The Truth About Happiness
The Hedonic Treadmill
Working in a creative medium is taxing. I’ve always imagined I’ve got a health bar with two sides, both representing energy, and while the red one is my physical energy, the blue one, my mental energy, anything that takes extensive amounts of brain power, that’s the mental stuff. My thought process is like this, there’s only a limited amount of energy for each day in the health bar. Some day’s you start with more physical energy, and vice versa. Some days there’s none, and other days you start full. The idea is you need to keep some of each of the health bars reserved for the stuff you want to do. If you work full time like I do, 40 hours a week is spent just on work related activities, plus drive time and a myriad of other factors and responsibilities. But a fair amount of energy can be spent in both categories by the time you arrive home for the evening, and after all the “life maintenance” stuff is taken care of.
This thought experiment has been in my head for a long time, it helps me to understand where I’m putting my energy and why some days I’ve got nothing left in the tank for anything creative. As it turns out, I was just experiencing the hedonic treadmill.
You can look into this deeper but long story short, each one of us has a base level of “happiness” that regardless of the frequency or occurrences of positive or negative events in our lives, given enough time, we all return to a baseline “normal” feeling. For some, this base level is very high, for others, low. For most it feels relatively neutral, you’re happy but not overtly so.
Understanding this concept might help more people who do not participate in creative spaces to comprehend the ups and downs of those that do. Completing a major project, having a kick ass show or festival, releasing a song, unveiling a new video, all of these things are extremely exciting and it’s what all the time spent behind the scenes lead up to. But there are expectations that are different for every artist, goals and numbers and metrics that we can judge the success of a release or event. With a show or event, it’s relatively easy to see in the moment if it’s successful, based on attendance and crowd participation. With a song or video release, we have to rely on the numbers and metrics provided by each of the websites where the art lives.
The reason I bring all of this up is to explain that regardless of success or failure, there’s always a return “home”, where your body and mind consider your base line. It’s also why the lead up to some big release or event, can be so exciting, building that expectation, then immediately plummet below your baseline soon after. It’s not that there’s false expectations of success, you have very little control of how a piece of art is received. I think where that disappointment comes from is some of these projects can be quite taxing taking a lot of time and energy and sometimes money to pull off, and for there to be lukewarm reception to something that took a lot of investment, can feel like a failure. Unfortunately, we do not live in a meritocracy and success is not judged simply by how much work you put into something.
Everything is temporary, the bad times, the good, the mediocre. The best thing any of us can do is acknowledge those feelings and live in them for the moment they exist. Feeling euphoric? Milk it for all it’s worth. Disappointed that the “thing” didn’t go quite how you thought it would? Be sad or mad about it. You can experience all of these feelings and emotions with the full expectation that you’ll eventually return to your base line. Work with full effort while you can, rest when you can’t.
Life is complicated, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to it, but one thing is for sure, everything… EVERYTHING is temporary and knowing that hopefully makes you better appreciate each opportunity to do something great and provides relief for the times when life feels at it’s worst.