# Breaking the Hedonic Rubber Band

*(content note: discussion of suicide)*

![61 (94)](https://film-grab.com/wp-content/uploads/photo-gallery/61%20(94).jpg?bwg=1547148217)

In the film that the above still is from[^afajpwrh6lc], the character sets his run-down hotel on fire, shoots some people, and then goes into his room to die.

I am confused about why this doesn't happen more often. That is, when people lose all their meaning in life (as must surely be happening regularly), why don't they explode? Personally I don't know anyone who's committed suicide, never mind had a nihilistic explosion where they burned down their house, or killed someone.

When people lose the meaning in their life, they lose a lot of the reason to keep putting energy into things. To believe in things. Being kind to their neighbor, supporting their friends, behaving well in public, holding down their job, eating well, exercising, sleeping enough... everything can become more effort than it's worth.

The world is a very big place, and I have heard stories of people losing all their meaning. Sometimes people become depressed; sometimes they move to a new country (e.g. from a developing country to a developed one) where they have nothing—no friends, no job, no community, and are very lost. A beta reader for this piece told me about someone they knew who, after an out-of-distribution dispiriting professional experience, had to move back in with their parents and get divorced; they talked about someone else who was cheated on in their life-long monogamous relationship since college, and was entirely unmoored. 

![Movie Psychos, Script Gods Must Die, Barton Fink | Script Gods](https://www.scriptgodsmustdie.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/barton-fire.png)

A man going through a nihilistic explosion.

I am reminded that it is typically not evolutionarily adaptive to be suicidal when things get bad. It's still worth it to keep striving, to keep putting in the work to try to find resources, mate, and rear offspring. Betting on it when things look lost, is much more "worth it" to the evolutionary forces, than for you to kill yourself and avoid the suffering.[^xhg8km2ib6g]

I think this is mirrored at the top level? There's no amount of resources you can gather or offspring you can create where your mind determines that it can stop aggressively tracking status, or to stop fearing death so much. Partly we're just made of stupid heuristics, and partly it just wouldn't be worth it for evolution to stop us from striving.

People talk of a [hedonic treadmill](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill), where as you run forward and get more strength and resources, your happiness meter stays roughly in the same place. But a treadmill is kind of unidirectional, so in my head it's more of a hedonic rubber band, or thermostat, that keeps you stuck in place whatever direction you go. People feel that losing a child is the worst thing that could possibly happen, and it is indeed horrendous, but most people pull themselves back together and get on with their lives.

![](https://39669.cdn.cke-cs.com/rQvD3VnunXZu34m86e5f/images/2d1b15f63456b3c078740678beb8c351d7880821b61be9d9.png)

Trapped in the hedonic rubber band

Have you considered using a freeze-ray?
---------------------------------------

From an abstract perspective, things can get very good, or get very bad. You can live in a flourishing era of prosperity and progress, or you can live in the USSR when millions die from unnecessary starvation.

But from the inside, with our hedonic rubber band, all of this is dampened. Everything feels more middling.

I think some people find this inspiring, that we'll always keep fighting? Or they take it as a reason to try to love the positive things more? I am suspicious that people don't use this argument to encourage people to commit suicide more often.

> "Even a shitty, shitty life is worth living, apparently, because folks are *living the fuck out of them*."  
> —[Louis CK](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RI2lZSKX18)

Similarly, things could get absolutely so much better, better than ever, and you won't really feel it. Have you imagined how good life can get? A few ideal romantic relationships, with incredible artists who understand you perfectly, and powerful hyper competent people who can wield the resources of the world as if by mere act of will, solutions to aging and a deeply fulfilling career in your chosen industry, always well slept and hyper healthy and feeling good in your body, pure being moving through intensely meaningful experiences in life... 

...now why don't you feel like that already? The dream has been reached for most humans in history—look how far child mortality has plummeted, look at how much food you have, look at how much great art you have at your fingertips, etc.

Mikhail Samin pointed out to me the other night that perhaps the true better way to live would be to temporarily commit suicide and freeze yourself cryogenically, in order to just live in the future (in expectation) where everything is finally good. If you could, wouldn't you rather bring people from the poverty of history to live in our prosperous world today? One can imagine a hedonic utilitarian supervillain going around, shooting his friends with a freeze-ray for their own good.

> "Friends don't let friends live in the present."  
> —Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres (maybe)

All this is to say: your feelings are useful for tracking things in the world, but they will rarely let you feel how good or bad things actually are. People aren't making decisions in accordance with how things *are*, but with how things *feel*. And the feelings are dampened.

I think part of the mission of human rationality, is to better use one's feelings to track reality. I endeavor to learn to more naturally inhabit the full range of my possible emotions—to feel more horror, dismay, terror, and more delight, ecstasy, and tears of joy—to be able to track on an intuitive, gut, emotional level, whether things are good or bad. 

And then to use my System 2 and do math for the places that my feelings cannot go.

Whether to have kids in the USSR
--------------------------------

There are two perspectives you can have, on people's feelings not tracking reality:

1.  We should respect their feelings
2.  We should not respect their feelings

These have different implications for natalism vs anti-natalism.

Suppose you live in a bad world. A world where things are horrendous, like you live in USSR that you can't escape and millions will starve to death, or a world developing AGI where everyone will likely go extinct in the next decade or two. Now, if their feelings should mirror the quality of the world they're in—"should", a word which here means "on reflection they will self-modify to be this sort of person"—then you're producing someone to primarily suffer excruciatingly and then consider killing themselves. It's quite plausibly something that, when they come in to their full powers, they would not have wanted to have existed.

Alternatively, if you respect their feelings within the hedonic rubber band, then it's kind of fine? They get to have a story, even if short. They get to love people and make friendships and help people in their suffering for a little while, in amongst all the pain and confusion.

I currently mostly don't respect my feelings, yet also think it's fine to have kids in the USSR. What's up with that?

My guess is that I want to be able to somehow get the best of both worlds—be emotionally quite functional in pretty bad worlds, while also being able to feel the full horror or bliss of whatever world I'm in. But is this attainable, or even rational? I'm not quite sure.

![Pod Country for Old Cast: Barton Fink with Chris Weitz : r/blankies](https://i.redd.it/lpw3ei86fqgf1.gif)

It's not quite the right tone, but I do like this GIF.

[^afajpwrh6lc]: In rot13, the film is named Onegba Svax. 

[^xhg8km2ib6g]: Some part of me would be equally able to explain that there's some fair decision theory that works out where you'll kill yourself when it looks really lost, and in-exchange put in a ton of extra effort when it's only nearly lost. Alas, the mind doesn't work this way. I suspect it's because evolution and brains are all pretty stupid and not able to consider this hypothesis or make this tradeoff.