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Hedonic adaptation is an event or mechanism that reduces the affective impact of substantial emotional events. Generally, hedonic adaptation involves a happiness "set point", whereby humans generally maintain a constant level of happiness throughout their lives, despite events that occur in their environment.
Eysenck has written and co-written many publications, including several textbooks. In the late 1990s, he developed the theory of the "hedonic treadmill", [2] stating that humans are predisposed by genetics to plateau at a certain level of happiness, and that the occurrence of novel happy events merely elevates this level temporarily.
The paradox of hedonism and the hedonic treadmill are proposed psychological barriers to the hedonist goal of long-term happiness. As one of the oldest philosophical theories, hedonism was discussed by the Cyrenaics and Epicureans in ancient Greece , the Charvaka school in ancient India , and Yangism in ancient China .
Portrait of Denis Diderot Louis-Michel van Loo, 1767. Denis Diderot described this effect in his 1769 essay "Regrets for my Old Dressing Gown".. The Diderot effect is a phenomenon that occurs when acquiring a new possession leads to a spiral of consumption that results in the acquisition of even more possessions.
The concept of measuring hedonic utility arose in Utilitarianism, with Classical Utilitarians acknowledging that the actual pleasure might not be easy to express quantitatively as a numeric value. Bentham, the early proponent of the concept, declared that the happiness is a sequence of episodes , each characterized by its intensity and duration.
The second explanation appeals to hedonic adaptation and the fact that people get used to having more income and higher living standards. [10] [11] For example, the theory of hedonic adaption would suggest that progress from iPhone 5s, to iPhone 6s, to iPhone 7s, to iPhone 8s and so on, have not made a lasting improvement to happiness.
The paradox of hedonism, also called the pleasure paradox, refers to the practical difficulties encountered in the pursuit of pleasure.For the hedonist, constant pleasure-seeking may not yield the most actual pleasure or happiness in the long term when consciously pursuing pleasure interferes with experiencing it.
He discovered a preference drift (comparable to the hedonic treadmill), whereby the WFI of the individual depends on current income and shifts with rising income to the right. Kapteyn and Van Praag discovered reference drift, which means that individual welfare depends on the income of the reference group members.