We’ve all read stories about lottery winners who hit it big and soon lose everything. Sometimes they end up in debt, on the street, or incarcerated. Sometimes they even take their own lives.
For the lottery winners who end up this way, it is usually a combination of unwise behaviors that leads to their downfall. They impulsively give far too much to friends, family, churches, or charity. They go on wild spending sprees. They often engage in substance abuse and degenerate gambling.
However, despite some misleading statistics that are often repeated online – such as the urban legend that 70 percent of lottery winners end up in bankruptcy – a decidedly small percentage of big-prize lottery winners actually end up squandering it all.
Most reasonably well-adjusted people will have positive experiences after a large windfall lottery prize.
The huge relief of financial stress enhances their personal relationships, and the money affords them opportunities to spend more time with family and friends. Also, the removal of their financial burdens gives winners a much greater sense of confidence and security.[1]
So, what causes a minority of lottery winners to spiral uncontrollably to tragic ends? It might start with their inability to get off what’s known as the hedonic treadmill.
What is the hedonic treadmill?
It feels good to be able to help others. It feels good to purchase things we’ve had our eye on but couldn’t comfortably afford. Alcohol, drugs, and gambling can also bring us a rush of temporary pleasure and excitement.
But the pleasure we get from the immediate experience of positive emotions doesn’t last. We quickly adapt to these feelings, and we often end up pursuing ever more of the things we desire just to experience some short-lived happiness.
It sure felt good to help your brother get back on his feet. Why not help your struggling cousin? It felt good to donate to the Humane Society. Why not donate to the ASPCA? You like the way your neighbors admired your new Mercedes. Why not spring for that new Sea Ray and be the envy of the marina, too? Winning the lottery felt awesome. Why not head for Vegas?
Hedonic adaptation refers to our tendency to return to a relatively set or stable happiness level after positive or negative life events. If we continuously chase positive feelings in pursuit of short-term happiness, we find ourselves on the hedonic treadmill.
Even when our life circumstances seem to dramatically improve, we begin to revise our expectations based on our new status quo. This can lead us to set ever higher goals, or to desire ever more material goods.
The hedonic treadmill was originally proposed by psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell. While people may briefly react to positive or negative events, they explained, happiness and unhappiness are transitory because we soon return to hedonic neutrality.
People continue to pursue happiness, though, because they “incorrectly believe that greater happiness lies just around the corner in the next goal accomplished, the next social relationship obtained, or the next problem solved.”[2]
Building on Brickman and Campbell’s theory, subsequent research implies that there may be significant individual differences in baseline happiness, and we aren’t all necessarily hedonically “neutral.” We may have multiple happiness “set points” that may move in different directions. This research also suggests that happiness can and does change, and that interventions to increase happiness can work.[3]
While individual coping strategies and personality traits might help us avoid the hedonic treadmill, one proactive strategy for escaping the treadmill is to select better life goals.
Happiness and life goals
Our life goals impact our subjective happiness.
Research indicates that prioritizing competitive goals (those that relate to materialism, achievement, and success) can reduce happiness. Conversely, prioritizing noncompetitive goals (those that relate to altruism, family life, and relationships) promotes greater life satisfaction.[4]
People who place a high priority on materialistic goals and values tend to:[5]
- Consume more products
- Incur more debt
- Have worse money management skills
- Have more gambling problems
- Engage in riskier health behaviors
- Be more image and status obsessed
- Have more negative social attitudes toward others
- Be more narcissistic
- Be less empathic
- Have superficial interpersonal relationships
- Have difficulty balancing work and family commitments
- Engage in fewer prosocial and more antisocial behaviors
- Care less about corporate social responsibility
- Hold more prejudicial beliefs
- Be more ecologically destructive
- Report higher burnout and lower job satisfaction
- Demonstrate worse learning outcomes
- Feel less free
- Feel less connected
- Express lower levels of need satisfaction and personal well-being
The good news is that as damaging as it might be to place outsized emphasis on materialistic goals, we can gradually get off the hedonic treadmill and improve our well-being by shifting our goal focus.
This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have materialistic goals. We all have certain needs and wants that require money to realize. Rather, it just means that we need to understand how the attainment of materialistic and non-materialistic pursuits affects our happiness so that we can prioritize our goals accordingly.
Even when we achieve our material goals, we don’t necessarily experience a comparable net gain in overall life satisfaction. The relationship between money and happiness is indistinct.
The extent to which money buys happiness depends largely on how we spend that money.
Research shows that people derive significantly greater happiness from experiential purchases than from material purchases.[6]A vacation in the Maldives is likely to bring you greater happiness than installing new Calacatta marble countertops in your kitchen.
But why are experiential purchases more gratifying? There are four likely reasons:[7]
- Experiences don’t fade into the background so quickly. We adapt more quickly to things than to experiences. Material things quickly become part of our environment, and we soon take them for granted.
- Experiences give us cherished memories. We are happy with things when we use them, but they don’t give us much to reflect on. Experiences (positive ones, anyway) provide delightful memories that we can revisit throughout life.
- Experiences are more closely tied to our identities. Most people see their experiential purchases as more self-defining than their material purchases. Anyone with the means can buy the same things we can, but our experiences are more unique to us.
- Experiences are more likely to be shared with others. We are social animals, and experiences often involve active engagement and positive interaction with other people.
Also, monetary gifts to others, charitable donations, and other types of prosocial spending usually makes us happier than spending money on ourselves. Our happiness is closely related to the quality of our social relationships, and prosocial spending tends to improve our connections with others.[8]
Similar to the way we adapt more quickly to material goods than to experiences, we adapt more quickly to large, infrequent pleasures than to small, frequent ones.
Research reveals that it is the frequency – rather than the intensity – of positive experiences that correlates most strongly with happiness. Frequent small pleasures bring us more happiness than rare peak experiences.[9]
Align your goals with your values
The French literary laureate and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupery said, “If you want to understand the meaning of happiness, you must see it as a reward and not as a goal.”
Too many people see happiness as a goal in itself, rather than as a temporary state of well-being that results from having achieved goals that are aligned with our higher values.
Even people who would typically describe themselves as being “happy” don’t walk around in a perpetual state of bliss. They experience both positive and negative emotions just like everyone else.
In fact, negative emotions are good for us. As psychologist David B. Feldman explains, “If we felt happy all the time, we might end up missing opportunities to improve ourselves.”
The key is to align our goals with our deeper values. For most of us, our most important values don’t relate primarily to pleasure or material gain. If your highest-priority values only relate to pleasure and material success, you may need to do some soul-searching and reprioritize.
Of course, most of us have some desires that relate to pleasure and material success. Usually, though, the attainment of these desires is seen as the reward for achieving our loftier goals rather than as our primary life purpose. The more we focus on our superficial aims, the longer we stay on the hedonic treadmill.
Our values drive our motivation, and we want to make sure that our goal-directed actions reflect those values.
Most of us choose an assortment of values that shape our life and guide our behavior. Sometimes, though, these values are not always consciously selected, and we are therefore only vaguely aware of the exact combination of values we use to determine our actions.
It can be helpful to occasionally assess and clarify our personal values. Fortunately, there are some tools that can help us conduct a values inventory:
- The Personal Values Assessment is a short survey designed to help you discover your authentic motivations, that is, the values that matter to and motivate you.
- The Portrait Values Questionnaire is based on social psychologist Shalom Schwartz’s theory of basic human values, which defines and orders values based on their compatible and conflicting motivations, expression of self-protection versus growth, and personal versus social focus.
- The Valued Living Questionnaire assesses how consistently an individual is living in accordance with their values by exploring how those values have influenced their everyday actions in the immediate past.
Once we have a clearer picture of the values that are really important to us, we should select goals that are consistent with these values. By doing this, our aspirations will always be congruent with our intrinsic motivation, and we will not waste so much time and energy on superficial pursuits that distract us from our deeper purpose or vision.
Whenever we choose a new goal, we should always ask ourselves if it is compatible with our values.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with materialistic goals. We all have material wants and needs. As long as we ensure that our goals align with our values, we will properly prioritize our material goals and stay off the hedonic treadmill.
