Jumping off the hedonic treadmill
Oct. 14th, 2005 10:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat[Uh. This thing is full of typos, don't have the energy or stamia to go back and proof it all. So if that bothers you? Skip it. It's my day off dang it, feel like a break from all things detail oriented. Ah. Rain. Is it possible that it can rain non-stop for three days straight? Apparently so.
Can't be on the computer too long today, screwed up my right shoulder a bit on Tuesday. And being on the computer aggravates it. Luckily I decided to take today off, had scheduled it weeks ago with my boss, we can't take the same days off. Sick of the rain, but oddly happy to be able to be lazy and not have to go out in it, not have to brave the downpours to get lunch or get to the subway or commute. First day all week didn't have to do that. Could work on what I wanted to do, be lazy, watch tv, read, drink tea, eat my gluten-free muffins and gluten free chocolat chip cookies I baked myself - somewhat on the grainy side, but tasty too. Ate too many of them at once and am paying for it now. Ugh.]
Jumping off the hedonic treadmill
The hedonic treadmill is a phrase that I'd never heard until this week, thrown our hap-harzardly, almost as an after thought by the social psych teacher and eliciting a debate that she could not quite put an end to. I think in retrospect she may have regretted mentioning it. It means working long hours, climbing the corporate ladder,w working hard at a job you're not nuts over in order to obtain pleasure, not unlike walking a treadmill hour after hour at a gym to become thin. I'm not a huge fan of treadmills, one of them destroyed my knees so I can no longer run the way I once was able to. I basically kept upping the speed, until one day my knees gave out. Push past the pain to the high and all that. The rewards will be great. Yeah, right. The rewards are pain.
The question posed this week is why people feel the need to work til they drop? The argument was whether that is a bad thing? And what would you do if you weren't working? And do people only work to obtain pleasure? Or is the job itself a plearuable thing? I guess it depends on what job you land in.
At work, every week, ten of us, put a dollar each into an envelope to play the New York Lottery. I find it odd at times that I participate, since I'm not a huge believer in lotteries and know that we have a one in a millionieth chance of winning, if that. Plus it's a rare thing that my name or number gets selected. When it happens, I'm usually in shock. While part of me dreams of winning, part of me dreads it. Fears it even. What would I do with all that money and how would I deal with people, friends, family, etc who wanted a piece of it?
Money changes relationships. Having something someone else wants always does. Approximately 50% of the people interviewed after winning the lottery, mentioned that their lives changed, not for the better. Most lost half their winninngs to family members who swindled them. Or bad investment scehemes. Or buying things they did not need. The pressure to have fun, some responded, overwhelmed. While others responded that they'd lost loved ones because of it and in some respects life was better without all that money, yet, yet, they still wanted it and getting it, they wanted more. Because whatever they wanted to do - was always somehow out of reach - the hedonic carrot they chased.
I feel safe in a way, doing it with a group. If we win - we win together. We half-jokingly mention that if we win a large amount, we'll all quit and go to Hawaii for lunch. And, I'm half-relieved half-disappointed when we rarely win enough to pay for a lotto ticket one week. Lotto used to be illegal in most of the US, with the possible exception of Nevada and Indian Reservations, until around the mid-1990s. What changed? Ah. Individual state legislatures finally woke up to the fact that Nevada and the Indian reservations were acquiring a ton of revenue that was not based on your standard income taxes. Revenue that voters didn't quip over. Revenue that could pay for stuff like education, building dams, government employees salaries. So they got to work on overturning the laws prohibiting state run lotteries. Gambling was still illegal but not if it was commissioned or run by the state or on a riverboat that paid taxes to the state. They of course forgot why gambling was illegal to begin with - the fact that it robbed people of their savings and caused social dissent and chaos.
And well is addictive. But hey, if we outlaw everything that is addictive, what's left? Sleep? It's what my old constitutional law professor loved to call the slippery slope argument.
Shirley Jackson wrote a short story, a rather famous one, that most people have heard of, called the Lottery.
A horror story really. About a town that picks a stoning victim through a lottery. I vaguely remember the particulars, having read it so long ago. Lotteries scare me a bit. Their randomness. I feel when I participate as if I'm throwing a kiss to the winds of fate. Yet by the same token, I'm afraid not to participate in my colleagues lottery pool. Half afraid the week I don't they will win and I'll be left out in the cold. Alone.
The reason Lost has been fascinating me this year, in some ways more than it did last year, is the focus on how each character is struggling with their own fears, insecurities, and foibles - how they are lost, not necessarily in the real sense of the word so much as the metaphorical sense. In an odd way they are less lost on the island they've found themselves stranded on, then they were in their lives off of it. On the island they are being forced to face the things they ran from or hide from in their own lives.
Last week the emphasis was on the character Locke, a man who had worked as a manager in a company that created boxes. Confined to a wheelchair, he fantazied about being a hero of having a higher purpose and played role-playing games with others. On the island, he is playing the game for real, no longer a cripple, able to walk, able to be the man he could only play at being in his head prior to this. Yet, he's far from simple. Lock also needs systematic structure. He needs the ritual. The daily routine. The job. He is a creature of habit. And for him the treadmill is in of itself a hedonic one. Whether there was a reason behind the ritual did not matter so much as the belief that there was one. A perfect example of the "obediant" man. The unquestioning man. The man who will do what the authority figure asks believing it suits a higher purpose. Of course it depends on the authority figure. I push the button because I believe doing so saves the world. And that gives me purpose. He almost seems lost without that. Without the idea of a destiny.
This week's episode focuses on Hurley, who won 126 million dollars in the lottery using a group of numbers he heard in a psych ward. A group of numbers he currently believes are cursed. Yet he won an amount most of us can only dream of winning. What would you do if you won 126 million dollars? How would that change your life and the lives of those closest to you? Would you want to win that much? Would if mean that you could jump off the treadmill or are you know locked to it?
In the episode, Hurley is given the task of doling out food. They've found a gold-mine of food and shampoo and toiletries in a bunker, enough to last one man three-six months. There are 44 people on the island. Hurley knows that as long as he has to chose who gets what, has to keep it from folks, that they will begin to hate him. He's the one who has everything they want. And in flashbacks we see that fear realized before. How he loses his friend, how he becomes a person who has everything but nothing at the same time. How he loses himself in it.
On the island, he tells his fear to a woman named Rose. But we do not see how she responds nor the telling.
It's much later, when Hurley goes to Jack and tells him, that he's decided that there is not enough to last them a long time and doling it out slowly makes little sense, that instead he wants to give it out to everyone now. Give everyone the one item or piece they want. Share it. And by doing so, he is loved. The food won't last but as Hurley mentions, it wouldn't anyway and if we hord it we only push dissent, distrust. Intersliced between these bits is a commericial where a couple considers taking some money dumped in their lawn. Huge buckets of it.
The man advises his wife to wait until more plops in. As they wait, hundreds of people dart onto the lawn and grab the money and they stare in disbelief. The caption is - play the NY Lottery now or lose out while others gain. A message in direct contrast to the one shown on the drama. Yet, both play in our heads. The fear that we'll have nothing if everyone gets a bit and the fear we'll have nothing if everyone doesn't.
I'm not sure what I'd do if I won a million dollars. Probably buy a house and have it renovated and get a cat.
Then again, maybe not. Maybe I'd take a year to figure out what I want to do, wait doing that now and working at the same time. Maybe, go back to school. Get a degree in a new discipline. Maybe travel to some out of the way place and do volunteer work. I don't know. I'm not sure anyone does, really.
In Lost, it's funny, no one believes Hurly when he tells them he won that money, nor does anyone call Hurely by his real name. He's just Hurely, a big fat lovable lug of a guy. They love him but don't know him. And I find that fascinating, because it's so true in group situations, we don't know people. The fit roles in our heads and we use nicknames or names we've given them, not their real ones. We don't push past the surface, we don't try to find out more, we're happy with what we're given. To find out more...well, people are landmines and we have our own shit to handle.
By the same token, part of us wants to know more, we want to connect, we want to feel real. Hurley shows that - he tells Charley certain things and is angry at Locke for revealing things he hasn't, afraid of Charlie's rejection. In his dream in the episode, he is talking to the man on the island who was an outsider, Jin, who can't speak English. And left in the raft. Who was never quite accepted. Even though he caught fish and tried to be. But he is excluded by his inability to speak the same language. Which when I think about it is pretty typical of my own journey through life, the number of times I've struggled with group situations because I just don't frigging speak the same language as everyone else. And how I've learned over time to grab bits of slang so I can. Here Hurley can speak to Jin, but he asks Jin, wait are you speaking English - immediately assuming Jin is speaking the same language as Hurley. He's not, he's told. Jin says, no, you are speaking Korean. And Hurley's old friend appears in a chicken costume. Everything is about to change. In the dream Hurley is eating as much food as he wants. And that's when Jin appears - the outsider, divided from the rest by a language barrier and Hurley fears soon he'll be divided from the rest as well, but not by a weight barrier or necessarily a food one, but by having that which others want. Fear of being the outsider. The desire to connect. To be one with the group. Yet at the same time, uncertain about it. Is this a group I really want to connect to? Do I want to be defined by it? You don't know me. You know the aspect of me that I show you in order to fit in, the language I've learned, the tics and tonks, to blend in with you and the others. But what happens when that factor that makes us a group goes away? What then? What happens when you introduce a bunker with food? Taking away the fact we all don't have any. Or introduce a million dollars? Taking away the factor that we are all on a treadmill working for it. OR take away a favorite tv show? Taking away the one thing we all liked. That commonality of interest. Hurley solves his problem by sharing it, asking for help, learning from his past mistake with the lotto winnings, not to keep it to himself. Yet in this case, he's allowed to do that, would he have been allowed with the lotto winnings?
Can't be on the computer too long today, screwed up my right shoulder a bit on Tuesday. And being on the computer aggravates it. Luckily I decided to take today off, had scheduled it weeks ago with my boss, we can't take the same days off. Sick of the rain, but oddly happy to be able to be lazy and not have to go out in it, not have to brave the downpours to get lunch or get to the subway or commute. First day all week didn't have to do that. Could work on what I wanted to do, be lazy, watch tv, read, drink tea, eat my gluten-free muffins and gluten free chocolat chip cookies I baked myself - somewhat on the grainy side, but tasty too. Ate too many of them at once and am paying for it now. Ugh.]
Jumping off the hedonic treadmill
The hedonic treadmill is a phrase that I'd never heard until this week, thrown our hap-harzardly, almost as an after thought by the social psych teacher and eliciting a debate that she could not quite put an end to. I think in retrospect she may have regretted mentioning it. It means working long hours, climbing the corporate ladder,w working hard at a job you're not nuts over in order to obtain pleasure, not unlike walking a treadmill hour after hour at a gym to become thin. I'm not a huge fan of treadmills, one of them destroyed my knees so I can no longer run the way I once was able to. I basically kept upping the speed, until one day my knees gave out. Push past the pain to the high and all that. The rewards will be great. Yeah, right. The rewards are pain.
The question posed this week is why people feel the need to work til they drop? The argument was whether that is a bad thing? And what would you do if you weren't working? And do people only work to obtain pleasure? Or is the job itself a plearuable thing? I guess it depends on what job you land in.
At work, every week, ten of us, put a dollar each into an envelope to play the New York Lottery. I find it odd at times that I participate, since I'm not a huge believer in lotteries and know that we have a one in a millionieth chance of winning, if that. Plus it's a rare thing that my name or number gets selected. When it happens, I'm usually in shock. While part of me dreams of winning, part of me dreads it. Fears it even. What would I do with all that money and how would I deal with people, friends, family, etc who wanted a piece of it?
Money changes relationships. Having something someone else wants always does. Approximately 50% of the people interviewed after winning the lottery, mentioned that their lives changed, not for the better. Most lost half their winninngs to family members who swindled them. Or bad investment scehemes. Or buying things they did not need. The pressure to have fun, some responded, overwhelmed. While others responded that they'd lost loved ones because of it and in some respects life was better without all that money, yet, yet, they still wanted it and getting it, they wanted more. Because whatever they wanted to do - was always somehow out of reach - the hedonic carrot they chased.
I feel safe in a way, doing it with a group. If we win - we win together. We half-jokingly mention that if we win a large amount, we'll all quit and go to Hawaii for lunch. And, I'm half-relieved half-disappointed when we rarely win enough to pay for a lotto ticket one week. Lotto used to be illegal in most of the US, with the possible exception of Nevada and Indian Reservations, until around the mid-1990s. What changed? Ah. Individual state legislatures finally woke up to the fact that Nevada and the Indian reservations were acquiring a ton of revenue that was not based on your standard income taxes. Revenue that voters didn't quip over. Revenue that could pay for stuff like education, building dams, government employees salaries. So they got to work on overturning the laws prohibiting state run lotteries. Gambling was still illegal but not if it was commissioned or run by the state or on a riverboat that paid taxes to the state. They of course forgot why gambling was illegal to begin with - the fact that it robbed people of their savings and caused social dissent and chaos.
And well is addictive. But hey, if we outlaw everything that is addictive, what's left? Sleep? It's what my old constitutional law professor loved to call the slippery slope argument.
Shirley Jackson wrote a short story, a rather famous one, that most people have heard of, called the Lottery.
A horror story really. About a town that picks a stoning victim through a lottery. I vaguely remember the particulars, having read it so long ago. Lotteries scare me a bit. Their randomness. I feel when I participate as if I'm throwing a kiss to the winds of fate. Yet by the same token, I'm afraid not to participate in my colleagues lottery pool. Half afraid the week I don't they will win and I'll be left out in the cold. Alone.
The reason Lost has been fascinating me this year, in some ways more than it did last year, is the focus on how each character is struggling with their own fears, insecurities, and foibles - how they are lost, not necessarily in the real sense of the word so much as the metaphorical sense. In an odd way they are less lost on the island they've found themselves stranded on, then they were in their lives off of it. On the island they are being forced to face the things they ran from or hide from in their own lives.
Last week the emphasis was on the character Locke, a man who had worked as a manager in a company that created boxes. Confined to a wheelchair, he fantazied about being a hero of having a higher purpose and played role-playing games with others. On the island, he is playing the game for real, no longer a cripple, able to walk, able to be the man he could only play at being in his head prior to this. Yet, he's far from simple. Lock also needs systematic structure. He needs the ritual. The daily routine. The job. He is a creature of habit. And for him the treadmill is in of itself a hedonic one. Whether there was a reason behind the ritual did not matter so much as the belief that there was one. A perfect example of the "obediant" man. The unquestioning man. The man who will do what the authority figure asks believing it suits a higher purpose. Of course it depends on the authority figure. I push the button because I believe doing so saves the world. And that gives me purpose. He almost seems lost without that. Without the idea of a destiny.
This week's episode focuses on Hurley, who won 126 million dollars in the lottery using a group of numbers he heard in a psych ward. A group of numbers he currently believes are cursed. Yet he won an amount most of us can only dream of winning. What would you do if you won 126 million dollars? How would that change your life and the lives of those closest to you? Would you want to win that much? Would if mean that you could jump off the treadmill or are you know locked to it?
In the episode, Hurley is given the task of doling out food. They've found a gold-mine of food and shampoo and toiletries in a bunker, enough to last one man three-six months. There are 44 people on the island. Hurley knows that as long as he has to chose who gets what, has to keep it from folks, that they will begin to hate him. He's the one who has everything they want. And in flashbacks we see that fear realized before. How he loses his friend, how he becomes a person who has everything but nothing at the same time. How he loses himself in it.
On the island, he tells his fear to a woman named Rose. But we do not see how she responds nor the telling.
It's much later, when Hurley goes to Jack and tells him, that he's decided that there is not enough to last them a long time and doling it out slowly makes little sense, that instead he wants to give it out to everyone now. Give everyone the one item or piece they want. Share it. And by doing so, he is loved. The food won't last but as Hurley mentions, it wouldn't anyway and if we hord it we only push dissent, distrust. Intersliced between these bits is a commericial where a couple considers taking some money dumped in their lawn. Huge buckets of it.
The man advises his wife to wait until more plops in. As they wait, hundreds of people dart onto the lawn and grab the money and they stare in disbelief. The caption is - play the NY Lottery now or lose out while others gain. A message in direct contrast to the one shown on the drama. Yet, both play in our heads. The fear that we'll have nothing if everyone gets a bit and the fear we'll have nothing if everyone doesn't.
I'm not sure what I'd do if I won a million dollars. Probably buy a house and have it renovated and get a cat.
Then again, maybe not. Maybe I'd take a year to figure out what I want to do, wait doing that now and working at the same time. Maybe, go back to school. Get a degree in a new discipline. Maybe travel to some out of the way place and do volunteer work. I don't know. I'm not sure anyone does, really.
In Lost, it's funny, no one believes Hurly when he tells them he won that money, nor does anyone call Hurely by his real name. He's just Hurely, a big fat lovable lug of a guy. They love him but don't know him. And I find that fascinating, because it's so true in group situations, we don't know people. The fit roles in our heads and we use nicknames or names we've given them, not their real ones. We don't push past the surface, we don't try to find out more, we're happy with what we're given. To find out more...well, people are landmines and we have our own shit to handle.
By the same token, part of us wants to know more, we want to connect, we want to feel real. Hurley shows that - he tells Charley certain things and is angry at Locke for revealing things he hasn't, afraid of Charlie's rejection. In his dream in the episode, he is talking to the man on the island who was an outsider, Jin, who can't speak English. And left in the raft. Who was never quite accepted. Even though he caught fish and tried to be. But he is excluded by his inability to speak the same language. Which when I think about it is pretty typical of my own journey through life, the number of times I've struggled with group situations because I just don't frigging speak the same language as everyone else. And how I've learned over time to grab bits of slang so I can. Here Hurley can speak to Jin, but he asks Jin, wait are you speaking English - immediately assuming Jin is speaking the same language as Hurley. He's not, he's told. Jin says, no, you are speaking Korean. And Hurley's old friend appears in a chicken costume. Everything is about to change. In the dream Hurley is eating as much food as he wants. And that's when Jin appears - the outsider, divided from the rest by a language barrier and Hurley fears soon he'll be divided from the rest as well, but not by a weight barrier or necessarily a food one, but by having that which others want. Fear of being the outsider. The desire to connect. To be one with the group. Yet at the same time, uncertain about it. Is this a group I really want to connect to? Do I want to be defined by it? You don't know me. You know the aspect of me that I show you in order to fit in, the language I've learned, the tics and tonks, to blend in with you and the others. But what happens when that factor that makes us a group goes away? What then? What happens when you introduce a bunker with food? Taking away the fact we all don't have any. Or introduce a million dollars? Taking away the factor that we are all on a treadmill working for it. OR take away a favorite tv show? Taking away the one thing we all liked. That commonality of interest. Hurley solves his problem by sharing it, asking for help, learning from his past mistake with the lotto winnings, not to keep it to himself. Yet in this case, he's allowed to do that, would he have been allowed with the lotto winnings?
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no subject
Date: 2005-10-15 02:03 pm (UTC)But can we trust what the characters say? Did Locke really say "Hugo" or is it only what Hurley heard?
The Jin/Hurley scene pointed out that it's all a matter of perceptions after all.