The Hedonic Treadmill and How to Ruin A Billionaire’s Day
Recently I was in a guitar shop shopping for a new set of Amplifiers for My Electric Guitar.
The salesperson at the guitar shop showed off this particular amp, a Marshall JCM900 amp, with two distortion knobs:
One that went from 0 to 10, and another that went from 0 to 11.
I can’t help but recall this clip on the 1984 movie, This is Spinal Tap.
“Up to eleven”, also phrased as “these go to eleven”, is an idiom from popular culture, coined in the 1984 movie This Is Spinal Tap, where guitarist Nigel Tufnel proudly demonstrates an amplifier whose volume knobs are marked from zero to eleven, instead of the usual zero to ten.
He asked why eleven. Nigel said: “Well, it’s not ten, because when you are all the way up to ten, where can you go from there?”.
He added “Nowhere, exactly. What we need is if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do… we push it up to 11…exactly… ”
1.) The Hedonic Treadmill & Jeff Bezos Much Happier?
Human beings do not go up to 11. The Hedonic Treadmill is the name given for the way human beings pursue pleasure. Whatever form of pleasure it is that they seek.
It turns out that people, some people, not all people want more of whatever gave them happiness the last time.
So here’s a question we begin with Jeff bezos has 1000 times as much money as someone with 10 million dollars do we think Jeff is 1000x happier than someone with 10 million dollars or consider the marathon runner who finishes a marathon in 2 hours and 30 minutes.
Are they happier than someone who finishes the marathon in 3 hours?
Well, maybe if their goal was to win the race. And if their goal was to run a personal best, but, if the person who ran the marathon in three hours was used to doing a 4 hour marathon or was used to losing and he just won, I think we would argue that the person who ran the 3 Hour Marathon at least today is happier.
Free climbing is the activity of going up the side of a mountain with no ropes. This is a fairly foolhardy Endeavour if the side of the mountain is particularly steep or particularly tall.
If you free climb safely it’s entirely possible that you will now want to free climb less safely and then perhaps you will continue to free climb less and Less safely seeking to get to 11 seeking the thrill of survival until one day you (gasp…) lose the game.
The Hedonic treadmill is responsible for many elements for our culture. There are two things that create Culture.
One is when people accidentally have side effects to their pursuit of this sort of happiness and the second is were actually changing the culture is the thing that is giving the person on the Hedonic Treadmill satisfaction.
The reason all of this is a problem because lots of creatures experience the Hedonic treadmill.
Lots of creatures will eat something until they are sick. Lots of creatures will head out to do something that makes them happy, but human beings have built a culture and technology in that culture to amplify it.
So if someone got a certain satisfaction out of having a little bit of plastic surgery, the question is, do you decide that you will get more satisfaction by having more plastic surgery. If so, then how many times do you need to the plastic surgeon before even you acknowledge it was a mistake?
2.) Side Effects of Hedonic Treadmill
Because there are side effects, it’s permanent there was an industry there just waiting for you to come back with money. Eager to go under the knife to do it again. Or something as simple as snack food.
We are hardwired evolutionary to want dense calories and fats to help people on the Savanna survive.
However, once you start pursuing that, once you associate high calorie density and fats with pleasure, with belonging, with Comfort then there’s an industry that exists to sell you more of it.
We can call that weaponizing.
If we weaponized the food what we’ve done is turn it from nutrition into something that goes on your treadmill.
Until the next thing you know, you’re slamming back a Pepsi because they made the top of the bottle wide enough so you can drink 16oz all at once.
Until the next thing we know, we have scientists who are dedicating their lives to crunch and to the way fat satisfies us.
These people are doing it because they’re getting paid to do it. They are getting paid to do it by industrialists who are on the Hedonic Treadmill. Because they already have enough cash.
They already have enough resources to happily survive but by their measure it’s not happy because they’re not winning.
Kind of like the person who needs a personal best at the marathon. Like the person that wants to win, we have created a culture were people who are very talented, who are very driven are all competing on one excess.
3.) How to Ruin a Billionaire’s Day
If you want a ruin a certain kind of billionaire’s day, all you need to do is hand them the Forbes 400 list. In the old days, they weren’t to be a list of the richest people in the world and now there is.
Not too long ago, Forbes magazine decided it would be link bait before that was link bait to publish a list of the richest people in the world. Some of the datas is made up, some people lobbied to be on the list, others work overtime to not be noticed by the list.
But here’s the thing, you can ruin a billionaire’s day, not all billionaires but most of them by showing them that they haven’t moved up on the list. But they in fact moved down.
That one of the things that we can assert about people who make it to the billionaire’s list is they like being billionaires. That they are on a hedonic treadmill, keeping score of something that is actually meaningless in every other element of their life.
Except for the story they tell themselves and now thanks for that list and others like it. Other people are telling themselves a story about that person as well so they’re all competing to move up on a list because the difference between 5 billion dollars and 50 billion dollars is no difference at all.
There is nothing a person with 5 billion dollars wants that they can’t get. But could get if they had 50 billion dollars. Except for one thing, the feeling of being up on the list.
When people are pursuing a treadmill that hurts no one or even themselves it’s really hard to criticize that.
If you’re spending half an hour day playing Scrabble or just against the computer trying to beat your personal best, that’s called a hobby, a pastime, it’s something that gives us pleasure and hurts no one. Other times there are things we call addictions.
Whether it’s something like going for too much plastic surgery or finding Comfort in a bag of chips that leads to problems associated with your weight.
4.) A Shift in Culture
What we see in those situations is someone hurting themselves but no one else and the third situation is what happens when the treadmill leads to hurting the culture itself. In the 1970s, some very rich industrialists got together and decided to start lobbying against taxation. To start lobbying against regulation.
These wealthy families did not need freedom from taxation and regulation in order to pay their bills, or find happiness of any kind, other than winning the game. And then winning the game became a game that a lot of people in that circle wanted to play. And what we ended up with was a shift to the culture.
So that in order for some people to win a game that they decided would be their treadmill, they chose to change the entire culture. And so we see the culture is often the side effect of what happens when you humans choose to pursue their goals. I’m not just using billionaires as an example.
Consider somebody who’s treadmill is all about being the Class Clown. When you are a class clown in third grade, or fifth grade or ninth grade, you get satisfaction from making the class laugh. From showing that you have power over the teacher and the system.
But then, some people choose to go to 11 and then more and then more. If you end up with a career as a stand-up comic, it is one thing to say I want to practice my craft, or I like being in front of people and doing my work. It’s another to say, I can’t find satisfaction unless there is More people in the crowd than last week.
I can’t find satisfaction unless they’re laughing harder than they were last week because the problem with treadmills like this is you will hit the wall. You will hit the wall because you have stopped keeping track of the thing that got you in the game in the first place and now are obsessed simply with winning and with personal best.
This gets particularly poignant when we think about people whose treadmill is about dominance, is about bullying, is about lying, is about getting away with things and about beating other people. Because as you can imagine when you turn this up to 11 you need to victimize more people, you need to play it on an ever bigger stakes. You need bigger stakes. You need to do more damage.
5.) Bond Villain’s Hedonic Treadmill
Every James Bond villain in history is the victim of a poorly chosen hedonic treadmill. Working their way up from Petty crime to world domination. Now of course, that’s fiction but it happens in the real world as well.
And so when we see people who finally hit the wall who get arrested or shamed or failed because they’ve gone too far, we shake our head and say why did they keep going? Why did they need to keep hurting people? And the answer is because they were trying to turn it up to 11.
So what’s our opportunity? Our opportunity is to choose our treadmill wisely. We can choose our treadmill that hurts no one that no-one even knows about. That’s our personal hobby, our craft, the thing we find satisfaction. The thing where it’s sort of harmless to turn it up to 11.
If it leads to an addict crammed with stuff dangerous living conditions, too much debt, then we haven’t chosen as wisely as we could. Often industry, sometimes even marketers are pushing us to pick the wrong treadmill. Or once we picked a treadmill, to race Down it ever harder.
The Merchant of debt do this all the time. There was a significant portion of the population that believed that the high interest rate on interest is better than a low one when they’re in debt because more must be better.
There are huge number of people who no matter what their credit limit is on their credit card will go right to that credit limit. They are on a bizarre painful hedonic treadmill.
Seeking to go to 11, when 11 is impossible.
And in return, they are ending up with a lifetime of debt. Instead, we can say wait a minute, I can get that same satisfaction, by pressing the same buttons by becoming a community activist, by becoming a teacher or a mentor or a coach.
I can figure out how to do increasingly difficult challenges that have nothing to do with risky my life climbing a mountain face and everything to do with playing in an Arena where my contribution to the culture makes the culture better and then I get to do it again.
So the choice of our treadmill and its impact on the culture around us is profoundly important.
And as a community, we’ve got a figure out what to say to people who have picked the wrong treadmill because it’s entirely possible their treadmills create positive side effects.
It is also possible that their treadmill is hurting other people and that they could get the same satisfaction with far fewer side effects.
Once we can understand what game people on a treadmill are choosing to play, then we have a chance to help guide them in a way that helps all of us. Because No, each of us is not entitled to our treadmill.
Not if it’s going to affect anybody else. This is part of our responsibility of being in the culture, acknowledging that it never goes up to 11.
But they’re part of being human, is trying to get it up to 11 is a first step to understanding that we are always playing this game with ourselves. And that we have a chance to put ourselves on track where our subconscious is working overtime to create outputs that we can be proud of.
Thank you for reading this.
