Despite their poverty, people enjoyed spending time with their families, sharing a meal for example. The misery found in the slums was also accompanied by some surprising pockets of happiness.

And he did find misery-at this level of poverty there is a steep drop in life satisfaction (both as compared to those in wealthier nations and as compared to the middle class in Calcutta)-but not as much as you might imagine.

He went looking for misery in the homeless, the sex workers, and the slum-dwellers of Calcutta. To better understand hedonic adaptation, he travelled to India to spend time with the poorest people in one of the poorest cities in the world. Biswas-Diener, who is known as the “Indiana Jones” of psychology, takes his research to the far reaches of the world including Kenya, India, and Greenland, not in search of archaeological treasures, but in a quest for the roots of human happiness. But this is not your typical psychologist running experiments on college students from a university laboratory. Robert Biswas-Diener is a psychologist who has researched some of these theories.

In other words, getting a new BMW will only make you happier if all your neighbors are still driving their Hyundais. It is only relative income or individual status that has a more lasting effect. More options to choose from leads to more stress in every decision we make and more regret when we consider all of the options we didn’t take.Īnother theory is that wealth doesn’t bring happiness if everyone becomes wealthier. And researchers have found that having more choices is not always a good thing. Increased wealth also brings more choices. We strive for the things that will make us happier, but once we achieve them our happiness quickly returns to our natural set point, and so we find ourselves on a “hedonic treadmill,” always in pursuit, but never quite reaching our goal. First of all, we tend to quickly adapt to the changes in our lives. Scientists have several theories to explain this apparent paradox.

Why do we strive for wealth if we don’t know how to convert it into happiness? Until recently, the average American’s buying power was increasing steadily, up to two and a half times what it was 50 years ago-but happiness has hardly increased at all. But worrying about wealth might be counter productive. After decades as one of the wealthiest nations in the world, Americans can feel their wealth slipping away from them.

Hedonic treadmill theory