hedonic treadmill
Article
hedonic treadmill is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between September 13, 2022 and May 15, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “relationships that haven’t already been hedonic-treadmilled away”; “Radical recalibration of the hedonic treadmill is consistent not just with classical or negative utilitarianism”. It most often appears alongside @the_megabase, A Pan-Species Welfare State, ACX Grantees.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: September 13, 2022
- Last seen: May 15, 2024
Appears In
Related Pages
-
- @the_megabase (1 shared issues)
-
- A Pan-Species Welfare State (1 shared issues)
-
- ACX Grantees (1 shared issues)
-
- ACX MEETUP (1 shared issues)
-
- Andres (1 shared issues)
-
- Apimostinel (1 shared issues)
-
- Aristotelian virtue theory (1 shared issues)
-
- bereavement (1 shared issues)
-
- BIA 10-2474 (1 shared issues)
-
- bioconservatives (1 shared issues)
-
- biology of happiness (1 shared issues)
-
- biology of superhappiness (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Happiness that’s cancelled out by predictability sounds like our old friend the hedonic treadmill: if your life gets better, that doesn’t improve your long-term happiness, because you just adjust. Something like this must be sort of true - if medieval serfs had normal happiness level, modern middle-class people have so many advantages over them that you’d expect them to be delighted all the time, but this doesn’t seem right . On the other hand, the hedonic treadmill can’t be the whole story, or else there would be no advantage of being rich/healthy/popular to being poor/sick/shunned. But studies usually find that rich people tend to be happier than poor people.
Inline links: usually find
(yes, obviously there’s a hedonic treadmill - Pearce’s goal is to find some biotech intervention that works prior to the hedonic treadmill, giving you a hedonic treadmill around a different set point)
Naturally, superhappiness scenarios could be misconceived. Long-range prediction is normally a fool's game. But it's worth noting that future life based on gradients of intelligent bliss isn't tied to any particular ethical theory: its assumptions are quite weak. Radical recalibration of the hedonic treadmill is consistent not just with classical or negative utilitarianism, but also with preference utilitarianism, Aristotelian virtue theory, a deontological or a pluralist ethic, Buddhism, and many other value systems besides.