He’s so happy and easy going and it’s so nice to plop him down on a blanket with toys and know that he’ll be able to entertain himself. If you don’t push yourself to think about how their stage of childhood has changed, you can kind of ignore the progress they are making, if that makes any sense? Like I enjoy Will SO MUCH MORE right now than I did at say 3 or 4 months. Like I think about the different phases of babies/toddlers and how you can get kind of trapped in thinking “I’m so tired” so I try to remember that sleep was worse X months ago or more tantrums were happening X weeks ago. I am sure there are other ways we are susceptible to it, though. I feel like people who are extremely logical/practical and not swayed by what others are doing and focus on their own goals are maybe less susceptible to it? When I hear about people buying fancy cars or building or moving into expensive/huge homes I just think, “good for you, not for me.” But my husband and I are both super frugal so I think that removes some of the natural tendency to want a better car, bigger house, etc etc. I feel like certain personality types are less susceptible to hedonic adaptation. The power would go out all the time there! And she actually lived in the mountains where there was no electricity! So that trip really made me appreciate all the things I take for granted here in the US!! Which reminds me of my time visiting my friend in the Dominican Republic when she was in the peace corp. So yes, reliable electricity is definitely something to be grateful for. I was pretty cranky about that, too, because the boys were already up a lot and I think the power outage cutting out the white noise resulted in Will waking up an extra time. Luckily it was probably only out for maybe 30 minutes? We also had an outage earlier in the week during the middle of the night when we had strong winds. I was also super super annoyed and worried about what in the world we would feed the boys. We had a power outage recently, too! It was on Sunday RIGHT when I started to make dinner in the instant pot. In fact you’ve “moved up” in t he world, but emotionally it feels like you are where you used to be.” “And the idea of the “treadmill” is that you’re walking, but if feels like you’re staying in place. Shankar then replies about the idea of being on a “hedonic treadmill”: The bottom line is that hedonic adaptation leads us to want even more than we have, so we’re never quite satisfied.“ And another thing that happens is that our social comparisons change, so when we move into that bigger house in the new neighborhood, suddenly we notice our neighbors have houses that might be even nicer than ours, or they drive cars that are nicer than ours…so our social comparisons change, which also leads to kind of wanting even more. I certainly have friends who are constantly talking about improving their houses even though their houses are perfectly beautiful and enormous. So now when we live in the bigger house, that becomes our new normal…so then we think, well, maybe an extra bedroom would be even nicer, or hmm, maybe a deck would be nicer! When we get the job that we want, when we get more money, have a new relationship that we really like…what happens after those positive changes is that first our expectations or aspirations change. “ There are two aspects of hedonic adaptation that are really important. Here’s a little clip about it (Sonja Lyubomirsky speaking): Hedonic Adaptation: Meaning, getting what we thought we always wanted doesn’t end up truly affecting our overall happiness as much as we might think it would. In case you aren’t familiar, basically, hedonic adaptation means that we get used to whatever is around us (positive OR negative), and pretty quickly return to our sort of “baseline” level of happiness. But I always find the idea of hedonic adaptation to be just so TRUE! I love hearing about it, because it’s just such a great reminder that it exists. This is a very well known theory, so it wasn’t earth shattering knowledge to me, exactly. In one part, she discussed the concept of hedonic adaptation.
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