the hedonic racetrack

I've observed the hedonic treadmill in my life, but used for constructive growth instead of materialistic displeasure. 

The hedonic treadmill is the human tendency to reset your "baseline happiness" so that you never maintain excess happiness, rather your brain recalibrates your current happiness level to be the new normal. This pushes you to always need more to maintain the same level of satisfaction.

Typically when talking about the hedonic treadmill, the "happiness" is referring to satisfaction from materialistic desires, similar to "lifestyle inflation". But imagine if you could channel this for constructive growth if you instead derived your happiness from anything constructive. In my life I'm referring to career growth, but it can be anything that satisfies your definition of constructive. Hopefully one day my "career growth" feels as pointless as any other materialistic desire, but for now it is enough for me to be fulfilled by it. 

Maybe there really is no difference as long as I'm deriving my happiness from something external. Maybe I just feel this way right now because I'm seeing consistent growth in my career, and it's at a level that I can see sustaining longer than other materialistic desires, but at the end of the day I would get the same dissatisfaction if I didn't see positive growth. 

But for now the hedonic treadmill fuels me to grow my career. And my career feels like it would be something that gets me somewhere. So I don't want to use the term treadmill. Since I'm in the rat race, I think the "hedonic racetrack" is fitting. 

Eventually I want to learn how to derive happiness from nothing. But right now it feels like that would be counterproductive to learn. Maybe this is a fallacy, too. Maybe I will figure that out once I get there. 

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this was a less structured, fully stream of consciousness post. here's a related, more structured thought I wrote a bit ago: contentment and ambition