This last year has been one of the most transformation for me across all aspects of my life in how I make decisions and choose to live the life I want – socially, professionally, and romantically. Much of these decisions are guarded-railed by the phrase “just because I can doesn’t mean I should”. Just because I have enough friends to go out 4 nights a week doesn’t mean I should. Just because I can afford with my garden leave to travel to a different city every week doesn’t mean I should. And just because I can go on dates with three different women a week doesn’t mean I should.
The concept of the hedonic treadmill is an important one here. Imagine taking a vacation to a remote beach island where you enjoy a beautiful, golden sunset on the first night. That sounds like the dream, right? Now imagine the next night having a nice, smoky scotch on the rocks (or your drink of choice), watching and enjoying the same sunset. Doesn’t that sound even better? And maybe let’s add a great Cuban cigar as well, maybe with a personal chef hand delivering freshly charred wagyu steaks. Whatever the progression of hedonism is for you, there’s always a “next” step, something that if you just had in front of you, you’d be able to enjoy the moment that much more. Soon enough, that golden sunset on the first night doesn’t seem quite as beautiful by itself anymore.
We are all susceptible to this treadmill because in one sense, why isn’t more “enjoyment” better? Even when I make myself breakfast, I sometimes fall into this trap. I sit down on my nice comfy couch and open a new YouTube video. As my video runs in the background, I pull out my phone to check social media notifications from last night. Maybe then I even pop open my chess.com account and play a few quick blitz games. And before I know it, all I’m left with is a cold, uneaten breakfast.
Knowing and prioritizing what matters most becomes key. To take the traveling example above, when I started garden leave, a friend asked why I didn’t just pack my bags and live in Europe for 6 months. To which I answered because my current priority is to continue deepening my relationships in NYC with people that I care about the most. And while I have had my fair share of travel these last couple of months, even while on the beautiful beaches of Barcelona, I find myself frequently missing NYC for the same exact reason – that my priority is to my relationships and everything else is secondary. And while going out for the 4th night in a row may sound appealing on the surface (a mistake I admittedly made last weekend), if that means being too hungover the next day to spend quality time with the handful of my friends that I care about, maybe taking the next step forward on the treadmill isn’t the right call.
For practical tips, there’s a ton of tweaks I’ve incorporated into my own life to limit the noise and hedonic treadmill as much as I can. From keeping my phone on Do Not Disturb and removing social media notifications. To exhaustively combing my friends list to 80/20 down to the few relationships I truly value the most and want to spend asymmetrical time and energy on. To even deleting my dating apps so I can focus my emotional energy on those I find truly special.
From a macro (life) perspective, this brings up an important distinction between “efficiency” and “efficacy”, where the former is defined as pure quantity output and the latter is being able to focus on the few things that matter. I would actually consider myself a highly in-effective individual (blame my borderline ADHD), but one who focuses on having high efficacy. Where reflecting on my life, I can point out a handful of “gut” decisions I made that have asymmetrically impacted the outcome of my life (e.g., learning pick up to overcome my social anxiety, committing fully to a business fraternity in college, living in a 70-person SF co-op based off a random Facebook marketplace ad, and even deciding to move to NYC despite my entire social and professional network being based out west).
As someone who gets anxious on whether I’m doing enough, i.e. having enough “efficiency”, the reason I am the person I am today is because of these handful of decisions to bring me closer to the life I want to live, and I am incredibly grateful for being able to commit to each and every experience. Because in the end, it really isn’t about having that scotch, or a personal chef. It’s about learning to enjoy the sunset for what it is.
Random Musings 