I think this attributes way too much to hedonic adaptation. It’s a real thing, and one’s felt-happiness-from-experiences does change over time. HOWEVER, there’s also a difference between pleasure and happiness, and for each of them different nonlinear impact over different timeframes.
These more fundamental differences in conflicting types and timeframes of desirable experiences can outweigh hedonic adaption by quite a bit. Reflectively, hedonic adaptation explains less than 1⁄4 of my experenced variance in desirability of different framings of experiences.
I’m interesting on your model, but I didn’t understand it, because this comment is too abstract. Can you give few example that proof your hypothesis, please?
If peoples like taking drugs so much, why are drug addict’s less happy than an average human?
This really does not seem to be related to adaptation, but to multiple dimensions and timeframes of happiness. This is a distinction between pleasure and happiness.
Why don’t you like simple pleasures any more, if you enjoyed them when you was child (think about any computer game from your childhood)?
I definitely still like simple pleasures, they’re just not enough for happiness anymore. In fact, they never were, but memory is a funny thing. This is also not caused by adaptation but is more about different context and complexity of experience to integrate the simple pleasure into.
I sometimes argue that even the common drive to variety is distinct from hedonic adaptation, but I’ll leave that for later.
Note that I don’t deny that hedonic adaptation is real and important—people’s short-term happiness change and (partial) reversion to previous levels when losing a limb or winning a lottery are pretty strong examples. I only claim that there are multiple other mechanisms that explain a lot of change over time in experience->happiness causality.
This is a distinction between pleasure and happiness.
I wrote about distinction between pleasure and happiness later in the article.
My model is this: there are different experiences. Each one give some amount of long-term happiness and pleasure. But there’s no big correlation between these 2 things.
Although in short term, pleasure does bring happiness, so if you do something pleasant, you would be happy while you do it and unhappy when you not.
But there are many nuances here that I did not mention. For example, if you have strict schedule like home/work, your brain will create a default level of pleasure for each activity. This way, you would not suffer during all work hours and won’t feel overwhelming pleasure all the time at home.
I sometimes argue that even the common drive to variety is distinct from hedonic adaptation
I think drive to variety is all about happiness, not pleasure.
Do you disagree with my model, or do you think I should add those remarks to the post ?
Do you disagree with my model, or do you think I should add those remarks to the post ?
I fully agree with the distinction between pleasure and happiness, though I suspect the relationship between them is more complicated than long vs short terms. You should probably retitle the post and remove hedonic adaptation as your primary cause for the distinction. Either explore other causes, or just describe the weakness of the correlation without naming the reason.
I think this attributes way too much to hedonic adaptation. It’s a real thing, and one’s felt-happiness-from-experiences does change over time. HOWEVER, there’s also a difference between pleasure and happiness, and for each of them different nonlinear impact over different timeframes.
These more fundamental differences in conflicting types and timeframes of desirable experiences can outweigh hedonic adaption by quite a bit. Reflectively, hedonic adaptation explains less than 1⁄4 of my experenced variance in desirability of different framings of experiences.
I’m interesting on your model, but I didn’t understand it, because this comment is too abstract. Can you give few example that proof your hypothesis, please?
Sure. I’ll take 2 of your 3 examples:
This really does not seem to be related to adaptation, but to multiple dimensions and timeframes of happiness. This is a distinction between pleasure and happiness.
I definitely still like simple pleasures, they’re just not enough for happiness anymore. In fact, they never were, but memory is a funny thing. This is also not caused by adaptation but is more about different context and complexity of experience to integrate the simple pleasure into.
I sometimes argue that even the common drive to variety is distinct from hedonic adaptation, but I’ll leave that for later.
Note that I don’t deny that hedonic adaptation is real and important—people’s short-term happiness change and (partial) reversion to previous levels when losing a limb or winning a lottery are pretty strong examples. I only claim that there are multiple other mechanisms that explain a lot of change over time in experience->happiness causality.
I wrote about distinction between pleasure and happiness later in the article.
My model is this: there are different experiences. Each one give some amount of long-term happiness and pleasure. But there’s no big correlation between these 2 things.
Although in short term, pleasure does bring happiness, so if you do something pleasant, you would be happy while you do it and unhappy when you not.
But there are many nuances here that I did not mention. For example, if you have strict schedule like home/work, your brain will create a default level of pleasure for each activity. This way, you would not suffer during all work hours and won’t feel overwhelming pleasure all the time at home.
I think drive to variety is all about happiness, not pleasure.
Do you disagree with my model, or do you think I should add those remarks to the post ?
I fully agree with the distinction between pleasure and happiness, though I suspect the relationship between them is more complicated than long vs short terms. You should probably retitle the post and remove hedonic adaptation as your primary cause for the distinction. Either explore other causes, or just describe the weakness of the correlation without naming the reason.
Can you explain with few exemples what do you mean by “more complicated”?