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Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

This very much captures the hedonic treadmill: when you increase your baseline level of happiness, you re-normalize to the new level, with relatively little change in your absolute happiness.

But while I do think appreciating what you have is part of how to avoid the hedonic treadmill, I don't think it's a matter of learning to be happy with a routine.

I've found it possible to make a conscious effort to avoid hedonic adapation, and enjoy novel things without allowing them to become a new baseline. If you can maintain your expectations at the same level, while improving your actual circumstances noticeably above that level, you can maintain a higher level of enjoyment of your life.

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It does make me think it's - once again - a privilege thing. A lot of people can't afford vacations full stop. Another group can, but only in their own country or only stepping over the border.

Single, full-time working people, especially in tech, start to unlock the ability to travel abroad, maybe even one of those big two-three week Life Changing things to somewhere exotic, but only once in a lifetime or once every few years.

Middle / upper-middle class incomes eventually get to a point of wealth and freedom where they can take vacations abroad multiple times a year.

And I think you need to be even above that level, where you don't have to worry about your base income or mortgages or whatever, where you can have this lifestyle where you can have novel things and experiences all the time. And even then there's a risk people get used to it.

Good point. We should take into account that Seneca wrote the letters as a life framework that would help others and mostly they were poor.

Bull. This is such a boring way to look at life. You can’t go on ‘vacation’ unless you’ve reached a certain (extremely high) level of material success? Maybe if you think of vacation as a place you go for a little while, eat nice food, stay in an Airbnb, and when you come home, your dog is waiting for you at the pet hotel to go back to your condo where all your stuff, subscriptions, job and ‘real life’ is still waiting as if you never left.

Even with very little means you can travel and see the world. It’s just a matter of priorities and what kind of life you want to make for yourself. If you think you have to establish the standard life package first and then go see the world when you have spare time and money, sure, maybe you won’t until you’ve made it pretty far. Right out of high school, instead of going to university, I decided to travel abroad. I didn’t have family money. I’m from a poor family in a small town. I just saved a little money working service jobs and traveled on the cheap. CouchSurfing, hitchhiking, camping out, hostels, etc. I’m not special. My little sister is doing the same thing now on waitress money. I’ve met countless people out on the road living interesting and meaningful lives, traveling abroad without being a single, full-time tech worker. You just have to ask yourself whether you need to compete materially with everyone who’s staying in one place and accumulating stuff.

To think you only deserve a couple Life Changing, two or three week trips, even as a high earning tech worker… Such poverty of spirit makes me depressed just thinking it. Consider a few great authors, like Orwell for example. As a broke 20 something he was tramping around living a series of great stories. If he’d chosen to play it safe, stay home and work at some Important Career and collecting stuff, he’d probably never have gone to Spain in 1936, and the world would probably never have received his most important works as a result.

> To think you only deserve a couple Life Changing, two or three week trips, even as a high earning tech worker… Such poverty of spirit makes me depressed just thinking it.

How does one live this lifestyle with children and/or other dependents, such as an elderly & infirm parent or a permanently-disabled sibling?

A lack of obligations is another kind of wealth; a privilege, even. I guess only people like you can afford to rise above this "poverty of spirit".

You've made quite a leap from what I said (travel, even extensive travel, isn't a pleasure reserved for high-income tech workers) to taking care of infirm or permanently disabled family members. Why not bring up 95-year-old diabetics? They certainly can't hop on a plane to go hitchhiking across Europe. There's always someone worse off, I never said _anyone_ can do it, but it's far less exclusive than Cthulu_ makes it sound.

By the way, children are a choice in most cases. If you decide to have children in your twenties, I agree, you won't have the same flexibility that I had. That's kind of the point of what I wrote: you can pick your priorities in life. Career and children are a popular priority, but that doesn't mean everything else in life has to be a nice-to-have that you can only consider once you have the house and kids. Orwell wasn't caring for a toddler while he and his wife were fighting in Catalonia.

I mean, you're kind of choosing to care about those things.

In general, these are just different goals in life. If you want a house and kids more than you want the freedom to travel, that's cool and pretty normal. There's no stone tablet handed down from the skies that says that has to be the way it is, though.

When I was 23 I saved a few grand up and went hitchhiking around Europe on a budget of something like < 500 eur a month.

I didn't care about my base income and still don't. I think most people accidentally structure their life so that the 9-5 becomes necessary (e.g. if you rent a room in an expensive city, or a flat or house, now you need to pay for that).

The income is a means to achieve the things that you want. If you can't X because Y, and you want to X, then give up Y, not X, find a different way to do X.

I have a mortgage now, but I didn't bother with it for the longest time for precisely the reason you'd described. It locks you down. I waited until I was sure that it _wouldn't_ lock me down because I could really afford it (i.e. it's not 50% of my income from a full time job).

If I'm being charitable, I had the advantage that I could move my belongings etc in to my parents' house if I wanted to. They're pretty poor, probably in the bottom 20% in the UK, so that's not some fantastic privilege.

If you have fuckup parents (not just poor but failed in some way), then yeah, this becomes a lot harder, and I'm sorry about that.

Exactly what I was thinking. There is alway some kind of privilege to consider, like having a US or British passport, but there’s no way seeing the world a bit is a pleasure reserved for the ultra-wealthy FAANG employee. I wish we were friends, because I bet you have some interesting stories about hitchhiking across Europe, and that’s more than you can expect from a stereotypical upper class tech worker.

Yeah. Basically I'd just give it the normal caveats, you're on a Western forum and there is an implicit assumption that you're in the "golden billion" and that you're reasonably physically and mentally healthy.

Beyond that, if you couldn't find a way, then it's just not your priority, ya know?

Russian blokes from mining towns can afford to travel third class on the Trans Siberian, what's your excuse?

And I'm sure we'd have fun too!

> Beyond that, if you couldn't find a way, then it's just not your priority, ya know?

The opening of "It's A Wonderful Life" addresses this directly. It was undeniably George Bailey's priority, but even the "golden billion" aren't free from obligation(s).

Can you explain? I remember the opening as the cosmos "talking" to each other, but don't remember any specific points like this

The cosmos (God & angels) in the opening takes time to prep George's guardian angel, Clarence, with George's backstory. Flashbacks are used to establish George as wanting to do nothing more than travel the world and seek adventure abroad, but his obligations at home prevent him from doing so. There's a good breakdown of this portion of the plot here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_a_Wonderful_Life#Plot

>If I'm being charitable, I had the advantage that I could move my belongings etc in to my parents' house if I wanted to. They're pretty poor, probably in the bottom 20% in the UK, so that's not some fantastic privilege.

Just to clarify, this suggests that your parents earn total around 16000 a year, pre-tax [0]. Perhaps your guess was accurate, and they really do - but I also find that the average person is normally wildly off in their estimates of the UK wealth distribution. A few thousands more a year would already place them in the top 50%.

[0]: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/percentile-points-f...

Less than that, though this is more than ten years ago.

My parents are seperated, both lived in social housing at that time.

In 2022 they earn approximately 16k between them. Think minimum wage 20 hours a week, that's the ballpark.

I looked at the table of individual taxpayers income. For the relevant years, my mother's income was actually probably closer to the bottom 10% :)

There is a skew here in that you need to pay tax to be included in the table at all, though, hence 2018-19 having 1% set at 12,100 because that's the income tax threshold.

The percentage doesn't really matter though, basically what I'm saying is that like, it's useful to have a place to dump your belongings. That can be a parent, friend, whatever. It's a social capital thing more than it is a monetary thing unless you own tons of stuff and are unwilling to part with it.

For someone to say that being "single, full-time working people, especially in tech" is a matter of privilege is such a sign of our excuse-seeking times. Literally, every single one of those attributes are (or used to be before you made certain decisions) 100% within your control.

I have to wonder how people will look back at the current period. I really doubt we'll compete with the WW2 folks for the term "the greatest generation."

So if I'm not mistaken, the hedonic treadmill is not about baseline happiness. It's about increasing your set-point for joy and/or excitement. Happiness is a state, joy is fleeting.

So the goal is generally to increase your level of happiness - to have a higher baseline in terms of feeling good and having a sense of well-being.

It's futile to chase joy in place of happiness, because each hit of joy makes the next one feel less exceptional.

Although joy feels like happiness, it's not the same thing, and it's barely related. Joy often has to do with doing more. Doing something extra and exceptional to move the needle.

Happiness often has to do with doing less. With being less focused on doing/attaining/obtaining something new, and more focused on mindset: on finding happiness in what we already have.

If joy is the upwards deviation from the norm, then keeping the norm low allows more things to produce joy.

In any case, I'm not claiming a universal recipe here, just observing something that seems to have worked well for me.

But it's not an upward deviation from the "happiness" norm, it's deviation from the joy baseline. They're entirely separate systems.

To give an extreme example, someone who's addicted to drugs might receive extreme joy from their next hit, while at the same time being deeply unhappy, and unable to take joy from anything else. That's the hedonic treadmill at the extreme.

At the same time, someone who's very happy might be able to take joy from something simple - like a fried egg yolk with the perfect consistency - because their mind is not preoccupied with seeking bigger and better joy, they may be more free to find it in simple places where it arises naturally.

I find this very depressing, but the reason the nordics have some of the happiest people in the world is they have low expectations.

Source? The nordics have some of the highest suicide rates in the world, actually.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r...

Top 10: 1. Lesotho 2. Guyana 3. Eswatini 4. Kiribati 5. Micronesia 6. Suriname 7. Zimbabwe 8. South Africa 9. Mozambique 10. Central African Republic

Did you mean to link to some other data? This list shows that the Nordic state with the highest suicide rate is Finland at number 38, in which suicides are about 30% higher than the European average (although of course Greenland remains an interesting artefact). I don't think that really fits your description.

It's always been pretty interesting (and I'd say quite well-known) that the Nordics do have a somewhat higher suicide rate than other similar states. But it's also likely a pretty bad proxy; I'd be suspicious of a metric suggesting the average North Korean citizen is substantially happier than the average Finn.

Probably better is the World Happiness Report (https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2020/social-environments-fo...). It's a bit arbitrary for my taste, but does at least have a pretty long history as well as plenty of transparency about what it's measuring and why. And it consistently places the Nordics in the top ten.

Not “low” expectations – reasonable expectations:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27061860

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