Running on the Hedonic Treadmill

One excellent benefit of being married to an academic who studies human behavior is I sometimes get to learn about fascinating theories and ideas of human thoughts, motives, and actions. Lately, I have found myself thinking a lot about one particular theory. It is Brickman and Campbell’s idea of the Hedonic Treadmill. Brickman and Campbell gave this name to the idea that humans develop a happiness “set point” early in life. This set point is fairly stable and it is the level of happiness to which we return after our temporary highs and lows fade away. Other researchers have expanded on Brickman and Campbell’s idea and now there is a Hedonic Treadmill Theory. It describes “the tendency of a person to remain at a relatively stable level of happiness despite a change in fortune or the achievement of major goals.

 

According to the hedonic treadmill, as a person makes more money, expectations and desires rise in tandem, which results in no permanent gain in happiness.” (from Wikipedia) When I first started running, back in March of 2002, I wore Converse Chuck Taylor high-tops and struggled to go 2.3 miles. It hurt a lot. I slowly improved and by the summer I was upping my longest run by two miles every two weeks. I was training for a marathon and I began to look forward to my long Sunday runs. I got new shoes—shoes made for running. I can remember the first time I ran 10 miles. I was high as a kite, reveling in my accomplishment. I couldn’t really believe that I was able to run that far without stopping. 

The best training run I have ever had was one August morning when I stepped outside our house in Trumansburg, New York and ran across the rolling farmland and hills between Cayuga Lake and Seneca Lake and ended up 18 miles away in Watkins Glen. Eighteen frickin’ miles! It was amazing. And then that October I ran a full marathon—26.2 miles. Sure, it took four and a half hours, but I did it. You would think the net effect of having run a marathon would be pretty positive and would last a long time. I would have thought so, too. But you and I would both be wrong. The actual net effect has been one easily predicted by the hedonic treadmill theory. 

In the last 10 months I have run four half marathons, one twenty-kilometer race, and one 208-mile relay race through New Hampshire from the mountains to the coast. Yesterday I ran a half marathon in Boston. It was a beautiful morning, I was with friends, and I had decided not to focus on my time but instead to just run at whatever speed felt good and to be happy with finishing. And yet today, when I went to the Cool Running website to check the results, I had a palpable sense of disappointment when I saw my time. 8 minutes and 50 seconds per mile. Just three months ago I ran a half marathon a full 58 seconds per mile faster. God, sometimes being a human is so stupid. Why can’t I just relish the accomplishment of having run 13.1 miles? It is not easy to run that far—not easy at all. T

he odd thing is that while I was running I was truly and fully able to set aside my expectations of finishing in a certain amount of time. I really did simply enjoy the company and the weather and the people on the sidelines and the feeling of moving strongly and confidently in my body through the world. I was happy. Yet not even 24 hours later, the happiness has faded away and the one feeling I am left with is a vague sense of disappointment. Given its name, it really shouldn’t surprise me that the hedonic treadmill theory applies to my running, but sure enough, it does.

Jack, Part 4--I Love You More

When they got to Muncie it was dawn and a steady snow had been falling for hours. James’s father met them at the station and they piled into his Pontiac for the ride to Grandpa Charlie and Nana’s house. When they got there it was Christmas Eve morning. The tree stood in its place in the corner, but it was bare. The living room, which Jack had never seen before, smelled odd to Jack. He could not quite place the smell, but he knew he liked it, whatever it was.
Nana ran over and wrapped each of them in a hug as they came through the door. She brushed the snow off of their shoulders and their hats and their sleeves, kissed Katherine, kissed James, kissed Jack about fifteen times right on top of the head, and then told them mock-brusquely to take their shoes off before they tracked snow through the entire house. She led them straight through the living room, past the undecorated tree, and into the dining room, where bacon and eggs were waiting for them on the table. That was it! The smell—bacon and Christmas tree melded together. Could any combination even be more incredible?
After breakfast they spent the morning decorating the tree. They popped popcorn to string on a thread, they hung family heirloom ornaments, and they made a paper chain out of construction paper. There was grilled cheese and tomato soup for lunch—Jack’s first experience of that particular combination—and then an afternoon spent baking gingerbread cookies. Late afternoon Jack, Grandpa Charlie, and Nana went out to play in the snow.
Christmas Eve dinner was turkey, potatoes, cranberries, and corn washed down with non-alcoholic eggnog. It was a day of firsts for Jack and he went to bed that night reeling with the possibilities. After his bath Nana came in and sat on the edge of his bed. She gave him another peck on top of his wet head and then, almost as an afterthought, she said, “Do you want to hear a story before you fall asleep?”
No shyness. No hesitation at all. “Yes, please!”
“I know a story I used to tell your dad when he was your age. In fact, there was a full five months where he really loved this one—couldn’t get to sleep without it.”
“How old was he then?” asked Jack.
“Well…let’s see...I can picture him there now—right where you are. He had his cowboy pajamas on, so he must have been about five or six. Your age!” Nana said, and she smiled a smile at Jack that was just like the gingerbread.
She asked him, “Do you need some water or anything before I start?”
“Nope—I am ready to listen,” said Jack, snuggling down a little deeper under the comforter. From where his head was, he could see out the window to a streetlight that showed the individual flakes as they drifted down out of the orangey clouds illuminated from below by the lights of Muncie. Once in a while the wind would blow and the descending flakes would swirl and dance in the cone of light visible to Jack.

Jack, Part 3--I Love You More

Jack continued to grow, his body fed first by his mother’s milk, then by cereal and eggs and pancakes and hamburgers and milk and a hundred other good old-fashioned solid foods. And by malted milk balls. Jack LOVED malted milk balls. His mind and his spirit continued to grow, too. Fed by the love of his parents and his grandparents, whom he would visit pretty regularly. Oh, and by stories—lots and lots of stories. Katherine’s parents still lived in Mrs. Brock’s apartment over in Brooklyn and it was easy enough to go and see them every weekend.
As is often the case with grandparents, they doted on Jack. Sometimes Katherine was jealous of her own son. Her mom and dad were never very demonstrative or silly with her, yet here they were dressing up in aprons and hats and marching around with wooden spoons and metal pots in a Cook’s Parade. She could not remember them ever once doing something like that with her. Of course, times had been different, and harder, when she was a girl.
James parents lived in Muncie, Indiana so visits from them were a once-a-year occurance. Jack thought of these grandparents, Grandpa Charlie and Nana, as a different sort of relation than his other grandparents—Poppop and Grandma Jean. Though there was one particular Christmas—the Christmas of 1957—when Grandpa Charlie and Nana featured heavily. James had been steadily building up quite a body of work and, cumulatively, his books sold fairly well. The family was managing to save some money.
They decided to use a little of that money to take a trip across the eastern quarter of America on a train to see James’ parents for the holidays. Jack had never been out to Indiana before—Grandpa Charlie and Nana always came to New York to see him. Jack remembered that train trip to this very day. He was thrilled to be getting on the silver train that was hissing and venting little eruptions of steam there at the platform at Penn Station. He felt like a character in one of his mother’s stories. HE was having an adventure like some of them did. In so many of Katherine’s stories a journey turned into an adventure, an odyssey, a quest. In Jack’s mind (and in his heart) magic was always possible whenever you put yourself in motion out in the world.
And he was certainly out in the world. He took his aisle seat on the train and turned to look directly at every other face in that car. A coach class inter-city train car in the North in America in 1957 was a fairly diverse place. There were a few men who were obviously traveling salesmen. There were a couple of families like theirs. There were two soldiers in uniform. There was a black-skinned woman and her daughter, who looked to be about Jack’s age. They were all dressed in what one might call traveling clothes.
People today don’t seem to place much distinction between everyday clothes, work clothes, and traveling clothes. People in the 1950s did. Going across the country on a train was a special occasion for most people and special occasions required special clothes
So there was Jack, in his traveling clothes which looked good to Jack when he saw himself in the mirror, but which were scratchy at the neck and cuffs. As he looked around the little girl six rows ahead looked him directly in the eye and gave him a face that seemed to be asking for something—though what it was Jack had no clue. He smiled and turned away, coloring pink as he did. Katherine saw all of this and wrote some things in a small notebook she always carried in her purse.

Jack, Part Two--I Love You More

James continued to write his books, and, as I said, his books continued to sell in modest amounts. They always received good reviews, but never glowing. When he ran low on ideas, he would simply write a retelling of an old Grimm story or a fable of Aesop’s or even a tale from the Bible. These retellings were fun for James to write and he would often run them by Katherine and Jack before submitting them to his editor. By the time Jack was two he had heard just about every story ever told in one form or another.
The ones he heard from James were always good. There were not the long pauses and gaps that filled Katherine’s stories, as she struggled for direction. But Jack always seemed to prefer Katherine’s tales. Jack could not have put into words exactly why he liked his mom’s stories better than his dad’s. But, with the benefit of hindsight, I think I can shed a little light on the reasons for his preference.
Katherine had a way of telling a story that cast a spell. When she talked, a net weaved its way around Jack and her and held them in a place outside of the regular world. When James told a story, Jack never forgot that he was in a chair in an apartment in New York City, listening to a story. When Katherine told a story, the world lost form and the words created a new place to temporarily replace this one.
Jack would never had a said it out loud, (he was two, so he COULDN’T have said it out loud), but he preferred his mom’s stories to his dad’s. Don’t get me wrong. He loved them both fully and madly. And he liked his dad’s way of playing on the carpet better. But when it came to stories, he liked the ones told by his mom a little better. Okay—a lot better.


It was about this time that Jack and Katherine started a game they would continue the rest of Katherine’s life. It went like this: Whenever they were saying goodbye, both Jack and Katherine would try to arrange things so that each could be the one to speak last. If, for example, James and Jack were heading out for a Saturday morning at the Central Park Zoo to see Cuzco and all the other animals, Katherine might say, “Bye James. Bye Jack. I love you.” Jack would not reply right away. Instead he would wait until he and his father got to the door of their apartment and as the door was closing behind them he would yell back over his shoulder, “I love you MORE,” and hope that the door would latch before his mom could reply.
Of course, in keeping with the game, Katherine would then run to the bedroom window, throw it open, and lurk in the shadows of the room until she heard James and Jack out on the front stoop. She would slink over to the open window, thrust her head out, yell, “I love YOU MORE,” and then slam the window shut before Jack could respond. The winner was whoever got the last word in. Many was the time the phone would ring while James and Jack were out doing something somewhere in the city. Katherine would pick up the receiver and say, “Hello. MacArthur residence,” only to hear a giggly, “I love you MORE,” practically shouted into the phone, followed by a quick click.

Katherine's Son--Jack, Part I

About ten months after that picture was taken, Katherine and James welcomed Jack into their life. (Notice that I used the singular—“life”--and not the plural “lives.”) Katherine and Jack were so in love and so happy to have found each other that each day they entwined the tendrils of themselves more firmly around the trunk of the other. Being two separate people, of course they had two separate trunks and root systems connecting them to the world.
But all of their new growth was in the direction of the other. Each was a heliotrope and each was also a sun. By the time little Jack was born it was hard to tell where Katherine ended and James began.
It was easy to tell where Jack began and ended. He began at the end that cried and gurgled and screamed when he was hungry. And he ended at the end that emitted some pretty foul substances at disturbingly regular intervals. The distance from one end to the other increased substantially and by the time they celebrated his first birthday, Jack was walking, albeit unsteadily, across the length of the small living room that made up most of the MacArthur family’s apartment.
Jack was cute. If you know babies you know the hidden horrible truth that some babies are ugly. Sure, everyone will say to the parents, “Oh, he is SO cute. He looks just like his father.” Then, on the way out of the house and back down the street those same people will whisper to each other, “Poor kid—he looks just like his dad.” No one said this of Jack. He was a beautiful baby. He shined.
He had that smile of Katherine’s—the one from the wedding picture. But his eyes were entirely untroubled by whatever it was Katherine saw as she looked into their future on that wedding day back in City Hall almost two years before.
Details? You want details? Okay, I will give you some details. (But not too many, mind you. Too many details can get in the way of a good story sometimes.) There was no universal Pre-K in 1952. When a woman had a baby in America in 1952, she quit her job, stayed home, and raised her baby. This is exactly what Katherine did, too. She cleared out her desk at Peabody Publishing and handed the ledger books over to a new accountant—a young man just back from the war in Korea.
Pregnant women sometimes have odd dreams--vivid dreams of giving birth to a monstrosity or of losing their newborn child amongst the cabbages in the grocery store. The dream Katherine had was nowhere near as frightening. She had just one odd dream and it was about the marble that she found in her desk as she made way for the new guy. In the dream she was holding her new baby boy and he was staring at a pendant dangling from a simple black leather string around her neck. The dream was from an outside observer’s point of view so that she could see both herself and her child. When he let go of the pendant she could see that it was her lucky marble—the one she had gotten in her stocking one Christmas so many years ago.
She could also see the look of pure rapture on her baby’s face. So, near the end of her pregnancy she took the marble to a jeweler and asked him to make it into a simple necklace for her. She put the necklace on that first morning as a stay-at-home mom and it somehow made her feel okay—as if she knew what she was doing.
Back then, the job of the man was to go out into the world and bring back a paycheck. And this is what James did. He continued to write children’s storybooks for Peabody Publishing and these books continued to bring in modest, yet steady, royalties. While James left their apartment on Mott Street in the lower half of Manhattan and got on the train to head up to Peabody every day, Katherine stayed home with Jack. Katherine loved her Jack more than she thought it possible for anyone to love anyone else.
It scared her sometimes how much and how deeply she felt for this little life. She could never tell James this, but she secretly looked forward every day to his leaving so that she could be alone with Jack. When it was just the two of them, Katherine would tell stories. Some of them were the stories she used to tell herself back in her undergraduate days as she crossed the bridge back to Brooklyn and her parents’ apartment. Some were her own variations of stories she had read as a girl during her long hours at the public library, reading to stave off the hunger in her stomach. But some of them were new stories—stories Katherine made up on the spot for her audience of one.
And some of them were good. Really good. At first, Jack was too young to have any idea what his mother was saying. But still he followed her with his eyes and smiled when she said something funny, grew wide-eyed when the princess was facing danger, and filled his diaper when the troll menaced the town. There was no way he could know what, exactly, she was saying. But he was his mother’s son and he had the same love of stories she did. He knew the rhythm and meter and pace of a story. He could tell when the words his mother was saying were everyday words, like “let’s see what is in the fridge that we can cook up for Daddy’s dinner”, and when they were special words, like “The king’s wizard sometimes took the form of a rooster and roamed around the town, gathering information.”
As little Jack listened to his mother narrate a tale, his eyes would often focus on the green marble that seemed almost to change color, depending on what was happening in the story. Sometimes it glowed with the menacing light of a tornado sky. Sometimes it danced with the green of a shaft of sunlight slicing through sea water. Sometimes it turned dark like a stand of spruce on a mountainside. It was as if the marble translated the story into a sort of pre-language that didn’t need words for Jack to understand.
The marble took the plot and translated it into pure feeling and Jack ate those feelings up. Of course, Katherine knew nothing of this. All she knew was that when she was telling a story, Jack was as well-behaved a baby as ever there was. In her heart of hearts, she thought maybe Jack knew what she was saying. In her brain of brains, she knew this was ridiculous. Jack was one year old. How could he possibly know what she was talking about when he didn’t even know any words yet? He didn’t even know his A’s yet, let alone his B’s and C’s. Still, when Katherine told about the kingdom they had created together, Jack locked in on that marble and his face showed an understanding that was unmistakable.