Something that a lot of people talk about is the pursuit of happiness.
An idea that gets brought up a lot is the hedonic treadmill.
The meaning is pretty much that once you get something new, you get used to it, and it becomes your new normal.
Kind of like how if you run 1 step on a treadmill, it’ll just move the belt and you stay in the same place.
In real life if you try to maxx your cost function by gambling your life savings and doing giga stimulants you’ll get bored of it quickly.
Instead, if you try to spread out your happiness, it’s much more sustainable.
So stuff like gardening or engineering or raising kids is good because you have high influence over the final result and it takes a long time.
- I didn’t really explain why having influence (or agency but that word is kinda cringe rn) matters but it does
If I had a genie that could grant me any wish, I wouldn’t wish for a trillion dollars. The integral of my happiness would get way worse.
And I wouldn’t wish for any of my goals to get instantly fulfilled. Like having a Schwarzenegger physique or being instantly good at a sport.
The whole point is the journey. The whole point is the experience.
Here’s a thought experiment that I’ve been thinking about recently.
I saw on instagram there’s these fake military boot camps run by alpha male dad influencers.
The idea is that you pay a bunch of money (like 10k) to go to a fake BASIC training where the instructor giga yells at you (they’re even meaner than the real thing!),
and at the end you pass the course and feel like you surmounted a big obstacle.
Graduates of these courses will rave about how the experience changed their life and how much they loved it.
On the other hand, if you ask a person who went through the real thing,
they would probably tell you that it sucked to wake up early in the morning and that everybody smelled bad.
How can the same experience be perceived so differently?
The takeaway from this is that both good and bad experiences are a gift.
In an infinitely abundant world, the experience of struggling will be worth more than the experience of coasting.
And the experience of suffering from coasting and craving struggling will be worth more than the experience of ignorantly coasting.
The unique experience of whatever life you are currently living is inherently valuable and interesting for the sole reason that it’s non-perfect.
So at the end of the day, if I actually met a genie that could grant me any wish,
I would wish that my life continue on exactly how it is.