Why Getting What You Wanted Felt Like Nothing

In 1978 Philip Brickman, Dan Coates and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman tracked down 22 people who had won large prizes in the Illinois state lottery and asked them how happy they were. They asked 22 of their neighbours the same questions, and a group of 29 people paralysed in accidents. The winners were no happier than the controls. They also took measurably less pleasure in ordinary things: breakfast, a good joke, a conversation with a friend. The money had not raised their happiness, and the memory of winning had made the rest of life look a little dim by comparison.

The study is nearly fifty years old and its samples are tiny. It is still the piece of evidence most people reach for when they want to explain why the promotion, the house or the finished thing landed with so little weight. The explanation it anchors has a name, hedonic adaptation, and a picture to go with it: a treadmill, on which every gain is run back to the same place.

The picture is partly right and partly wrong, and the research since has sorted out which is which.

What hedonic adaptation is

Hedonic adaptation is the tendency for the emotional effect of a change, good or bad, to fade over time as the change becomes the new normal. Brickman’s group drew on an older idea, adaptation level theory, in which people judge each experience against what they have grown used to. A gain feels good against the old baseline. Then the baseline moves to meet it.

The strong version of the claim, the one that became the treadmill, says the baseline always moves all the way back. Good news and bad news alike wear off, and every person returns to a fixed level of happiness set by their temperament. That is the version in most retellings of the lottery study, and it is the version the better data have overturned.

What the lottery winners actually did

The clearest test came from Sweden. Erik Lindqvist, Robert Östling and David Cesarini surveyed a large sample of Swedish lottery players, some of whom had won large prizes, and followed them for more than ten years after the win. Because lottery wins are random, the winners could be compared with players who did not win without worrying that the two groups differed to begin with.

The winners were more satisfied with their lives, and the effect lasted. More than a decade on it showed no sign of fading. Brickman’s winners were interviewed soon after their prizes. Whether they would have adapted all the way back, nobody followed them long enough to find out.

But the Swedish study found something else, and it is the part that keeps Brickman’s result alive. The winners’ gain was in how they rated their lives when asked to stand back and judge them. On measures of day-to-day happiness and mental health, the effect was much smaller. The money changed the verdict a person gave on their life. It did much less to the texture of their days.

What adapts and what does not

That split, between judging a life and living it, turns out to be the shape of the whole literature. In 2012 Maike Luhmann, Richard Lucas and colleagues pooled 188 longitudinal studies, nearly 66,000 people, following them through marriage, divorce, bereavement, the birth of a child, losing a job, finding one, retirement and moving country. The events had different effects on the two kinds of wellbeing. Cognitive wellbeing, the considered judgement of how your life is going, responded more strongly and more consistently than affective wellbeing, the running balance of good and bad feeling. And adaptation was not one process. People adapted at different rates to different events, and how desirable an event was supposed to be turned out to be a poor guide to what it did.

Unemployment is the clearest case. Losing a job hits both kinds of wellbeing hard. The considered judgement then climbs back so slowly that it takes around three years to reach where it was, and the day-to-day feeling, on the pooled data, does not climb back at all. Marriage runs the other way. Life satisfaction is unusually high in the run-up to a wedding, and what looks like adaptation afterwards is mostly a return to where the person was before the engagement, complete within about two years. Day-to-day feeling barely moves. The treadmill runs for some things, seizes up for others, and for the happiest events it was carrying less weight than it seemed.

In 2006 Ed Diener, Lucas and Christie Napa Scollon set out five revisions to the treadmill model that the evidence demanded. The baseline is not neutral: most people, most of the time, are mildly happy rather than at zero. Baselines differ between people. One person can have several, with pleasant feeling, unpleasant feeling and life satisfaction moving independently. The baseline can shift for good. And people differ in whether a given event moves it. Of the original picture, what survives is the fading. What does not survive is the idea that everything fades, to the same place, for everyone.

The part that does not fade

So the research gives two answers to the question of why getting what you wanted felt like nothing, and they pull in different directions.

The first is that it probably did not feel like nothing at the level the surveys can see. If the thing was a real improvement in your circumstances, your considered judgement of your life most likely moved and may have stayed moved. What the Swedish winners show is that this kind of gain is real and durable. It is also not what people mean when they say the thing felt like nothing. They mean the days.

The second answer is about the days, and it is Brickman’s. His winners did not just fail to get happier. They took less pleasure in small things, and the explanation he offered was contrast: a peak experience, kept in memory, against which ordinary pleasures could no longer compete. The Swedish data cannot settle this, because they measured happiness, not the fate of breakfast. Nothing on the scale of the Swedish work appears to have retested it, and 22 people is not a basis for much. But it names something the larger studies leave untouched. The arrival of the wanted thing may not lower the level of a life. It may raise the bar that the rest of the life is measured against.

What is settled is that adaptation is real, uneven and incomplete. The treadmill is a bad picture: some gains hold, some losses are still visible years later, and the judgement of a life and the feel of one come apart. What is not settled is the thing most people were asking about in the first place. The data can show that the promotion raised your satisfaction with your life. They cannot yet say why Tuesday afternoon felt the same as before, or slightly worse.