If we’re not good at knowing what makes us happy, and our attempts to do the things we think will make us happy work against us, might that suggest we shouldn’t hitch ourselves to the happy wagon when trying to persuade people to take action?
Brickman and Campbell developed the idea of the hedonic treadmill in a 1971 essay ‘Hedonic Relativism and Planning the Good Society’, reflecting that people seem to have their own happiness baseline and positive or negative events can take people away from their baseline but they return to close to it over time. This idea was translated into the specific treadmill metaphor by Eysenck in his work exploring how people can chase happiness without making progress towards it. It then seems the chasing can itself then raise the bar for what we need to be happy – and you might be able to think of examples in those around you who focus on something like a holiday and being able to relax and do nothing, then come back complaining about some seemingly minor aspect, rather than giving a sense the holiday had been really relaxing.
So if this is the case, in the search for things that can catalyse action – in ourselves and others – it’s obvious why there might be an appeal to happiness. Who doesn’t want to be happy after all? Yet over and over we choose meaning over happiness. We do the difficult things. We also chase things that we think will bring happiness yet turn out not to . Perhaps then, if we can see and feel in ourselves and others that tension which exists between meaning and the pursuit of happiness, it might be worth exploring other avenues than happiness to try and engage people?
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