The hedonic treadmill was first described in a 1971 essay entitled Hedonic Relativism and Planning the Good Society. The authors described a tendency for people to keep a stable baseline level of happiness despite positive or negative external events. The hedonic treadmill, therefore, is a theory positing that people repeatedly return to a baseline level of happiness, irrespective of what happens to them.
Understanding the hedonic treadmill
However, the concept itself was alluded two almost 200 years earlier by philosopher and writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
In his 1754 Discourse on Inequality, he wrote: “Since these conveniences by becoming habitual had almost entirely ceased to be enjoyable, and at the same time degenerated into true needs, it became much more cruel to be deprived of them than to possess them was sweet, and men were unhappy to lose them without being happy to possess them.”
No one can escape the hedonic treadmill because it impacts nearly every aspect of life.
One person may dream of buying a house or starting a new career and fantasize about the happiness these events will bring.
However, when these dreams become a reality, the happiness is neither as sustained nor as intense as they envisioned.
Note that the baseline level of happiness varies from person to person. While most people are happy most of the time, some individuals will default to a more neutral or negative baseline.
Real-world examples of the hedonic treadmill
The hedonic treadmill is most often associated with high impact positive and negative events, including:
Winning the lottery – winning a large sum of money is a happy experience initially, but the individual tends to revert to their previous baseline after the novelty wears off. Some lottery winners may find their happiness decrease because of the way money changes their relationships with family and friends.
Becoming an amputee – those who lose a limb in an accident or for some other reason experience a tremendous amount of physical and emotional pain. Though they are left with a permanent disability, most return to their previous happiness level.
Finding a new partner – many attribute falling in love to be one of the most enjoyable experiences in life. However, two people in a relationship quickly become habituated to each other and may experience negative emotions as a result.
The hedonic treadmill in marketing
The hedonic treadmill is one of the main reasons a brand has to deliver new and different versions of its core message to maintain customer engagement over time.
For instance, American insurer Allstate launched a series of advertising campaigns where the company mascot, Mr. Mayhem, portrayed several different disasters that might require the target audience to make an insurance claim.
Each disaster comprised a single episode, with each episode designed to provide a new, unexpected, and novel way of communicating Allstate’s brand message.
The hedonic treadmill also impacts product development. After the initial success of Angry Birds began to wane, game developers had to diversify and start releasing subsequent versions to secure the attention of the target audience.
Stuffed toys and other physical merchandise were also sold to maintain some degree of novelty in the brand.
Hedonic treadmill examples
Some more hedonic treadmill examples are listed in this section.
Gadgets
Gadgets such as the iPhone are subject to the hedonic treadmill perhaps more than any other product in the twenty-first century.
Hudson reasoned that smartphones never make people truly happy and most are stuck in a perpetual cycle of buying one and then, almost immediately, looking toward the next model update.
The hedonic treadmill’s impact on smartphones can be seen in the way they were first received compared to now.
Reviews of the early iPhones were mostly poor, but as Apple ironed out kinks and other usability issues, consumers were enraptured with a new piece of technology that could do anything a PC could.
Unlike a PC, however, iPhones could be carried in one’s pocket and many camped at Apple Stores overnight to be the first to get their hands on one.
Fast forward to today and the iPhone has undergone at least 13 model updates (more if you count S models and the like).
The product itself is even more feature rich and technologically advanced than its predecessors, but the sheen has very much worn off.
Now, consumers post reviews that admonish Apple for removing the home button or incorporating a 10-megapixel camera when it really should have been 12 megapixels.
Others are locked in battles that pit Apple against Samsung or Sony which are as perpetual as the hedonic treadmill itself.
Car ownership
In a study that was accepted into the Journal of Economic Psychology in 2017, researchers Johannes Emmerling and Salmai Qari found that car owners experienced “a significant and sizeable decrease in individual happiness in the years after a car purchase.”
They also found there was an 80% chance of the study participants exhibiting habits that would contribute to the effect – presumably, in this case, a habit involving the purchase of a new vehicle.
In 2017, luxury automakers such as BMW, Range Rover, and Mercedes-Benz admitted that they had too many models after running out of niches to exploit or new markets to enter.
Some models were even hybridized versions of two different markets like the Range Rover Evoque SUV that was re-released as a convertible.
Despite claims the manufacturers would be culling less popular models, Mercedes-Benz was then featured in a subsequent 2020 article over criticism of its product line-up.
While the expansion of the SUV range enabled Mercedes to cater to the growing popularity of these vehicles, other products such as the S-Class coupe and X-Class utility vehicle were retired due to low sales volume.
Might the development of new car models for the sake of it be driven by the hedonic treadmill and the ceaseless demand from consumers for a new set of wheels?
Hedonic treadmill vs. happiness set point
The concept of a hedonic treadmill or hedonic adaptation is connected to the so-called happiness set point.
In short, the happiness set point theory describes the initial level of happiness that each of us has.
The happiness setpoint, of course, will depend from individual to individual.
The happiness setpoint can be partly due to genetics; in part, it depends on how we respond and reframe our behavior in the context we live in.
In short, while genetics does play a role, we can train ourselves to frame external things that happen in the environment as good or bad.
In other words, those who have mastered the ability to reframe things as “obstacles to overcome” instead of just “bad things” for which you can’t do anything also change how to respond to them.
Regarding happiness set level, it’s critical to set your expectations properly.
If you think that anything is due, that the real world must be good, and that you mostly got to live a comfortable life, then your expectations are too high.
And anything bad, happening to you will be framed as a catastrophe.
Instead, if you do accept the fact that the real world doesn’t necessarily owe you anything.
Bad things happen, and you can decide how to respond to them. Then, suddenly, it also changes your perspective.
Making your happiness set point higher but also more stable over time. You might want to understand the difference between what you can control and what you can’t.
You might want to adopt a piece-of-mind approach for things out of your control. Where pretty much acceptthat you can’t control what happens to you, but you can control how you perceive it.
And for things you can control, that is where your focus will be. You will need to work as hard as possible to shape the world around you according to your vision.
In this manner, you will be able to build a proper context where you can build the best version of yourself.
Key takeaways:
The hedonic treadmill is a theory positing that people repeatedly return to a baseline level of happiness, irrespective of what happens to them.
The hedonic treadmill is most associated with high impact positive and negative events such as winning the lottery, becoming an amputee, or entering into a new relationship.
In business, the hedonic treadmill encourages businesses to develop new and different versions of their core brand message to keep customers engaged.
A Barbell strategy consists of making sure that 90% of your capital is safe, and using the remaining 10%, or on risky investments. Applied to business strategy, this means having a binary approach. On the one hand, extremely conservative. On the other, extremely aggressive, thus creating a potent mix.
Technological modeling is a discipline to provide the basis for companies to sustain innovation, thus developing incremental products. While also looking at breakthrough innovative products that can pave the way for long-term success. In a sort of Barbell Strategy, technological modeling suggests having a two-sided approach, on the one hand, to keep sustaining continuous innovation as a core part of the businessmodel. On the other hand, it places bets on future developments that have the potential to break through and take a leap forward.
As highlighted by German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer in the paper “Heuristic Decision Making,” the term heuristic is of Greek origin, meaning “serving to find out or discover.” More precisely, a heuristic is a fast and accurate way to make decisions in the real world, which is driven by uncertainty.
Bounded rationality is a concept attributed to Herbert Simon, an economist and political scientist interested in decision-making and how we make decisions in the real world. In fact, he believed that rather than optimizing (which was the mainstream view in the past decades) humans follow what he called satisficing.
Second-order thinking is a means of assessing the implications of our decisions by considering future consequences. Second-order thinking is a mental model that considers all future possibilities. It encourages individuals to think outside of the box so that they can prepare for every and eventuality. It also discourages the tendency for individuals to default to the most obvious choice.
Lateral thinking is a business strategy that involves approaching a problem from a different direction. The strategy attempts to remove traditionally formulaic and routine approaches to problem-solving by advocating creative thinking, therefore finding unconventional ways to solve a known problem. This sort of non-linear approach to problem-solving, can at times, create a big impact.
Moonshot thinking is an approach to innovation, and it can be applied to business or any other discipline where you target at least 10X goals. That shifts the mindset, and it empowers a team of people to look for unconventional solutions, thus starting from first principles, by leveraging on fast-paced experimentation.
The concept of cognitive biases was introduced and popularized by the work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in 1972. Biases are seen as systematic errors and flaws that make humans deviate from the standards of rationality, thus making us inept at making good decisions under uncertainty.
The Dunning-Kruger effect describes a cognitive bias where people with low ability in a task overestimate their ability to perform that task well. Consumers or businesses that do not possess the requisite knowledge make bad decisions. What’s more, knowledge gaps prevent the person or business from seeing their mistakes.
Occam’s Razor states that one should not increase (beyond reason) the number of entities required to explain anything. All things being equal, the simplest solution is often the best one. The principle is attributed to 14th-century English theologian William of Ockham.
The Mandela effect is a phenomenon where a large group of people remembers an event differently from how it occurred. The Mandela effect was first described in relation to Fiona Broome, who believed that former South African President Nelson Mandela died in prison during the 1980s. While Mandela was released from prison in 1990 and died 23 years later, Broome remembered news coverage of his death in prison and even a speech from his widow. Of course, neither event occurred in reality. But Broome was later to discover that she was not the only one with the same recollection of events.
The bandwagon effect tells us that the more a belief or idea has been adopted by more people within a group, the more the individual adoption of that idea might increase within the same group. This is the psychological effect that leads to herd mentality. What is marketing can be associated with social proof.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
