#31 the hedonic treadmill

you have everything you once wanted, but are you the happiest you've ever been?

I looked around my apartment yesterday after I’d tidied it, slivers of morning summer sun streaming in and slanting onto the wooden floors under my bare feet. It smelt like coffee in there, freshly brewed, like the wild cherry blossom candle from Target I am habituated to lighting, like summer sweat and Valentino perfume.

You have everything you once wanted, my brain informed me.

What had I once wanted?

At 15, my goals were simple, some slightly shallow : Move to New York. Get an interesting job in finance or banking. Have a closet full of unique items, so dressing up never feels like add to cart and endlessly pine after, but feels more like walk into store and pay with your own credit card. I wanted to be effortlessly pretty. I wanted a sense of belonging - to a small group of people. I constantly brimmed with awkward self-consciousness, so I wanted to be able to summon confidence when I needed it. I wanted lasting, romantic love.

My grandmother would make us wish for things before bed, four cousins huddled under the covers, and we had to manifest our wishes by saying them out loud. I always said, I’ll make six figures at 25 and I’ll live on the Upper East Side. My little brother would cackle.

Not to brag (and mostly just to shut my little brother up), both of those things happened. I also got my interesting job in fintech, my seasonally appropriate closet. I found that some of my bets were misplaced, and would need adjustment : effortlessly pretty was a myth, effort would have to be made. The sense of belongingness came from the city of New York instead of a group of people, and I learnt to summon confidence most times when it was required in an interaction. Romantic love crashed and burned the few times I got close, and I realized that burning for ambition was, instead, the more fruitful alternative.

The hedonic treadmill, a term coined by Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell, states that as a person makes more money, expectations and desires rise in tandem, which results in no permanent gain in happiness.

For example, when your lifestyle rises in proportion to your income, your state of what qualifies as ‘normal’ rises. If you once wished for any goddamn car just to be able to get around, once you have that car, you look around and find that others are driving more luxurious ones. As humans, we undeniably go chasing after bigger dreams just so we have something to wake up in the morning and work towards. A goal-less life lacks purpose, and what’s life without purpose, right?

If I have (almost) all that I wanted at 15 by 25, what do I want now?

I want to publish at least one essay in the New York Times. I want a south facing, historic apartment with sweeping views of Manhattan. I want to soar up the corporate ladder, and make a much higher bracket of the numbers that fall into the six figure window. I want the confidence to internalize, not need to be summoned. Effortlessly pretty now translates to I want younger looking skin even as I age, and the unique closet now requires carefully curated vintage designer items. Deep down, I want to be proven wrong about my newfound belief that love doesn’t exist by someone with a nice laugh who plants their feet firmly in my life and refuses to budge until I’m convinced.

You’ll have to stick around until I’m 35 to find out if my next decade of dreams do come true, but if I climb off the treadmill for a second now and attempt to honestly evaluate when I’ve been happiest, I’ll easily say it’s not now. It’s not in my beautiful apartment full of all the stuff I always wanted. In fact, I’ve never felt more numb in the quarter of a century I’ve been alive.

The things I do feel are more resilient, more self-aware, and more comfortable in my own insulated bubble of a life. But I’m desperately wading through my own memories, trying to locate a moment of the it’s a fucking joy to be alive variety, and coming up short.

In a lot of ways, New York has been described as a perfect example of the hedonic treadmill, and I see it. Just look at the buildings and how they race to be taller than each other in the sky. People scurry up already moving escalators, trying to get ahead of each other. Sometimes I’ve simply hated my body from walking down the street : everyone is prettier and taller and dressed better. God forbid you end up in a FiDi bar on a Friday night, teeming with investment bankers who are dying, absolutely frothing at the mouth, to tell you how much money they make. It’s absolutely disgusting behavior, but then in the car home the question inevitably creeps into your blurry mind, dragging it back to reality : why don’t I make that much? If you have two degrees by 25, somebody is halfway through their PhD. If you buy a million dollar penthouse, there’s someone who owns a ten million dollar one.

It seeped into me, that electricity of bigger, better, faster. It holds me hostage now.

And it never stops, because as long as the person next to you is running faster, you have this competitive need to increase the speed on your treadmill too, don’t you? You don’t want to look like a slow, ambitionless loser next to them. You never stop to question whether what your life looks like makes you happy, or if you’re tired, or if a more realistic pace might be better for you.

I have everything my past self ever wanted, and not only am I unhappy, but I’ve entirely lost the ability to feel pure joy. And yet, I can’t stop running. I’m still horribly convinced that if I accomplish more than other people my age have, that happiness will arrive.

Happiness, however, continues to be an evasive motherfucker.