What is Hedonic Adaptation and How Can it Turn You Into a Sucka?

[hector.mustache]

You have to adress the cause and not the effects. This is my comment :

Using the knowledge around hedonic adaption is very powerful. The problem is, most people cannot apply it because a mix of their ego/blind spots/subconscious is self sabotaging them.

Subconscious beliefs are running us 99.5% of the time. Like this advice dozens of self - help books cannot change anything either. In my experience, the only chance to open the gate for radical and lasting change is the release of subconscious pain and beliefs (based on the past) through self-centered meditation, sometimes with help of spiritual seeds.

@hector.mustache

[RetiredAt63]

And for those of us not ready to embark on that journey -
compare yourself down as well as up (i.e. look at those not as well off).

Go camping, come home and appreciate your house.

Drop a level of convenience - if you have a dishwasher, wash your dishes in the sink.  Then pretend the tap doesn't work and carry water in from elsewhere in the house.  Pretend the clothes dryer is broken and hang your clothes to dry (outside or in), you may never go back.  Pretend the clothes washer is broken, realize how much convenience it adds to your life.  Same with AC, same with colder house in winter (warm slippers and sweaters make 19^oC perfectly comfortable).

Same applies to other areas of life.

[EarthSurfer]

Seneca's Letter 18 to Lucilius "On Festivals and Fasting" really captures the spirit of RetiredAt63's statement.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/Letter_18

5. I am so firmly determined, however, to test the constancy of your mind that, drawing from the teachings of great men, I shall give you also a lesson: Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with coarse and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: "Is this the condition that I feared?"

8. There is no reason, however, why you should think that you are doing anything great; for you will merely be doing what many thousands of slaves and many thousands of poor men are doing every day. But you may credit yourself with this item, – that you will not be doing it under compulsion, and that it will be as easy for you to endure it permanently as to make the experiment from time to time. Let us practise our strokes on the "dummy"; let us become intimate with poverty, so that Fortune may not catch us off our guard. We shall be rich with all the more comfort, if we once learn how far poverty is from being a burden.

I strongly recommend spending a few months backpacking to understand how amazing hot showers and flush toilets are. Spending a growing season on a subsistence farm where no food comes from the store will make the smallest grocery store seem like an amazing bazaar. (Funny, a month with out internet made me wonder why I really needed it...)