Recognizing When We Are in the Throes of Hedonic Adaptation
What we can do to get ourselves off of our treadmills of forgetting pleasure and pain then repeating the same actions over and over again.
We’re programmed to want.
Success, more money, relationships, fame, children. The latest gadget. A house, a car. This works very well for businesses and the economy. But does wanting work out well for us?
What about the consumers?
Every time we achieve one of the above it’s a positive stimulus. We are excited, happy. We are also programmed to forget that excitement as life returns to its routine. We adapt. We fix our minds on the next pay rise, the next episode of our favourite TV show. Binge-watching Netflix is a very popular pastime.
How about relationships?
That first giddy flush of a new love interest is the excitement of your sex pheromones as they are attracted to your lover’s smell and they to yours — or you might have bought a pheromone-enhanced bottled perfume to do the same job. How you feel in the first year of a new intimate relationship doesn’t last much longer than a year, two at most. By then you are two people who have learned…
