Onto The Hedonic Treadmill

I once heard someone say the that the problem with chasing money as your life goal was that someone always had more than you. I was thinking about this yesterday as I was paddling a circuit from my home bay. I am training for a sea kayak trip, and essential training is paddling multiple days in a row so that your body gets used to performing even when fatigued.

After a upwind/downwind with Sir Splashalot the day before (28 kilometres), I was heading out for my standard 20 kilometre paddle. Unless I am doing a skills day or paddling with a big group, I have a rule that I paddle at least 20 kilometres every time I go out. Less disciplined or goal oriented people would think this is really weird, but it makes perfect sense to me, and is very similar to the drive to adventure ratio that I uphold. I like having principles in life no matter how weird or arbitrary they seem to other people.

But back to money. My dad always used to say "Money is made round to go round." He was a working class guy, my whole family was working class, but, as Australia has gained wealth, mostly from digging large holes in the ground to extract resources, pumping up a property market to fetish status, and, when both of those things teetered, importing people as fodder for the economic machine, living standards have climbed to what is, compared to when I grew up, almost unimaginable heights.

My brother, for example, a five person family, if you count the new son-in-law, is about to become a six car family. That is more than one car per person. When I grew up, we were a five person family and had one car. Clearly, from an environmental perspective, this is appalling. But this is not a post about the environmental impact of excessive consumerism. It is a post about the ultimate futility of jumping onto the hedonic treadmill from which there really is no escape, merely a running faster and faster in place as the treadmill speeds ahead of you.

I am not against getting ahead in life. I just think we need to put a bit more thought into what we are getting ahead at. Far as I can tell, despite what the old 1980's bumper sticker read, the one with the most toys does not actually win. Some of my millennial relatives are so motivated by money that it actually scares me a little. I am not sure if the money is a vehicle to greater independence to do things they really love (sports? travelling? collecting fine art?) or if the money is simply a vehicle by which to gain status and demonstrate their status by buying more stuff.

My own opinion is that our behaviour is far more hijacked by neurotransmitter release than we are willing to admit. We are far less independent thinkers and much more easily manipulated crash test dummies hurtling head long towards a cement wall. There is simply no other way to explain the trends that we see in larger society: diets composed entirely of processed food, alcohol and drug dependency, retail therapy, cheating even our closest relatives so that we can stick a few more dollars into our own pockets. All of these things ultimately have a bad ending: premature disability or death, a house full of possessions but a life devoid of connection, a few more dollars in your bank account but no-one to spend time with when you are lonely. Would rational and sentient beings actually destroy their future for some short term gain?

We really have to get away from the idea that we are exceptional if we are to recognise that our behaviour may not be aligned with our stated beliefs. Humans, among all the animals upon the earth, are surely the greatest at taking courses of action that are biologically motivated (cue dopamine reward systems) that we rationalise after the fact. Whenever I discuss this with people, however, they say, "yes but not me." If not you, then who?