zlacker

So if I'm not mistaken, the hedonic treadmill is not about baseline happiness. It's about increasing your set-point for joy and/or excitement. Happiness is a state, joy is fleeting.

So the goal is generally to increase your level of happiness - to have a higher baseline in terms of feeling good and having a sense of well-being.

It's futile to chase joy in place of happiness, because each hit of joy makes the next one feel less exceptional.

Although joy feels like happiness, it's not the same thing, and it's barely related. Joy often has to do with doing more. Doing something extra and exceptional to move the needle.

Happiness often has to do with doing less. With being less focused on doing/attaining/obtaining something new, and more focused on mindset: on finding happiness in what we already have.

>>skohan+(OP)
If joy is the upwards deviation from the norm, then keeping the norm low allows more things to produce joy.

In any case, I'm not claiming a universal recipe here, just observing something that seems to have worked well for me.

>>JoshTr+66
But it's not an upward deviation from the "happiness" norm, it's deviation from the joy baseline. They're entirely separate systems.

To give an extreme example, someone who's addicted to drugs might receive extreme joy from their next hit, while at the same time being deeply unhappy, and unable to take joy from anything else. That's the hedonic treadmill at the extreme.

At the same time, someone who's very happy might be able to take joy from something simple - like a fried egg yolk with the perfect consistency - because their mind is not preoccupied with seeking bigger and better joy, they may be more free to find it in simple places where it arises naturally.