Hedonic treadmill

I read this wonderful article here that talks about how we derive pleasure when we first upgrade our standards of living but eventually getting so used to the the experience through repeated use that it offers no more pleasure. In other words, you get back to the same pleasure level before you started this hedonic treadmill, and you have to go look for better and better pleasures, and yet getting nowhere. After reading the article, I learnt the name for such a vicious cycle. What an apt name!


But I say we can trick ourselves to hop onto the abstemious treadmill and derive greater and greater pleasure on the simple things. First of all, a dictionary definition of abstemious:

Abstemious (adjective)
1) sparing or moderate in eating and drinking; temperate in diet.
2) characterized by abstinence.
3) sparing

Abstemious, in other words, is the direct opposite of hedonistic. A hedonistic lifestyle would be to seek maximum pleasure, whereas a abstemious one would be to simplify and reduce. Now instead of seeking greater and greater pleasures and eventually getting numb to the new experience and thus hopping onto the hedonistic treadmill, I suggest we reverse the whole process.

I say we simplify our lifestyles and eventually we will get numb to the new experience of a simplified lifestyle, and we go on and simplify it further, leading to a virtuous cycle which I termed abstemious treadmill. I believe this is where we would really find a lot of pleasure in the little things that pop up because we're so used to so little. Imagine not having salt and sugar in your diet for 1 month. At first you'll feel that your food taste very bland, but after a while, you start tasting all the natural flavors of the ingredient. And once a while when you do eat food with just a little sprinkling of salt or sugar, you'll feel that it's very salty or very sweet. It's the same food we're talking about here but we're no longer talking about the same person tasting the food.


I mentioned this because there are people who thinks that living a frugal life is a very sad life. Earn and save so much money but you deprive yourself from enjoying the pleasures of life. Life is short, so YOLO-ing your life is not such a bad idea. But a frugal person is already jogging on a abstemious treadmill. He had reduced his lifestyle to something that is simpler than the people who are around him, and he is not suffering and yet he found great pleasures in it. How can the crowd who are invariably jogging on their own hedonic treadmill understand him?


Well, they can't. They will wonder what strange beast this frugal person is, and how different he is from the rest of the world, and how odd. Doesn't matter eventually, we're all running our own race.