There’s a secret blessing and cursing within your life that you’ve probably noticed before. The things you always thought you wanted, when and if you finally got them, eventually lost the fresh flavor of self-fulfillment. Your daily life probably contains, subjectively, a similar amount of stress and folly as it did before you got that promotion, or new car, or even just fixed that sticky door lock that you hated so much. The opposite is also true. Life is marked by many great periods of personal tragedy. The loss of one’s parents, the passing of dear pets, the end of friendships. Each of these eventually loses their sense of overwhelming personal sadness. Your daily life probably contains, subjectively, a similar amount of upsetting moments and depressed moods as it did before each of these events happened in your life*. This function of our psychology is known as, “Hedonic Adaptation” and its implications are fairly profound and valuable to the average person. These lessons undergird many philosophies and religious ideas, particularly those of eastern meditative practices.
There’s an unfortunate nature to the self-propelling momentum of organizations and institutions. No one organization sets out in its charter the goals that once achieved would mean that the organization has no more reason to continue existing. There’s a survival instinct that results in the pivoting towards new territory or the adoption of loftier goals, this of course necessitates that the organization, and the professional positions that compose it, have reason to continue breathing. This also has a fun name, “Mission Creep” a, “gradual or incremental expansion of an intervention, project or mission, beyond its original scope, focus or goals, a ratchet effect spawned by initial success.”**
This function of our institutions and organizations and its implications are fairly profound and valuable to the average person. These lessons undergird many economic, political, and religious philosophies (is there a difference?) and have resonance with the current state of many contemporaneous organizations.
The hypothesis here is that these two functions are the same operation being called on a different substrate. The first, within our own minds and deeply personal to our lives. The second, within the institutional bodies that dictate much of how your life operates and what is required and enabled of you during your time here on this planet. The function itself is a simple adaptation to the new normal as a baseline. It would be easy to claim that this is what allows for our catastrophic mindsets despite the broad spectrum of measurements that should inspire optimism in everyone about how great the current moment is to live in for more people than ever before. That we are pessimistic because it is in our nature to eventually return to our hedonic set points no matter what novel improvements may come. And that it is this subjective feeling that inspires those organizations which helped bring about some of these recent increases in well-being to say, “so what should we pivot to next?” and suddenly there’s a whole new world of things to have concern over with no real feasible endpoint. A Lucretian javelin of social progress.
There are lessons from the literature on hedonic adaptation that might serve as guiding lights for organizations and social movements to produce longer-lasting and more rewarding outcomes. These have less to do with giving up the idea of seeking out achievements because they’ll just go stale after a few years of normalcy and more to do with seeking out the right type of achievements and then instituting systems around them so that we avoid the amnesic components of adaptation.
If you spend much time around meditators or self-help enthusiasts, you’ll eventually hear about how your attention is the most valuable resource you have. In fact, they’ll state, that it is the key determinant of your well-being and the quality of your experience in each moment. This has a sort of self-fulfilling tautology, because of course whatever you’re dedicating your cognitive resources to will determine what you are thinking about therefore feeling as you move throughout the day. So maybe this is just a nice sounding fluffy idea that doesn’t really have any impact on our long-term success and happiness as individuals or as organizations?
Maybe. But if you’re convinced that hedonic adaptation is the reason why all of life’s splendors that you’ve worked so hard to achieve will eventually lose their good feels, then it probably is important. Once you stop appreciating the positive and ruminating on the negative, you’ve adapted. To negate this effect, you can attempt to develop ways to reemphasize the novelty and surprise of your newfound state of existence through habits that are dynamic and varied enough that they’ll remind you of these new states without becoming rote and repetitive.
My father knew a man who became rich and felt that his happiness would be best served by driving an exciting sports car. He purchased a Jaguar and began using this as his daily driver. His daily 40-minute commute through Los Angeles traffic now occurred in a straight-six 3.6-liter V12 sports car, but nothing else changed. Over time, the car began to have mechanical issues due to his driving habits, so he bought another one while his first Jag was in the shop. He repeated this procedure once more until he had a rotating collection of three identical Jaguars. One being commuted daily and the others in various states of repair.
It is not that every sports car purchased to reinvigorate your energies is doomed to eventually be as fulfilling as your old Junker, but if you do nothing to remind of you this new component of your life, you will rapidly adapt to it as normal and return to baseline. To forestall adaption, you must have your attention continually grabbed by your life’s new circumstances.
Let’s say you are a social or political institution who has finally achieved your equivalent of purchasing a shiny new Ferrari. You rev your engines loudly to let the whole neighborhood know about your success and go drag racing to feel the thrill of newfound horsepower. Everyone is now aware of your success; some applaud, some feel envious, and others are spiteful. The trick is now to keep yourself aware and content with your achievements and not engender expanding resentment from your neighbors and the broader community.
Institutionally, this would mean the implementation of regular focused celebrations or holidays of the accomplishments and liberties that your movement enabled. The novelty of these celebrations is also something to factor in. If you’re flooring your new car on the same on-ramp at the same time every week you will eventually adapt to that brief reminder as well. Developing a variable schedule and integrating unexpected events into these celebrations would account for both. The Super Bowl Half-Time show is a good model of this, the variance in performers keeps you relatively interested, but it is when the unexpected strikes (ala Janet Jackson’s right breast) that the event becomes a sensation that grabs everyone’s attention and centralizes the nature and importance of the event.
What if the goal of your organization is to have its achievement become normalized and thought of as a nonsignificant basic fact of life, not something to feel positively or negatively about? Then you’d turn these dials back up in the opposite direction. Enforce repetitive and predictable reminders and grow beyond identifying with those past achievements or even attempting to forget them altogether. This should breed a reaction of, “Why are we celebrating this again? Who’s this even for, I mean everyone knows that [Insert what was once a taboo or radical proposition here] is totally normal.” I think that many organizations and movements inadvertently install themselves into this pattern when hoping that others will remain enthused by their prior successes.
Celebrations should move to recognize and focus on intrinsic values rather than extrinsic ones. There comes a time when you stop celebrating the event itself and begin growing the new possibilities as its own celebration of your success. Managing your attention to highlight appreciation and gratitude for these new possibilities regularly helps here. I have a close friend who employs a ‘Grati-Food’ method where every meal is begun with a brief statement of what you’re grateful for that day. I’ve found that this leads to us savoring not only the food, but also the feeling of appreciative attention. Focusing on your victories here can help deliberately stall the adaptation process for yourself and, if you were to employ this within your organization, hopefully your ‘movement’ more generally by extracting maximal appreciation and satisfaction through reflection. These small practices almost by design mandate an appreciation for those intrinsic developments of growth and intimacy rather than the bold and external effects of popularity and social victory.
Maybe you’re listening to me go on about how this tricky subjective phenomenon can be applied to larger sociocultural processes and thinking, “Idiot! Society is not the human mind! Why must you always be drawing X as Y body politic comparators as if they have any bearing on the world?” And I think I would agree with you. I regularly find myself saying, “I’m not really a big body politic believer…” and then providing some physiological explanation for the social topic being discussed. Probably this is just a side effect of my entire life revolving around the intricacies of the human body and the mind which rides along with it. At the same time, I can’t help but attach to these seemingly helpful analogies. The world around me seems to be suffering some psychotic relationship from failed adaptations to our new achievements. Partially we can’t seem to believe that we actually have that new shiny sports car of closer equality and expanded personal liberties. I lay much of the responsibility for this condition at the feet of once powerful organizations that fought to protect and expand human rights. The actual experiential impact of their accomplishments is currently percolating through our culture. It is manifesting in the lives of numerous young adults from various historically oppressed groups who are beginning to thrive and will continue to do so because of these historically valiant battles.
But the warriors from those battles are still around and there is now a class of citizens and a slew of organizations that operate as political war junkies. They’ve seen the heat of battle, felt the adrenaline of culture war firefights, and witnessed the true benefits of their service. How is one to return home, back to the placid life of peacetime housekeeping and the drone of daily nine-to-five duty, after such experiences? They adapt to the outcomes of their victory and begin the hunt for the next great conquest. This cycle ends up with us collectively ignoring these past victories because, “Look those same great organizations and freedom fighters are still out there on the front lines! Glory be unto them and whatever righteous cause they have found!”
A healthy society and a functioning political action organization know when they can declare victory. A stable social system knows how to celebrate and keep fresh the memories of its great achievements. While those who adapt to their newfound freedoms are bound to forget them.
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*This ignores those individuals who teeter into psychiatric illness due to these potentially traumatic events. While many people have brief periods of difficulty following potentially traumatic events, only 5-20% will go on to have Acute Stress Disorder, and only ~8% will develop full-blown PTSD. These conditions are partially defined by a failure of the hedonic adaptive process.
**Some may complain that the phenomenon I’m describing here is more fitting with Scope Creep or some other term like it, and while I do think the term would fit here, Mission Creep seems more appropriate as it is based on prior successes and therefore has a more positive linear hedonic effect.
Lyubomirsky, S. (2011). Hedonic adaptation to positive and negative experiences. Oxford University Press.
Diener, E., Lyubomirsky, S., & King, L. (2005). The benefits of frequent positive affect: Does happiness lead to success. Psychological Bulletin, 131(6), 803-855.
Lykken, D., & Tellegen, A. (1996). Happiness is a stochastic phenomenon. Psychological Science, 7(3), 186–189. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1996.tb00355.x
Lyubomirsky, S., Sheldon, K. M., & Schkade, D. (2005). Pursuing happiness: The architecture of sustainable change. Review of general psychology, 9(2), 111-131.