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The Hedonic Treadmill

Examining our relationship with life’s great sprint.

ESSAY // BY MATEO PRICE

Introduction

Steven Bartlett and Tyson Fury believed the achievement of success and wealth would finally make them ‘feel’ happy. The reality couldn’t have been further from the truth. 

Bartlett listing his company on the European Stock Exchange at the age of 27 for a valuation of $300M was one of the worst days of his life. Fury becoming heavyweight boxing champion of the world led to him having “everything in life” but “still [mentally] feeling like sh*t on a daily basis.” 

Stories like these are infinite across all stages of professional success. Lately, I’ve found myself asking one question: why? 

Psychologists refer to this phenomenon as the hedonic treadmill. It is “the observed tendency of humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or life changes.”

I’ve become fascinated with the treadmill because I’ve been running on it for longer than I’d care to admit. For the last four years, I’ve worked in an industry – the creator economy – that VC firms are pumping billions into. I’ve also graduated from a top-tier university best known for sending its students into the ‘prestigious’ (read: high-paying) world of banking, consulting and big tech. In short: my world is filled with people running ‘fast’ on the hedonic treadmill, chasing their next big achievement.

As I approach my very own Bartlett x Fury moment — the sale of my company — I’ve started to put our addiction to life’s great sprint under the microscope.

A Treadmill of Desire

Can you recall a time in your life when you desperately wanted something? A new car, job promotion or a stellar vacation, for example. I’d bet you can recall several moments where you’ve aspired to have something you didn’t currently possess. It’s human nature, not to mention a core American ideal, to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and create your own success. 

If you’re anything like me, the process of chasing after what you want is filled with bursts of dizzying excitement. The problem, though, is those feelings quickly fade away within a few weeks, days or even hours after achieving said thing. Three months later, the new car doesn’t bring you nearly the same joy, the new job doesn’t feel so special anymore and even being admitted to your dream university feels less of a big deal as time passes.

And yet, our overall happiness rarely increases with more success. Studies consistently show that reaching the next promotion, or increase in salary, or buying that new home, doesn’t boost underlying happiness levels. In fact, the feelings of excitement fade as early as a few weeks afterwards. Despite this, we still chase more dollars, telling ourselves that we’ll eventually quit our day jobs and go sunset sailing in Aruba. 

Research tells us happiness is approximately 50 percent genetic, 10 percent circumstantial (where we’re born, to whom, etc.), and 40 percent subject to our own influence. How much does money contribute to that 40 percent? Barely at all. $75,000 is the upper limit at which people are no longer happier after making more money. In fact, income as a whole only contributes to approximately three percent of our well-being, and that’s primarily reserved for avoiding poverty.

Whether good or bad, science finds that we get used to things more quickly than we predict. It could be the joy of buying a new car or the pain of a tough breakup.

The classic example. After $75,000 in income, more money doesn’t make us happier. This has been reiterated in recent studies. Having more money is better in a vacuum, but the marginal returns become close to negligible.

The vast majority of people around me make far more than $75,000 right out of school, let alone 5-10 years later. And yet many don’t just want to hit the next milestone, they need to hit it for their own sanity. I often hear both friends and colleagues outline their dreams of the next promotion, big fundraising, or lucrative pay-out, and the resulting happiness they’ll feel. Plot twist: it never happens.

My original dream when starting my company was to get on the phone with my favorite creator. When it happened, I was absolutely ecstatic. For a few hours, that is, until I had a new dream: find a way to partner with him. After I succeeded, I told myself that, actually, what would make me feel sustained happiness and pride would be making $5,000. 

Three months in, to my shock, it happened. I celebrated that day, wandering around San Francisco and Mountain View with my friends. The weekend after, though, I was already sitting with a friend telling them my real dream was $10,000 (five figures, baby!). $10,000 became $100,000, which became $250,000, which became $500,000, which became… you get the gist. 

Every time, for the first week or two afterwards, I’d feel really good, only to completely lose those positive feelings afterwards and begin staring toward the next big accomplishment of what would “actually” prove myself to the world and make me satisfied.

My entrepreneurial story is the definition of the hedonic treadmill. But why?

I thought that each new milestone would bring me closer to peak happiness. In reality, it led to highs, but didn’t adjust my baseline levels of happiness.

Why Can’t We Get Off?

I have two main hypotheses: loss aversion and mimetic theory.

Loss aversion is a sensation referred to by psychologists and economists that states it hurts us more to lose things than it feels good to gain them.

If I gave you $100 in one scenario and took $100 from you in another, you’d be more upset when I took your money than you would be happy when I gave it to you.

This is the classic example of the average curve for loss aversion. Notice the larger area for losses as compared to gains.

Loss aversion adds a new layer of addiction to the hedonic treadmill. Even if we come back to baseline levels of happiness after gaining or losing something, at the moment, losing feels worse. And thus, to the extent that we already mispredict how happy or sad things will make us feel, we’re extra concerned about how bad losing will make us feel. It doesn’t matter whether it’s tangible (i.e. income) or not (i.e. professional momentum).

We think that even when making gains and gains, one loss can ruin the whole operation.

If we make professional or personal gains, the losses (a job setback, a stock market crash, a fight with a friend) can easily wipe out the feelings of growth, even if things are disproportionately going better than they are worse.

I see this clearly in my own life as well. After achieving each new milestone with my business, I’d actually typically feel more stressed afterwards, not wanting to “squander away” the great opportunity I had created for myself and lose the momentum on something that could possibly be even more special.

I kept achieving all my milestones, but I was left in a complex that many of us on the treadmill experience.

In short, loss aversion serves as a mechanism for us to never stop running. For not only do we already convince ourselves that doing more will lead to happiness, but we’re incredibly afraid of what may happen if we don’t maintain our current trajectory.

Creatures of Comparison

The second ingredient in our addiction to the hedonic treadmill is each other. Rene Girard calls this mimetic theory.

Although we live in our own bubbles, we are creatures of comparison. Hedonic adaptation isn’t just about us wanting more. Nor is loss aversion just about hating to lose things more than we love to gain them. It’s all of the above, plus a heavy dose of our wants and fears being driven by the people around us. The lifestyles they live, the jobs they have, the families they raise, and the vacations they take. We want things because other people want them.

It comes back to physiology. For example, when we’re promoted, it feels less special as we spend more time around peers with the same title as us, giving us a new baseline to reference. When you move to a new beautiful home, your new reference points are the surrounding expensive homes, cars, and families.

The vantage point from which we decide to look at our own lives can draw drastically different conclusions about what’s truly essential to feeling satisfied and happy. 

Zooming in from $75,000 onward makes it look like there’s a ton of room to go, even when there isn’t. The right graph shows that there’s so much room to go on the quest of happiness from success at work.

People in my bubble (myself included) are always convincing themselves of a need for more. What scares me is this never seems to stop. My peers making $100,000 as consultants want to make more. My friends making $300,000 a year are striving to be more like the creators I work with who are making $1,000,000 a year, and those creators are trying to be like the celebrities larger than them with even bigger studios and homes

When asked how much money they would need to make annually to feel happy, people making $30,000 say $50,000, and people making $100,000 say $250,000. The pattern doesn’t stop. It’s led to articles like In Silicon Valley, Millionaires Who Don’t Feel Rich. We want things because other people want them, not because we’re thinking about what we actually need. We keep running on the treadmill because, even when our ‘workout’ is done, when we look around, we see everyone else still doing the same thing.

At What Cost?

When comparing ourselves to our immediate environment, it can feel like there is so much more progress to make. Especially when you consider that social media is our immediate environment, everything and everyone is our benchmark. 

Plus, we’re living in an era where anything is possible. This is a New America. Kids don’t want to be astronauts, they want to be creators. People earn their income and build their community on the internet, not on the high street. We have public figures take their salaries in cryptocurrency. Going into the office is the exception rather than the rule. 

Whether we want to admit it or not, we’re living in a world plagued by opportunities to compare ourselves to everything we’re not. As a result, we often hurt ourselves: the opportunity cost is high when spending those extra hours grinding on the weekend for a work project instead of going on a walk with our partner, exploring a new neighborhood, or reading a new book. Making more money does not trickle down into a better life elsewhere (i.e. with our partners, our friends, our kids).

We noted earlier the examples of Steven Bartlett and Tyson Fury. They both had a purpose – to become the best at what they do and achieve financial freedom. What happened when they achieved it? They felt purposeless. By definition, once we complete our ‘purpose,’ we no longer have one. They achieved things beyond their wildest dreams, only to realize there was nothing left to work for.

I have a photograph on my wall of Chance the Rapper staring at his reflection following his world tour in 2015. Amidst all the fame, money, travel, and new lifestyle he was experiencing, he was looking at himself with a pensive expression. According to his photographer, he was asking himself: “what was it all for?”

“Chance Reflections.” Taken following his World Tour in 2015.

I see this all the time with the creators I work with. When the camera turns off, there’s an abundance of perpetual stress, burnout, and feelings of depression and anxiety. But many times, what I hear as the ‘solution’ to overcoming these woes is not to find a therapist, or take a break. It’s to keep pushing, so as not to give up the great opportunity they created for themselves, and that after reaching the next milestone  — anything from a million more subscribers to a new house  — they can finally “slow down.”

How Can We Get Off?

I don’t have all the answers, nor am I completely off the treadmill. However, there are a couple of frameworks that have reduced the speed at which I’m running lately by a few notches.

First — I’ve started to evaluate my earnings as well as any increases through the lens of absolute versus relative income. For example, if you work 40 hours a week to generate $100,000, but only 20 hours a week to generate $75,000, you’re “richer” on a time basis – something we can never buy back – with the latter. $100,000 from 40 hours a week is $50/hour. $75,000 from 20 hours a week is $94/hour. Annual income is misleading because it doesn’t factor in time, stress, and all the other bullshit you had to go through to get there. I only pursue opportunities that can increase my total income for either the same or less hours worked.

Second — I’ve started evaluating the quality of my life through a more holistic lens based on the eight forms of capital. Now that I’ve hit my financial capital minimum ($75,000/year), I’m strictly prioritizing other types of capital in my life first — intellectual, spiritual, social, material, living, cultural, and experiential.

I’m making a deliberate effort to increase my holistic capital gains.

How does this look in practice?

The foundation is capping the amount of time I spend working in any given week. By freezing my work hours at 45, hiring an excellent young team and granting them trust and ownership, I’m able to carve out time to pursue other priorities in life. These include hobbies (writing essays like these), spending meaningful time with family and friends, and traveling the world. In 2021, I traveled more than I ever had previously, and my startup’s revenue nearly doubled concurrently. 

Next, I’ve started to structure my business relationships differently, emphasizing learning and social capital above dollars. For example, I recently had the chance to meet and begin coaching one of my role models in the creator economy space with my analytics expertise. Rather than building our relationship on a business traction and pay-to-play basis, I recognized a few weeks into our engagement that I had as much to learn from her in other domains as she did from me. 

I proposed that we pursue an ‘office hours’ strategy where we swap our respective expertise every month. Is this the most profit I’ve ever made from a business deal? Absolutely not: I stopped charging once we switched formats. Is it the most valuable? Potentially. I learn new things every time we sit down and the quality of our relationship is not based on a business transaction.

Funnily enough, it was a DM that I sent to someone whose writing I loved that led to my startup being acquired eight months later. Not a business proposal or pitch. A DM. 

One cold DM led to my company being acquired eight months later.

What’s Enough?

I wish I could tell you I’ve been doing this for years.

The reality is that it took me experiencing my own burnout and growing pains several times to make this shift. Yes, there’s growing literature with a variety of suggestions on increasing our general well-being. Yet as it pertains to the hedonic treadmill, we simply don’t know enough yet. And I’m still full of questions, which I plan to continue to explore in essays like this.

Is getting ‘off it’ what our end goal should be, or could that lead to apathy? Can you get off it? Perhaps there is a minimum effective dose? How is it different for people coming from wealthy backgrounds versus not? Entrepreneurs versus employees? The western world versus east?

My story represents both life and reality in new America. It’s a place where a 19-year-old can send a cold email from their dorm room, build a half-million-dollar business, sell it by age 22 and yet still feel like he isn’t doing ‘enough’. New playbooks, for sure, but the same old breakdowns that have plagued us for centuries.

If, at least for now, the hedonic treadmill is a phenomenon we can’t escape, let us at least redefine what it is we’re running toward and understand how fast we’re doing so. I wonder how long the buzz of selling this business will last…

Mateo is an entrepreneur. Follow the next chapter of his journey here.

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