i think it's it's hard for us to sometimes remember that happiness is more often than not a state rather than um an actual sort of lifestyle um or or kind of a permanent uh sort of feeling it's it's a state and it's a state because of the hedonic treadmill the fact that we appear to have some sort of baseline happiness so it doesn't matter if i mean they've done studies with people that won the lottery yeah i was just about to use that as an example yeah you know people that won the lottery and people
that um ended up with uh kind of uh traumatic leg injuries where they couldn't walk again and both individuals ended up i mean the people that weren't able to walk again initially were incredibly distraught and sad and the people that won the lottery were extremely happy in the beginning but within i think four or five years their baseline happiness was pretty much the same they weren't any happier or sadder yeah and it's i mean it's it's kind of sad in the way that makes you go well there's no goal i'll achieve that'll make me happy
permanently but it's also kind of a good thing in a way because it makes you realize that your psychology is very adaptive that you know a lot of bad things can happen but it actually won't be as bad as as you might think it will be a lot of it's the worrying yeah that's true i've never never thought of it like that i've always just thought of the first part of what you said how it feels like there's nothing we could ever achieve to reach what we want but then i never looked at it that
way like you can also recover from super traumatic things because of whatever that our neuroplasticity or whatever it is that's that's super interesting yeah i don't i don't know well and and you bring up a good point with the the jumping or like the flipping and the you know like all the stuff you'd like really like doing for the sake of it because a lot of psychological research points to the idea that happiness is a state like we've established but if you pursue meaningful goals and by meaningful goals it usually revolves something i don't know
if you've heard of flow psychology but the sort of idea that you need to find something that is both matched in challenge and skill yeah you're kind of focused and it's like fulfilling in itself and there's temporal change um that if you kind of find goals like that like learning to play chess learning a language um yeah doing gymnastics something that's actually fulfilling not because you're doing it in order to get something it's what they call autotellic it's uh meaningful in itself as a side effect not only do you do people usually experience more meaning
but as a side effect they usually experience what they call hedonic benefits which is kind of happiness or enhanced subjective well-being and that's so so the it seems to be the best sort of life you could live just based off of these studies is one where you're pursuing meaningful goals and as a side effect sometimes you achieve states of happiness but you shouldn't expect this happiness to be you know static
