my Buddhist blog number 165

Hi Everybody,
 We're right in the middle of what I think is a really important chapter on Buddhism and Happiness, and we're picking up where we left off last time, answering the question ' can we buy it? ' And that leads us on a to a discussion of a key factor in all our lives that the psychologists call ' hedonic adaptation.' So here goes.

' So whatever external thing we desire in the belief that it will bring us significantly greater happiness, however much we convince ourselves that we need it, however profoundly life-changing  it might seem when we desire it, and indeed when we initially acquire it, turns out not to be so life changing after all. Indeed not at all.

There's no question that can be a very difficult lesson for us to take on board. We are so profoundly attached to the idea that these kinds of acquisitions will make us so much happier. But the body of research to the contrary is very substantial indeed. Hedonic adaptation is real!

So what does that mean in terms of our ordinary daily life? Well it's clear that although we may well get immense pleasure and satisfaction, and indeed a burst of genuine rapture at the moment of acquisition, and for a while afterwards, all the research shows that the while is vanishingly brief! The rapid adaptation to the new acquisition, or the new circumstance is an integral part of the human psyche, and from then on we're back to where we were. Square one. The new whatever becomes very much a part of the ordinary fabric of our lives.

And I think there's very little doubt, if we search even briefly through our own experience, few of us would suggest that our fundamental sense of well-being, or happiness in our lives has been substantially altered by any new material acquisition. The new car, the new kitchen, would we really say tha tit has re-shaped our happiness. I think not.

So this hedonic adaptation would seem to be the modern psychological explanation for a factor that Buddhism has been talking about for so long, namely that the external possessions  in our lives, or changes in those possession, even if on the surface they are quite substantial, have in fact a remarkably small impact on our enduring sense of well-being. It can be a profoundly unhappy-making delusion to believe that enduring, deep-seated happiness can be acquired in this way, externally as it were, as a result of some possession. any possession.

We only have to give that a moment's reflection to see that it amounts to a prfoundly behaviour-changing, life-changing lesson.'

Plenty enough for one swallow.
Thanks for reading.
See you next week.
William
PS The Case for Buddhism is available on Amazon and as a download on Kindle.