Why Do Smart Adults Downplay the Awesomeness of Hedonism?
My beloved collaborator Robert Biswas-Diener wrote a wonderful piece “in praise of hedonic wellbeing.” It’s worth repeating here as misunderstanding the value of pleasure is to pursue an artificial existence.
It has been more than 40 years since wellbeing researchers first considered Aristotle's eudemonic (also spelled, eudaimonic) approach to happiness and contrasted it with hedonic approaches. Hedonic approaches reflect the search for frequent positive emotions, infrequent negative emotions, and life satisfaction. Eudaimonia, by contrast, is widely regarded as the lofty state of "real happiness" - an orientation toward meaning, authenticity, excellence, and personal growth.
In the ensuing years, many well-being consumers arrived at a cemented conclusion that hedonia is about pleasure, and therefore fleeting and superficial.
In this context, I'd like to offer a few notes in defense of hedonic wellbeing. My goal is just to get people to think more about it:
1. Hedonia is a subjective experience. The advent of hedonia in wellbeing studies was merely a nod to the fact that people subjectively experience their happiness, no matter how you define it. Whether it is contentment, or purpose, or enthusiasm, or joy, it is--at least in part-- a felt experience. In this sense, hedonia just indicates something subjectively felt.
2. Hedonia includes safety. Critics of hedonic wellbeing sometimes act as if it denotes selfish, greedy consumption of pleasures. Nothing could be further from the truth. It includes feeling safe, being in love, enjoying a moment, and having a passion. In this sense, maybe it should not be quickly dismissed.
3. They are less separate than you might guess. Hedonic and eudemonic wellbeing affect one another. They turn together like cogs in a machine. Time and again, research shows them overlapping and interacting. It is rare-- really rare-- that people experience eudemonia in the absence of hedonia. In this sense, we ought to be considering both as important facets of happiness and not pretending that there is first-class and second-class happiness.
Food for thought.
The Science
Robert, Laura King, and I published two articles explaining how it’s a bit ludicrous to think you can cleave a person’s frequency of positive and negative experience, and sense of life satisfaction from the seemingly profound states of eudaimonia. You will not be able to do it.
Except for a few outliers, few seek a life of meaning that is devoid of joy, delight, and contentment. This is why the bulk of research on meaning and purpose in life targets the psychological benefits: hedonic well-being!
Have you ever met a parent who said all I want is my kid to have meaning in life without happiness, joy, and that sense of feeling alive? Me either.
Scientists must spend more time with humans and less time with calculators.
The Debate in Scientific Journals
I encourage you to read the original articles in this debate. Form your opinions and share your thoughts and questions.
Here you can find our target article “Reconsidering happiness: the costs of distinguishing between hedonics and eudaimonia” (cited over 1,500 times):
Here is the profoundly useful criticism by Richard M Ryan and Veronika Huta:
Here is the far more biting criticism by Corey Keyes (who refused to even cite our article):
And to bring it home, here is our response to the responses:
I’m going to be honest. Science needs more of these public debates where every detail is available for consumers to wrestle with ideas. I love the notion of adversarial collaborations and civil disagreements. Curious as to whose views have changed and how.
If you ever want to engage in an adversarial collaboration with our Well-Being Lab, do reach out. We are sitting on tons of data and our mission is to understand and improve the quality of life of humans.
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Todd B. Kashdan is an author of several books including The Upside of Your Dark Side (Penguin) and The Art of Insubordination: How to Dissent and Defy Effectively (Avery/Penguin) and Professor of Psychology and Leader of The Well-Being Laboratory at George Mason University.
I tend to view eudaimonic and hedonic sources of happiness as partly distinct from each other but also sharing a good deal of overlap (sometimes like a Venn diagram or even a bell shaped curve), sometimes indistinguishable from each other, sometimes combined and creating a synergistic effect. My observations, professionally and personally, have been that those who create an abundance of eudaimonic joy are also the ones who also get the most deep level pleasure from hedonic sources. These people just seem to be experts in extracting life’s joy. But I don’t see this as much the other way around - those who predominantly seek out hedonic sources seem to feel less overall joy. This is just correlational - not causation. I think dispositional factors can lead some people to seek out the kind of joy they are best able to feel.
Because we've lost touch with our deepest intuition, so we have to rely on particular rules as guardrails, including the avoidance of pleasure, joy, and so many good things?