Conversation

QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
way i would say it: if you can hedonic treadmill on something then it wasn’t satisfying any of your actual needs. we get very confused in america by not distinguishing, at all, between happiness and *excitement*. excitement is the stuff that fades quickly on repetition
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Simon Sarris
@simonsarris
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am I the only one who things the "hedonic treadmill" idea is... fake? It's covering for something else.
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
excitement is like “oh maybe this new thing will make me happy!!!” and it fades because as you keep doing it you learn that it will not in fact make you happy but if you live in an economy dedicated to repeating this bait-and-switch as many times as possible…
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
the way things are supposed to work for animals is that you do things that feel good (eat, sleep, fuck) and don’t do things that feel bad (eat poison, stand still and let predators eat you). that’s the basic fundamental thing. then humans complicate the situation enormously
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
good feelings - happiness, joy, love, relief, satisfaction - have epistemic content and they have moral content. they encode implicit beliefs about what sorts of things are good and virtuous to do. *and* we live in an environment in which this info is being *spoofed*
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
american culture specifically, i think, has a deeply ambivalent relationship to feeling good - on the one hand it is supposed to be the american dream in some sense, on the other hand there is a deep lingering distrust of it (puritanical? calvinist?). very obvious wrt sex, eg
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
imo clearing up this whole mess requires being more precise about distinguishing different flavors of good feeling. excitement and relief, eg, are different and *mean* different things. excitement involves a hope, an implicit belief about the future. relief is an unburdening
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Pamela J. Hobart
@amelapay
I think you're right, and it's part of why e.g. Keeping Up With the Joneses discourse is so shallow. If you bought a bigger house to dispel anxiety once and for all, excitement wears off and nope.
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Pamela J. Hobart
@amelapay
but if you bought it for specific reasons, with hypotheses about how you'd use it that really would make your animal more comfortable - to sleep better, move more, live more harmoniously with your kids, then sure that is not so treadmill-y
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