YC's Unsolicited Advice re: Hedonic Treadmill
Last night I set myself an accountability timer for 30 minutes and dove into some YouTube.
Something happened to me that has never happened before: I ended up watching ~4.5 minutes of content and then spent ~25 minutes writing a lengthy comment. Why? Because the first video I clicked on was a Y Combinator podcast episode that gave me the ick.
For the first few minutes, the presenters deliver the usual description of the hedonic treadmill. Then, curiously enough, they boldly claim that the solution the hedonic treadmill (at least within the realm of material goods and luxury experiences) is to spread out your wins. They reduce this lifestyle advice to the memorable section title, "Don't Speed Run."
Here is my original comment:
I never comment on videos, but the "don't speed run" section completely missed the mark for me.
The solution to the hedonic treadmill is not to space your lifestyle improvements out but to realize that material wins and similar achievements are not going to bring you sustained happiness, at any interval. The presenters' take sounds rational but presupposes that "new toys" give us some "lifetime aggregate happiness value," and as a result, they argue we should spread that total value into small doses. Their assumption is faulty because an endless supply of happiness can come from applying that same effort and focus to addressing and minimizing inner suffering instead. Yes, I am making a Buddhist argument.
You can speed run your 20s while also building healthy relationships, taking care of your body, and practicing insight meditation to excavate trauma-induced thought patterns and harmful conditioning. In doing so, you can apply yourself in the "doing" sense to achieve your potential (physique, apartment, car, "toys", etc.) without believing that those things will bring you lasting fulfillment. You will become more present and more able to handle the inevitable changing conditions and difficulties life brings your way. Fulfillment, peace, and joy come from removing the edges of your ego that prevent you from fully experiencing whatever is happening right now. I am almost exactly halfway through my 20s, so I am speaking from experience. If more bright people took this advice in their 20s, the world would be a more loving and less dangerous place, even if technological innovation moved forward a bit more slowly.
All of that being said, you should definitely try to increase your income and net worth while keeping your lifestyle fixed in your 20s and after. The reason to do that is purely economic though (save, invest, compound) other than the future happiness that may result from having no (or fewer) money problems.
Lastly, capable teens and 20-somethings: DO NOT BE DUPED by this kind of superficial incubator and VC propaganda. I had to pause the video five minutes in because the content was designed with a clear purpose in mind: to convince more intelligent young people to take bigger swings and work hard on startups in their 20s so the YCs and Sequoias of the world can continue to fatten their pockets. If you prefer to take advice from an industry giant rather than a strange YouTube commenter, allow me to paraphrse Naval: if you want to learn about a new technology, modern resources are what you need. If you want to learn how to solve human problems like maximizing individual happiness, read the ancients. They were passed down for a reason.
I am a capitalist, but we should not encourage groups like YC to use their platform to make claims about happiness when they have an obvious conflict of interest, namely, increasing the total universe of strong startups that may become unicorns (and beneath that, increasing the total number of hungry, savvy young people to take the risk of trying to found them).
Major eyeroll on this one.
Looking back, had I wanted to invest another 15 minutes into my post -- note that I stopped because my timer was going off -- I would have saved the Buddhist dogma for the end. I would have also rephrased "solution to the hedonic treadmill" to "strategy for dealing with the hedonic treadmill," as "solution" is a bit of a misnomer.
In any case, the irony is that if young viewers fall prey to tricks like this, they likely won't make great marketers for their product. If so, does YC really want them?
(I am being flip here -- Godspeed to all the driven young people that watch the video and make career decisions based on it. May they have a big payday alongside their investor counterparts!)