The Hedonic Treadmill
This is almost something I wish I did not learn.
It is the observed tendency of humans to quickly return to a relatively stable baseline level of happiness despite major positive or negative life events. Psychologists call it the hedonic treadmill. People adapt, joy fades, and they return to the previous ‘normal’ level of happiness regardless of what happens to them.
The promotion. The new car. The relationship. The dopamine hit from a post that performed well. It all levels out.
This means sustainable happiness is less about big goals and more about daily practices; creating strong relationships, chasing experiences over possessions, and finding satisfaction in the ordinary stuff most people scroll past.
13.4 Years
Here’s the uncomfortable callback to Episode 1.
We could happily scroll away on Instagram for 13.4 years of our conscious life and never realise we have yet to experience any of it. The hedonic treadmill ensures the scroll never satisfies you. The algorithm ensures you never stop.
Not once in those 13.4 years does the feed tell you to put it down and go live your life.
That’s your job.
The First 7 Days
I am writing this one week into the experiment. Here’s what happened when I stopped filling every gap in my day with a screen:
Signed up for the gym. Meditated. Journaled. Started writing, as you can see. Read a book. Left the house each day without my phone. Yoga in the morning. Cooked a new recipe. Had motivation for work again.
None of this is extraordinary. That’s the point.
These aren’t achievements unlocked by some radical lifestyle overhaul. They’re the things that were always available to me, sitting just behind the screen I couldn’t stop looking at.
Not Just Optimise Life, Experience It
There’s a tendency in the productivity space to treat every freed-up hour as something to optimise. More output, more efficiency, more measurable progress.
I’d push back on that.
The hedonic treadmill doesn’t care about your to-do list. It will normalise your achievements the same way it normalises everything else. What it struggles to normalise are experiences; the texture of a morning where you’re fully present, the satisfaction of cooking something from scratch, the quiet clarity that comes from being genuinely bored for the first time in a decade.
The goal isn’t to replace scrolling with a more productive form of scrolling. The goal is to experience the hours you’ve been giving away.
Seven days in, the evidence is already hard to argue with.