But beyond these neoliberal temptations, there are deeper reasons why the pursuit of hedonic well-being as hedonic well-being undermines our flourishing. The pleasurable life (hedonic well-being) will not lead you toward the good life (eudaimonic well-being). In my lecture for my positive psychology class, I described eight reasons hedonic well-being goes wrong. In this post, I'll walk through the first four.
Reason 1: The Hedonic Treadmill and Hedonic Adaptation
As psychologists have documented, the positive emotions associated with pleasures and achievements are temporary and short-lived. After a flush of positive emotion, we soon return to our emotional baseline. We habituate to the "new normal." This creates what psychologists call the "hedonic treadmill." We run after pleasures and achievements, but since the emotional gains fade, we are motivated to chase another pleasure or achievement, to which we also quickly habituate. Rinse and repeat. We run and run but never make any lasting progress toward happiness.
Reason 2: Affective Forecasting Errors
We are bad at choosing what will make us happy. Psychologists call these "affective forecasting errors." We stand at the fork in the road of a life decision. We look down one path and make a prediction about how happy we will be if we travel that road. We make an "affective forecast." Then we look down the alternative path and make a happiness prediction for that choice. We compare those forecasts and pick the one we think, at the moment of choice, will make us happier.
Sadly, as I said, we are terrible at this task. Due to "miswanting," desiring the wrong things, we are poor at predicting joy. We travel down roads that do not lead to happiness.
Reason 3: Pleasure Should Be the Reinforcement, Not the Goal
Pleasure exists to reinforce the good and, therefore, should not be pursued as an end in itself. We should pursue more durable and lasting goods and allow positive emotions to flow in and reinforce those pursuits.
For example, I should not pursue happiness for its own sake. I should take my wife on a date. I should pursue that relational good. And then, while we are on that date, I will experience a flood of positive emotions, emotions that reinforce the relational good I am pursuing. In short, do not choose happiness! You should choose the good and let happiness reinforce that choice.
Reason 4: Narcissistic Drift
When we pursue happiness, we slowly drift into selfishness. Inexorably, I come to privilege my happiness, joy, contentment, and peace over other goods, demands, obligations, and duties. An example of this is "self-care creep," where people withdraw from pursuing moral goods, like social justice, because that pursuit is stressful and upsetting. And so, I step away from the fight.
To be sure, self-care is a pressing and urgent need among social justice activists. But as everyone knows, many people sit on the social justice sidelines because of narcissistic drift. This is what "white fragility" is, after all, the privileging of emotional comfort over moral investment. A more parochial example is sleeping in on Sunday mornings instead of going to church. It's pleasurable to sleep in on Sundays, but doing so sacrifices goods that that will accrue--socially, morally, and existentially--to my deeper and more long term flourishing.
In the next post, I'll share four more reason why hedonic well-being goes wrong.
