Samuel Wilkinson, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Yale University -Why are many of us so driven to achieve? There’s an assumption that, through accolades and achievement, we will experience a measure of reward and satisfaction. The problem is that our assumptions are sometimes faulty. In this context, there is a powerful but under-appreciated principle in psychology known as affective forecasting. This is the ability to predict how we will feel in a given situation. It turns out that humans are really terrible at this. Which means, unfortunately, that we are very bad at predicting what will make us happy.
A classic study from the 1970s—with the provocative title “Lottery Winners and Accident Victims”—drives this point home. The researchers from this study conducted detailed assessments of two very different groups of people: those who had won the lottery and those who had become paraplegic through terrible accidents. If someone were to ask you which group you would rather be a part of, you would obviously pick the lottery winners. Why? Because you immediately envision yourself much happier in the life of a lottery winner than an accident victim. But surprisingly, in terms of their abilities to enjoy everyday pleasures, there was no difference between the lottery winners and the accident victims. If anything, the lottery winners had a bit less ability to enjoy things (though this difference wasn’t statistically significant). This is because of something psychologists call hedonic adaptation, which can work in our favor and to our detriment. Hedonic adaptation basically means that, for so many of the activities we engage in, after a brief period of time, our happiness setpoint will adjust right back to where it was originally. In a sense, this is a cruel twist of fate, a maddening happiness treadmill, which portrays us as if we were hamsters running on a wheel, forever destined to toil away with no enduring reward or satisfaction.
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