America's Hedonic Hedonism

In 1971 the psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell studied two groups of people whose lives had just been upended in opposite directions: recent lottery winners and recent accident victims left paraplegic. A year out, both groups had drifted back to roughly the same level of reported happiness they’d started at. The winners weren’t nearly as elated as anyone would have guessed. The paraplegics weren’t nearly as devastated. Brickman and Campbell named the mechanism the hedonic treadmill: a psychological set point that a person’s mood keeps returning to no matter which direction their circumstances move. Good news gets absorbed. Bad news gets absorbed. The treadmill doesn’t grade the outcome. It just resets the baseline and starts measuring change against the new one, forever, in both directions equally.

That single finding explains a lot more than personal happiness. Apply it across a population instead of across one person’s timeline and you get what economists call relative deprivation: satisfaction tracks comparison to whoever’s around you, not any absolute measure of what you actually have. A household with a paid-off home, two reliable cars, and full health insurance, none of that in dispute, none of it hypothetical, can still report feeling poor, not because the treadmill is lying to them, but because the treadmill was never built to register absolute resources in the first place. It registers distance from a reference point, and the reference point is infinitely swappable. Move next door to someone richer and the treadmill recalibrates instantly, with no regard for the fact that nothing about the household’s actual life just changed.

This is the mechanism sitting underneath a very old switch in vocabulary, poverty to inequality, and the switch matters more than it looks like it does. Poverty names a floor: a specific, measurable threshold of material need, hunger, exposure, lack of shelter, something a society can in principle eliminate and then point to the number and say, done. Inequality names a gap, usually expressed through something like the Gini coefficient, the statistical measure of how unevenly income or wealth is spread across a population, and a gap has no floor, because it is defined entirely by distance to whoever sits at the top of the distribution. There will always be a top. A movement that measures itself against poverty has a finish line. A movement that measures itself against inequality does not, and the hedonic treadmill is exactly why: it cannot register an absolute state as sufficient, only a rate of change relative to a target that keeps sliding.

None of this is new, and pretending it is new is itself part of the trick. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about the mechanism in the 1880s under the name ressentiment, the slow, structural resentment felt by those without power toward those with it, and his darker claim was that ressentiment doesn’t stay honest about what it is. Left alone long enough, he argued, it performs a moral inversion: the qualities of the powerful, strength, wealth, ambition, get relabeled as vices, and the qualities of the powerless, humility, poverty, self-denial, get relabeled as virtues, not because anyone examined the qualities and concluded this, but because the relabeling lets resentment call itself justice instead of envy. Envy, historically, was a vice. It sat on the same list as gluttony and sloth, something a person was supposed to recognize in themselves and work against. Ressentiment’s whole function is to launder it, take the exact same feeling and hand it a courtroom instead of a confessional.

That’s the actual shift from class as it used to be argued to class as it gets argued now. Class used to describe treatment: hours worked, wages paid, bodies broken in factories, children in mills, conditions a labor movement could document and demand be changed, and once changed, stay changed. What passes for class conversation today runs increasingly on feeling: not what was done to you, but what you’re owed relative to someone who has more, a claim that can never be fully paid out because, per the treadmill, satisfaction was never going to arrive at a number. Need, once a plain word for a physical fact, gets used increasingly interchangeably with want, a psychological state with no natural ceiling, and the merger of the two words does real work: it borrows the moral seriousness that used to be reserved for hunger and applies it to preference.

None of this requires anyone involved to be lying. The treadmill runs the same whether the person on it is sincere or cynical, and most of them are sincere. What it requires is only that a society solve enough of its actual material floor that the treadmill has nothing left to recalibrate against except rank, and that the vocabulary built for the older, realer fight, exploitation, suffering, class war, gets kept in circulation because it still carries weight, even after the thing underneath it changed. Vice becomes virtue not through anyone’s decree, but because the treadmill needs a target, and a virtue with an infinite target is far more durable political fuel than a vice anyone might eventually be talked out of.