice car, we want a perfect family vacation. But do we need any of those? Not necessarily. We get stuck on the treadmill by not knowing the difference of our wants and needs. When you realize you don’t need the things you want, you focus more on the things you need. Introspection in m…

Can you give some examples of needs? The obvious ones are food, water, shelter and (for most people) companionship. Any others?

Maslow's hierarchy of needs to start, but to extend on more modern meaning, your psychological needs are quite important given most people have their basic needs met. There's a popular self-determination theory to explain this further.

i.e. Autonomy, competence, relatedness.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-determination_theory

One of the better books on this topic is "Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization" by Scott Barry Kaufman

Here's a piece I wrote based on that book:

Think of your life as a sailboat.

The hull protects us from the waves and keeps us safe.

The sail allows us to explore and adapt to our environment.

However, to get anywhere, we must open our sail to the world. Without that, we're stuck in harbor.

As we set out in the world in the many different directions we each may take in life. We are all sailing into the unknown of the sea together.

So while a ship in harbor is safe, that's not what ships are built for.

Even though you're alone in your boat, it's nice to see other lights along the way.

Re: Hacking the Hedonic Treadmill

#72

Post by mewse-hn »

twobitshifter wrote: post #58
scld wrote: post #56

Because that line about preferring commercials completely rang false to me, I followed the link....it's from 2010... "You still haven’t accounted for the popularity of, say,The Sopranos and all the subscription-channel programs. Don’t we pay to get those shows without commercials? Contemporary shows like The Sopranos might be interrupting themselves. Remember, it’s not the commercial that increases the enjoyment, it’…

I don’t think I like commercials either, but the enforced pacing of the shows with commercials is something that I miss when I rewatch shows built for commercials on streaming services. You’ll come up against a cliffhanger cut and then a second later it’s resolved because there’s no commercial break.

I recently rewatched the entirety of DS9 on canadian netflix and I don't think I'm under any illusion that the bullshit cliffhangers they'd put before a commercial break actually added to the show

Re: Hacking the Hedonic Treadmill

#73

Post by bndr »

Shameless plug, I wrote an article recently on how the hedonic treadmill affects development culture [1].

In my opinion, good approach to avoiding the hedonic treadmill is to think in “processes” rather than “goals.” If you achieve some goal, you get back to the equilibrium and get used to it. But if you’re on a journey, there’s nothing to adapt to as every day is a journey and brings something new. So it's like smaller pendulum swings every day instead of big ones every few months.

Nonetheless, I like the ideas proposed in this article and think they also are quite effective.

[1] https://vadimkravcenko.com/shorts/hedonic-treadmill/

Re: Hacking the Hedonic Treadmill

#74

Post by RajT88 »

chownie wrote: post #66
trellad wrote: 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…

Are exercise highs real? Do all people experience them or is it a genetic niche? I've tried a bunch of different exercise methods. Gone running, swimming, weightlifting etc and I've never experienced anything close to a high afterward. I'll be tired, sometimes I'll feel proud of breaking a personal record but there's never any physical positive sensation or euphoria to me that would resemble the "runners high" that p…

> Are exercise highs real? Do all people experience them or is it a genetic niche?

I've known many people who have experienced Runner's High. I am not one of them, despite having run probably close to 10k miles in my life. Marathons, Ragnar ultras, stuff like that.

Might be genetic, or I might be doing it wrong. FWIW, I've also never hit "The Wall".

Re: Hacking the Hedonic Treadmill

#75

Post by BrainsPachanga »

chownie wrote: post #66
trellad wrote: 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…

Are exercise highs real? Do all people experience them or is it a genetic niche? I've tried a bunch of different exercise methods. Gone running, swimming, weightlifting etc and I've never experienced anything close to a high afterward. I'll be tired, sometimes I'll feel proud of breaking a personal record but there's never any physical positive sensation or euphoria to me that would resemble the "runners high" that p…

I don’t exercise a lot but when I play tennis and I am happen to be pushing to my limits (2 hrs, no breaks almost), there is a point when I get a sudden rush of pleasure for about a minute when I get a lot of goosebumps. Afterwards, I am in such a good mood and feel like I can push for a little bit more before being totally done. I am not sure if something like this is what people refer to as exercise highs?

Re: Hacking the Hedonic Treadmill

#76

Post by chrisfosterelli »

chownie wrote: post #66
trellad wrote: 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…

Are exercise highs real? Do all people experience them or is it a genetic niche? I've tried a bunch of different exercise methods. Gone running, swimming, weightlifting etc and I've never experienced anything close to a high afterward. I'll be tired, sometimes I'll feel proud of breaking a personal record but there's never any physical positive sensation or euphoria to me that would resemble the "runners high" that p…

I do a lot of running and a few times a year in my training there's a run where everything just lines up perfectly. I'll be well rested, focused, got some pretty scenery to look at, and moving fast with what feels like pretty low relative effort. Those moments definitely capture a lot of the joy of running for me, but if I was doing all my training just to chase them it probably wouldn't be worth it. A lot of the time it's in races but not always.

Separately, I usually feel pretty good after a run too. Some workouts I feel absolutely wrecked after, but most workouts, once you have a good fitness base, you feel pretty good after.

I'm not sure which of those, if either, are a 'runners high', but most runners I know have moments more like those than like an actual high.

Re: Hacking the Hedonic Treadmill

#77

Post by staticman2 »

xelxebar wrote: post #33
b3lvedere wrote: post #29

"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 pr…

"TV programs with commercial interruptions tend to correlate with people reporting higher enjoyment of the TV program"

... when watching an arbitrary TV show picked by the person doing the study.

If you want to start assuming that a TV show you've chosen to watch will be more enjoyable with commercials go ahead, but that wasn't the way the study was done.

Re: Hacking the Hedonic Treadmill

#78

Post by rfergie »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #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 sin…

Don't you just end up on a "meaning treadmill" instead?

Re: Hacking the Hedonic Treadmill

#79

Post by user00012-ab »

scld wrote: post #56

Because that line about preferring commercials completely rang false to me, I followed the link....it's from 2010... "You still haven’t accounted for the popularity of, say,The Sopranos and all the subscription-channel programs. Don’t we pay to get those shows without commercials? Contemporary shows like The Sopranos might be interrupting themselves. Remember, it’s not the commercial that increases the enjoyment, it’…

I stopped reading the article at that point; figuring the rest of the article was also made up by gpt3.

Re: Hacking the Hedonic Treadmill

#80

Post by mattgreenrocks »

rfergie wrote: post #78
mattgreenrocks wrote: post #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 sin…

Don't you just end up on a "meaning treadmill" instead?

IME, meaning is far more satiating than happiness simply because it is able to offset more BS than being happy will.

More to your question: what happens is your tolerance for meaninglessness decreases, which has good and bad side effects.

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