Anhedonic Adaptation

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Lady on WNYC, talking about “the hedonic treadmill.” The lady, a guest on a medical Friday show is Dr. Sonya Lubermersky, UC Riverside. Author of The How of Happiness from Penguin. She calls this pleasure problem, “the Elvis Presley effect.”

In other words you can grow accustomed all too accustomed to lots of peanut butter and banana sandwiches, sex and pills, and then die in a blur of banality. You join the pantheon of estates that make more revenue than you made while you were alive. Rather than die on the crapper unfulfillable, put your effort into things that really do last whilst alive. Sayeth the doctor.

A component of the hedonic treadmill is rumination or overthinking. I knew a therapist that called it perseveration. That word sounds nasty and annoying. Now, anhedonia, that’s a rock ‘n’ roll kinda word, in a Devo or Bad Religion kinda way. Which is why I learned it from the greatest nerd Harold Ramis. Ramis talked about his friend Doug Kenney, who, as he put it, “fell off a cliff while he was looking for a place to jump.” An unfortunate accident that happened to the brilliant satirist and parodist at the height of both his career and his drug-facilitated depression.

One should not become acclimated to compulsive/addictive behavior (including circular thinking) or become numb to privilege/entitlement.

Kenney and Belushi probably felt very old while they were busy dying young. Belushi was, to borrow a phrase from Laura Linney, a “relief seeking missile.”

Are we all problems and no solutions? No, we at Sycophantia believe that one must persist in the effort to derive pleasure safely from a thrifty and ethical existence.

Seeking more diverse opinions for this article, the mountains of crap I’ve accumulated in the quest for satisfaction were unavailable for comment.