The Hedonic Treadmill II

I’ve been doing some more worrying about the hedonic treadmill recently, but I think I am slowly getting my head round it. I wrote a while ago now about struggles with relating to other people’s problems, but the key to hopping off the hedonic hamster wheel could lie in how I relate to my own problems, and how I use them to inform my perspective on my current situation.

In the past this was very difficult - as I progressed through my teen years into adulthood, my problems seemed to get progressively more serious than their predecessors. I was no longer worried about whether or not a girl thought I was cute, or if I was going to get in trouble for not doing my homework - suddenly I was facing the prospect of trying to attain a degree, then find a job, then achieve and maintain financial independence and generally approximate being a functional adult human as best I could. It wasn’t exactly possible to look back and think to myself that I had had it much worse in the past and survived, and should be grateful for what I had now, because I had more responsibility and more at stake than ever before.

That’s not true anymore though. Even very recently I really wasn’t doing so good, but now a lot has changed for the better. I still have problems, and negative feelings that arise as a result of them - the difference being that this time, my own recent past might offer an important lens through which to view the present. My struggles now are undoubtedly not as great as they were even 9 months ago. So much has gone right for me in that time, and I have so many things to feel happy about, but as the treadmill notion suggests, it’s not necessarily that easy. The goal for the near future is to focus as much as possible on what’s changed, and how I no longer feel like I did. Back then, I thought I would be over the moon to be where I am today, and so it’s time to allow myself to feel like that and not worry too much about anything else.