How to Cheat the Thief of Joy

Two billionaires, Aron Mast and Mork Crewman, are quite proud of their yachts.¹ Crewman’s is 300 feet long, and Mast’s is 400 feet long. Both of them could more than meet all their sailing-related desires with a 300 foot yacht. They might even be fully satisfied with mere 200-footers. But they also both care about having a bigger yacht than the other. So Crewman commissions the construction of a 500 foot yacht. Not to be outdone, Mast has a 600-foot yacht built. At the end of this process, Mast and Crewman are basically exactly where they started. Both of them have yachts that are more than intrinsically sufficient, though Crewman’s is still relatively deficient—Mast’s is still bigger. What about the 1100-yacht-feet-worth of fiberglass, steel, aluminum, and, wood—not to mention labor—that went into building those new yachts? That was all wasted. It’s hard not to imagine there could be wiser uses—uses that would leave someone better off—for all those materials and all that manpower.

One of the fundamental concepts in economics is that of an “externality”. An externality is a cost or benefit associated with a transaction that affects people who aren’t party to the transaction, and which is not reflected in prices. If my railroad throws sparks onto nearby fields that sometimes cause fires that burn crops, that’s an externality. Usually, discussion of externalities as a practical problem concerns how to get parties to “internalize” the costs of their activities. Perhaps the railroad should be subjected to a Pigouvian tax. Or maybe if the railroad owner can bargain with the owner of the nearby fields, they’ll reach an efficient solution.²

Spending resources and effort to move up a ranking is an unusually pure example of an externality. We might call it an “intrinsic” externality. It’s not intrinsic to operating a railroad that it must cause costly fires. We can imagine all sorts of ways the value associated with operating a railroad could be achieved without the cost of starting fires. Maybe some technological innovation could prevent the railroad from throwing off sparks. Or maybe it could be routed in such a way that it doesn’t pass near any tinderboxes. Typical examples of externalities are “extrinsic” externalities. But there’s no way someone can become #1 in a ranking without knocking someone else out of the top spot. It’s intrinsic to Mast getting what he wants—having the bigger yacht—that Crewman fails to get what he wants.

If the only things we cared about were our positions on rankings like these—in the economists’ lingo, if all goods were positional goods—then we’d be left with an extremely bleak picture of the human condition. It would be impossible for us to collectively improve our lot.³ Luckily that’s not the case. While we do care about our positions in rankings, that’s not all we care about. In the example as I imagined it, up until 300 feet, there’s room for both Mast and Crewman to get more of what they want, yacht-wise. While some economic activity looks like trying to build the bigger yacht, plenty does not. I have no idea which of my acquaintances, if any, suffer from hemorrhoids; people tend to be private about that sort of thing. If I do have any such acquaintances, I won’t be worse off in any way if they pay the makers of Preparation H for rectal relief.

This suggests a kind of public policy objective that I don’t think I’ve seen much discussed. We should be on the lookout for ways to shift people’s economic activity away from pursuing zero-sum status competition, and towards everything else; fewer yachts, more hemorrhoid cream. What might that look like in practice? I’m not really sure. In our example, through the power of stipulation we could determine that a ban or prohibitive tax on >300 foot yachts would be efficient. In the real world, it’s much harder to say, as it’s much harder to identify economic activity whose sole effect is to improve the relative position of the actor in some ranking. Moreover, I’d be nervous about empowering anyone—even democratic majorities—to decide which apparently self-regarding activities really amount to negative sum status competition. Public choice and all that. So I don’t think there are obvious public policy implications of the above, though I do think it’s a rich vein to mine.⁴

Perhaps the best example I can think of would be certain kinds of cosmetic surgery. Consider height. Within the normal range, being taller has only relative benefits. Famously, taller people earn more, and do better on the dating market. When someone who is short has costly limb-lengthening surgery,⁵ they use medical materials and the time and expertise of medical professionals for the purpose of moving up in a ranking. They’re only better off to the extent that everybody else they’re now taller than is now (a tiny bit) worse off. I don’t think it’s absurd to think that it would be good public policy to discourage purely cosmetic limb lengthening surgery, perhaps through taxation.

The Hedonic Treadmill

But I don’t really want to talk about public policy in this post. Rather, I wanted to use the somewhat analytically cleaner example of zero-sum status competition as a kind of jumping off point to talk about the related, but distinct, set of issues known as the “hedonic treadmill”, and how it can be addressed through private policy. The metaphor of the hedonic treadmill involves expending effort to get happier, while in fact staying right where you are. Just like Mast and Crewman, who collectively spend 1100-yacht-feet-worth of resources just to end up where they started, if you’re on the hedonic treadmill, your efforts to make yourself happier are ultimately fruitless.

The hedonic treadmill might involve status competition. I’m an academic philosopher, and we have lots of rankings. We rank journals, we rank departments, and like any other academics of course we can count citations. Here’s a fictionalized, but I think pretty realistic, picture of how an academic philosopher—call her Sophie—might find herself on a status-inflected version of the hedonic treadmill. In college, she decides to apply to graduate school. She reads and posts on message boards like Gradcafe, which is full of people sharing stories of getting rejected from lots of the programs they apply to. Relative to this population, people who get into top graduate programs seem extremely fortunate. They must be so happy! Lo and behold, Sophie is lucky enough to be accepted into her top choice graduate program. But now that she’s surrounded by other people who were also accepted to that program, it no longer feels unusually fortunate to have done so. Moreover, her peers don’t seem particularly content; they’re all stressing out about the academic job market. Plenty of people, even at top programs, don’t land a faculty position. What happens to such people? Does anybody know? There are rumors that some of them find work outside of academia(!), and even enjoy it(?!?!?), but that’s hard to imagine. No, the ones who get faculty jobs are the lucky ones, and Sophie is sure that if she manages to enter their ranks, all will be well.

You see where this is heading. Sophie gets an academic job, but her standards keep shifting. You know you can look up salaries at public universities? Do you see what the philosophers are paid at Rutgers? (It’s a lot.) Even the very few, extremely influential, can unfavorably compare themselves to the mighty dead, or can worry that they’ll be a failure if their work won’t still be read in 200 years.

Seems like a bad state to be in! And sadly, it’s not just limited to academic philosophers. Of course, this is a very old observation. Entire philosophical traditions have been built around the idea that the satisfaction that comes from getting what you want is fleeting. Buddhism takes it as a central insight; Stoics counseled detachment from the things that slip away; I’m given to understand it’s a major theme in Schopenhauer’s work too.

From an evolutionary point of view, our tendency to keep shifting the goalposts so that they’re always out of reach may be a feature rather than a bug. Being content is maladaptive. If things are going well—if you have food, shelter, resources—that’s not a reason to relax; it’s a reason to push harder, to have more children, or to better position the ones you already have to reproduce in turn. A creature wired to always want a bit more, never quite satisfied, is a creature more likely to flood the next generation with copies of its genes.

But I’m an optimist by disposition; I don’t think our lot is quite as hopeless as the above might suggest. As I see it, there are two broad strategies—distinct, but compatible—for mitigating and/or avoiding the hedonic treadmill.

First, we can lean in to the human tendency to judge how well things our lives are going comparatively, but manipulate our bases for comparison so that we’re doing pretty well. (This strategy will further subdivide into two variants.) Second, we can try to find satisfaction in activities and projects whose value is non-comparative.

Cheating the Thief of Joy

How can we manipulate our bases for comparison? One strategy is nicely illustrated by a scene from the 2020 Netflix adaptation of Dracula. It uses the old Rip van Winkle trope of letting a character who’s been asleep for a long time see the present through the eyes of the past. Here’s how Dracula interacts with a contemporary, lower-middle-class English woman, Kathleen:

Dracula: Kathleen, isn’t it? What’s wrong with your servants, Kathleen? Is it their day off? I’m assuming you have staff. You’re clearly very wealthy.

Kathleen: …wealthy?

Dracula: Well look at all this. [He points at the telly] That thing? These things? [He’s walking round the kitchen area, yanking open doors] All this food?? Food in boxes with pictures of food on the front - there’s nothing like labouring the point, is there? That machine outside—Bob calls it a car—is it yours?

Kathleen: [nods]

Dracula: This treasure trove is your house?

Kathleen: It’s a dump.

Dracula: But look at it all, it’s amazing. It’s so warm. There are only two draughts. The furniture is new. That’s the most extraordinary clock I’ve ever seen. Kathleen, I’ve been a nobleman for four hundred years. I have lived in castles and palaces, among the richest people of any age. I have never stood anywhere, in greater luxury, than surrounds me now. This is a chamber of marvels. There isn’t a King or Queen or Emperor I have ever known - or eaten - who would step into this room and agree to ever leave it again. I knew the future would bring wonders. But I didn’t know it would make them ordinary.⁶

Dracula thinks this is the height of luxury.

One more example from fiction. One of my favorite novels is The Good Earth, which tells the story of an early 20th century Chinese peasant, Wang Lung. At the beginning of the book, he’s desperately poor. He and his family are constantly on the brink of starvation, one child grows up as a “poor fool” due to malnutrition-induced mental disability, and his wife kills another at birth when she knows there will not be enough food to keep the infant alive. By the end of the book, through a combination of hard work, luck, and theft, he’s rich. You’d think he’d be grateful! But now he has a new set of problems. For instance, his wife is old and ugly, with broad, coarse features; he wants a young concubine like his new friends have. And he is willing to cause some considerable tension in his household to get one. While the portrayal of Wang Lung is generally sympathetic, by the end of the book you sort of want to scream at him to be grateful for how incredibly lucky he is. And yet, almost anybody reading the book today—certainly myself included—has a life that’s more comfortable than Wung Lung’s even at his richest.

As much as possible, I want to view my life through Dracula’s perspective, and to avoid Wang Lung’s mistakes. I think just having these archetypes in mind and frequently reminding myself of them helps. As I was writing this I went to the refrigerator to eat some strawberries. Most emperors in most of history couldn’t have cold strawberries on a whim. I was grateful.

So my #1 tactic for hacking our tendency to judge our lives comparatively is to try to constantly remind ourselves of how big the world is, both spatially and temporally, so that we get into the habit of comparing our lives to those of the vast numbers of people far less fortunate than us—if you’re reading a post on Substack, you are included in the “us”—rather than our similarly fortunate neighbors with bigger houses, or newer cars, or more citations.

But suppose you just can’t shake the habit of judging how well your life is going by comparing yourself to members of your (comparably fortunate) social circle. All is not lost! While status competition may seem to be inherently zero sum, it doesn’t have to be. I was recently reminded, reading a post by Brad Skow, that Robert Nozick pointed out that if there are multiple dimensions of status that people care about, and if people vary in which dimensions of status they care more about, then status competition can be positive sum. People can compete to be higher on the rankings they care more about—or can end up caring more about those rankings where they’re already towards the top—and can psychically devalue the rankings where they’re towards the bottom. Suppose there’s wealth and artistic talent, and the artists tend to be starving, while the wealthy tend to be philistines. Then everyone can be happy; the wealthy can congratulate themselves on their material success, and the artists can congratulate themselves on their creativity.

The best is when people specialize in multiple, uncorrelated—or even better, negatively correlated—dimensions of status, and shift which ones they emphasize based on who the salient comparison group is. Here’s how I do it. I’m a professor at a fancy university. I’ve progressed a ways along the treadmill Sophie was on. But if I put all my self-worth eggs in that basket, there’s no shortage of people I can unfavorably compare myself to. If I go to a philosophy conference, or even just a faculty meeting, I’ll have no trouble finding people who have published more, made more of an impact on their respective fields, etc. “But”, I can tell myself, “I could beat them up.”

Don’t laugh! I’ve been training in Brazillian Jiu Jitsu for quite awhile now, and regularly participate in small, Connecticut tournaments at the black belt level, where I win some and I lose some. The level of competition is not particularly high. When I occasionally find myself matched against elite grapplers slumming it in the local competition circuit, the vast gulf in skill is palpable. But fortunately, none of those people are professors!⁷ If there were an academic philosophy/Brazillian jiu jitsu analog of chessboxing—if you’ve never heard of it, you should follow the link right now—I might well be the best in the world.

You may think it’s childish for me to take any pride in the knowledge that I could beat somebody up. It probably doesn’t bother you at all, reader, that were we to fight, I’d win. And that’s sort of my point. While I rank above almost(?) all of my academic peers when it comes to who would win in unarmed combat—and I get a kick out of knowing that—it doesn’t bother them that they rank lowly on that dimension. So my advice to you—only somewhat tongue in cheek—is to cultivate some idiosyncratic specialties. If your main project in life is A, try to have some side project B of the sort that people who focus on things like A would be very unlikely to be good at stuff like B.

The ultimate idiosyncratic project, however—and this is where we transition to the final portion of the essay, in which we turn our attention to non-comparative sources of value—is parenting. There are plenty of other people who are better than me at philosophy, or (not and!) jiu jitsu. But nobody could be a better father to my children than me.⁸ By and large, the ups and downs of parenting have nothing to do with anybody else’s parenting. When I take my baby and toddler to the playground, and the toddler demands the baby be put in the swing next to her and be given a big push just like she gets, and then they both laugh their heads off, the joy I get is not in the least diminished if another couple of kids are having a very similar experience with their parent a few swings down. When I rewatch the adventure movies I loved as a child—Indiana Jones, The Princess Bride, Willow—with my two older children, and then they spend the next week reciting their favorite parts, I’m happy if I hear that my buddy’s kids also loved them.

I doubt parenting is unique in this respect. I suspect many of the activities

Kieran Setiya

calls “atelic”, as opposed to “telic”, have this character. As he puts it:

Atelic activities are different. Listening to music, spending time with your new friend, working thoughtfully and well: these activities aren’t defined by endpoints that exhaust them, but are forms of process. You can stop doing these things, and you eventually will, but you can’t complete them, leaving no more left to do.

Setiya sees midlife crises as stemming from being overly focused on the opposite, telic projects:

The problem with projects is that they place fulfillment always in the future—the goal has yet to be achieved—only to consign it instantly to the past. No wonder the present feels empty.

My minor addition to Setiya’s rich discussion is that telic projects lend themselves to comparison, and thus, the hedonic treadmill, much more than do atelic activities. If you aim to hike the Appalachian trail, then it’s natural to start wondering what other trails you might hike—for instance, there’s also the Pacific Crest Trail, and the Continental Divide Trail. Over 700 people have hiked all three…Better, perhaps, if you can just enjoy hiking.

Parenting certainly can be approached as a telic project. For instance, you can set yourself the aim of raising chess prodigies, as did László Polgár. He wanted to prove that geniuses are made, not born, so he trained all three of his daughters to play chess from a young age. By any measure, he wildly succeeded: his daughters grew up to be among the best chess players in the world. But having succeeded, just as Setiya might predict, he needed a new project:

In 1992, Polgár said that he now wanted "to break the racial barriers in the virtually all-white chess world" by adopting "a black infant from the Third World" whom he would train to become a chess prodigy. Susan [his daughter] recalled in 2005 that, about 15 years earlier, "a very nice Dutch billionaire named Joop van Oosterom" had offered to help Polgár "adopt three boys from a developing country and raise them exactly as they raised us." Polgár, according to Susan, "really wanted to do it, but my mother talked him out of it. She understood that life is not only about chess and that all the rest would fall on her lap."

I think—hope?—most parents will recoil from the idea of treating children as projects. Psychologist Allison Gopnik offers a wonderful contrast between the parent as gardener and the parent as carpenter. The carpenter parent is trying to shape their children into a particular form, like a carpenter building furniture to an exact plan. The gardener parent is merely providing conditions for their children to grow, while allowing that lots is out of their hands; gardeners have much less control over the dimensions of their crops than carpenters do over their handiwork. As may already be clear, Gopnik favors the gardener metaphor.

Parenting is just one example—an especially vivid one for me—of an activity whose value isn’t comparative. My point isn’t that everyone has to be a parent to get off the treadmill. The point is that some goods are best enjoyed for what they are, not because they rank higher than someone else’s. To stick with Setiya’s examples, listening to music and spending time with friends are not diminished by how anyone else is doing.

Summing up, I think there are three main ways to resist the treadmill. First, perspective: like Dracula, we can try to see just how extraordinary our ordinary lives are. Second, idiosyncrasy: if we must rank ourselves against our contemporaries, we can do so in specific ways where we come out on top. And third, non-comparative goods: the kinds of activities whose worth doesn’t depend on ranking at all. None of these are foolproof, and none of them let us escape the hedonic treadmill entirely. But they’re the best I’ve got to offer.

I’ll close by noting that these strategies have a cost. They breed complacency. If you get good at finding favorable ways to compare yourself to others, or satisfaction in things that don’t involve winning, you also get worse at ambition, at striving, and at being outraged when you get a raw deal.⁹ And I don’t think you can have the benefits without some of that cost. I think I’m both happier and less driven than I was earlier in life. It’s a genuine tradeoff! Personally, I think it’s worth it, but I don’t want to pretend the tradeoff isn’t there.

1. This illustrative example is shamelessly stolen from

Paul Forrester

, a former PhD student of mine who’s about to start a job at Wharton. (The names are mine, but the idea of billionaires competing over who has the bigger yacht is from him.) Much of this post is inspired by discussions we had about his work.

2. Ronald Coase famously showed that this will happen under conditions where the railroad owner and the land owners can costlessly bargain. The Coasean perspective suggests a different set of questions to ask about how externalities might be internalized; rather than having government try to directly price them through taxes, we might instead ask how transaction costs can be lowered.

3. I’m making the huge, false, but simplifying assumption that “improving our lot” means “getting more of what we want”. For various interesting reasons—including ones in Paul’s dissertation, really nicely explained in a published paper here—this can’t be the whole story. Still, I do think getting what we want is at least an important dimension of well-being. If there was no way for us to collectively get more of what we want, that would still be pretty bleak!

4. E.g., Robert Frank argues that a desirable public policy response to the problem of positional externalities is a progressive consumption tax. Paul Forrester also defends this position, in work in progress.

5. Limb lengthening surgery has perfectly unobjectionable uses; correcting imbalances, for instance. So instead of that, imagine a case where a man who is 5’5’’ has limb lengthening surgery on both legs to symmetrically add a few inches.

6. I’m quoting from the script here. The dialogue in the actual scene as it was filmed is a little bit different; the actor playing dracula skips some of the lines.

7. Incidentally, I’m going to be attending a workshop on philosophy and jiu jitsu this winter. I’ll risk being outmatched along both dimensions. Wish me luck.

8. What’s the modal force of this claim? Not metaphysical necessity. Imagine my wife and I divorced, my wife remarried, and her new husband was a much better father to my children than I am. That would really sting. Luckily for me, it’s not going to happen.

9. See, e.g., Kate Manne on the Dark Side of Gratitude.