Reevaluating My Relationship With The Hedonic Treadmill
How does one bid goodbye to a place they’ve been trying to escape since they arrived? I didn’t have an answer to that question even as I was packing up four years of my life in Bangalore.
Bangalore is a hub for dreamers. Probably because, as a city, it is structured to offer maximum optionality. At any given time about 50% of the population is either house- or job-hunting. You can get away with renting almost everything because of the troves of VC money that go into startups that solve for optionality. And EVERYTHING there feels like it’s in flux - like the city is evolving and shifting as you look at it.
This is what sold me when I first visited the city as a student. I was an undergrad in Tiruchirappalli, and Bangalore was an escape. Cubbon Park walks, Hole in the Wall breakfasts, shopping on Church Street followed by a Blossoms visit and parties at Toit - trips to Bangalore were almost template.
You must understand that prior to moving there, I lived in a small temple town. Only then, I think, will you be able to excuse me for saying that I was a doe-eyed optimist excited about the different lives that Bangalore offered me. I believed I could be whoever I wanted to be and I was super excited about living there. That is, until I actually started to!
Somewhere between getting stuck in one too many multi-hour traffic jams and my third apartment move in my first year living there, I got acquainted with the city’s intricacies. And my optimism turned to indifference. Bangalore still offered the many lives I had dreamed of but somehow in the mundanity of everyday life, those lives went onto the backburner to make space for newer, fresher aspirations.
Like almost every 20-something in Bangalore, I started looking at it as a pitstop. A steppingstone to greener grasses. My new escapist fantasy was shifting to the US - a place I believed would provide a jumpier jumping board to help my dreams take off! The novelty of Bangalore’s existing optionality was overshadowed by the potential optionality of a new place. And so, Bangalore was, at max, a five-year pitstop.
I didn’t realize it then, but I was on a Hedonic treadmill; Always in pursuit of the next goal - more success, more money, more novelty, more *insert your vice here*. And the moment I achieved the goal, the surge of contentment quickly faded away. I adjusted to the new normal and started pursuing a fresh goal in the hope that realizing that dream would lead to lasting contentment. Of course, I see the fallacy in that reasoning as I write it. But I could only see the cycle I was caught in once I stepped off the treadmill to catch my breath!
You, dear reader, (whether you know it or not) are on a similar treadmill. It is quintessentially human to chase ever-changing goal posts. Our brains are wired to feel contentment as an inverse function of the difference between our reality (R) and aspirations (A); meaning, the smaller the difference, the higher the contentment. By sweating away on the treadmill, we are able to make advances in our reality, but our ever-increasing aspirations drop us back to our baseline very quickly.
The correlation between contentment, reality and aspirations.
My idea behind writing this isn’t to shit on the treadmill. It exists because it serves an evolutionary purpose. If contentment was absolute and everlasting, we would never be motivated to pursue our dreams. We would never have made it out of the stone age. But to be perpetually chasing that next high, that next aspiration, only to return to our baseline level of contentment would mean it’s all just much ado for nothing.
It’s extremely dystopian. That is, if you give into your biological monkey brain and forget that you have the agency and intellectual capacity to get yourself out of this fix.
A radical but unoriginal thought I’ve been toying with is that rather than chasing higher highs, maybe I should focus on shifting the baseline upwards. Paraphrasing Alan Watts, in a dance the point is not to arrive at a certain spot in the room but rather to dance. Similarly, the point of life is not to achieve a certain milestone or arrive at some peak but rather to live with an infectious contentment. I’m trying to internalize this wisdom before I get back on the treadmill again once I start my MBA at Kellogg!
If my mindset of Bangalore as a pitstop has taught me anything, it's that I can’t spend my life perpetually aspiring for greener grasses. Because, when it's the end, I don’t want to think of life as a place I’ve been trying to escape since I arrived.
