Hedonic treadmill

The hedonic treadmill is the name for a letdown almost everyone knows. A new car, a bigger apartment or a better phone brings a real lift, and then, over weeks or months, the lift drains away. The new thing has not changed. What changed is the yardstick: the upgrade has become the ordinary level against which everything else is judged. You walk faster, buy better, earn more, and end up feeling roughly where you started, only now with a higher standard to maintain.

Where the name comes from

In 1971 the psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell contributed a chapter to a symposium volume on adaptation-level theory, the idea that we judge every experience against a neutral point set by what we have recently been through. Their chapter, “Hedonic relativism and planning the good society,” drew an uncomfortable conclusion from that idea. If people judge good and bad against a baseline that moves, then improvements in circumstances will soon feel neutral, and a society that tries to make people happier by giving them more may find them no happier at all. They called the result a hedonic treadmill.

Seven years later Brickman, working with Dan Coates and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman, put the idea to an unusual test. They interviewed 22 people who had won $50,000 or more in the Illinois State Lottery, 22 people living in the same areas of the city who had not won, and 29 people who had been paralyzed in accidents, 11 of them paraplegic and 18 quadriplegic. Everyone rated how happy they were at the time on a scale from 0 to 5.

The winners averaged 4.00 and their neighbors 3.82, a difference too small to count as real. The accident victims averaged 2.96: lower, but well above the bottom of the scale and close to its middle. The winners also reported getting less pleasure than the comparison group from ordinary events, such as eating breakfast or buying clothes. The researchers saw two forces at work. Getting used to new luxuries wore down their appeal, and the memory of the big win made ordinary pleasures look small beside it.

The study was small and had no measure of anyone’s happiness before the win, so it is best read as a striking illustration rather than a final word. A 2006 review by Ed Diener, Richard Lucas and Christie Napa Scollon kept the core idea and revised the rest: baselines are not neutral, people differ in where they start and how fast they adapt, and some changes do move well-being for the long term.

Why the lift fades

Attention is built to notice change. A new sofa gets noticed every time you walk past it for a week, then it becomes part of the room and the eye moves on. The pleasure was tied to the change, not to the sofa.

The second force is the reference point. Once you are used to a quiet car or a fast laptop, that becomes the standard, and anything below it registers as a step down. This is where the treadmill meets loss aversion: going back to the old level feels like a loss, so the upgrade is hard to reverse even after it has stopped feeling good.

How the treadmill builds a chain

Here is how one upgrade can run for a year. You buy noise-canceling headphones for $350, and for a month every commute feels like a small luxury. By the third month they are simply what your commute sounds like. Meanwhile the kitchen speaker, which seemed fine before, now sounds thin by comparison, so a $250 speaker replaces it. The new speaker shows up the television’s built-in sound, so a $400 soundbar follows. A year on, the headphones have a successor with better battery life, and your pair feels dated.

No single step was extravagant, and each one was measured against a level that had just gone up. The year’s spending came to $1,000 where the plan had been $350, plus a standard for sound that every future purchase now has to meet.

How sellers schedule the fade

Sellers do not need to fight adaptation; they schedule around it. Yearly model releases, seasonal collections and “new and improved” versions arrive at roughly the point when the last purchase has gone quiet. Upgrade programs that swap your phone every year turn the treadmill into a monthly payment. Free trials of a premium tier let you adapt to the better version first, so that returning to the basic one feels like a downgrade, and tiered loyalty status has to be earned again each year to keep the perks you are now used to.

How to step off

1. Predict the fade in writing. Before a purchase over a set amount, note how you expect to feel about it in three months and in six. Check the note when the time comes. Most people find the prediction was too rosy, and that lesson carries into the next decision.
2. Replace on failure. Let things finish their working lives. “It broke” is a reason to replace something; “it no longer feels new” is the treadmill talking.
3. Price the new standard. An upgrade raises the cost of every future replacement in that category. The Chain Cost Calculator puts the first round of that in months of saving.
4. Wait out the follow-on. The urge to upgrade the things around a new purchase is strongest in the first weeks. The 30-day rule gives adaptation time to work in your favor, so the new item feels normal before you decide whether anything else needs replacing.

Where it meets the Diderot effect

The Diderot effect and the hedonic treadmill push in the same direction from two sides. When Diderot put on his new scarlet robe, the treadmill made its pleasure fade, while the Diderot effect made his old study look shabby beside it. One effect takes away the satisfaction of the first purchase, and the other supplies a reason for the next. Together they explain why spending chains feel urgent while you are in them and pointless afterward. The economics of that ratchet are on our page about the Diderot effect in economics, and its slower, salary-sized version is lifestyle creep.