![]() The hedonic pathways in our brains become desensitized to pleasurable things that we encounter regularly. The hedonic treadmill, or happiness treadmill, is named as such because no matter how much you chase happiness and increase it in the short term, you end up in the same place continually chasing. Campbell called “Hedonic Relativism and Planning the Good Society”, and it was made even more famous in a 1978 study called “Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative?” The study compared lottery winners and paraplegics with a control group to show that both groups eventually adjusted and returned to a baseline of happiness. ![]() The concept of hedonic adaptation dates back to a 1971 paper by Philip Brickman and Donald T. This adaptation is like an immune system that desensitizes us in relation to negative and positive experiences, making us continually find our happiness baseline. Hedonic adaptation is a phenomenon of our psychology and physiology that keeps us at a stable level of happiness over time. The topic of this episode is happiness and hedonic adaptation, otherwise known as the hedonic treadmill. “‘I shall take the heart,’ returned the Tin Woodsman ‘for brains do not make one happy, and happiness is the best thing in the world.’” -L.
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