Much of the damage that we cause on this green Earth comes down to our relationship to happiness.

That’s my working theory, at least 😉

I’ve been meaning to tackle this topic and then last week’s post on Ethical Bargains served as a reminder. In an article ostensibly about vegan ice cream cones, I wrote:

“I felt a heady kind of happiness eating them, like a celebration that things weren’t so bad.”

Although I didn’t think of it at the time, the phrase “a heady kind of happiness” is more or less the same as hedonic happiness, which then becomes hedonism if that’s all we care about.

Psychological or motivational hedonism is the view that all human actions aim at increasing pleasure and avoiding pain. – Wikipedia.

Two kinds of happiness

A useful article in in Psychology Today outlines two kinds of happiness: hedonic and eudaimonic.

Hedonic happiness is pleasure that comes from our senses, like eating an ice cream cone.

Eudaimonic happiness comes from shifting your focus outward, towards others.

In Psychology Today, Emma Seppälä explains that eudaimonic happiness engenders a more lasting sense of contentment than hedonic pleasures and that it arises from connection, service, and a sense of purpose. Going back to the Ancient Greek roots of the word, Aristotle said that the eudaimonic life is one of “virtuous activity in accordance with reason.”

Now you’re probably expecting a lecture about steering clear of hedonic happiness and aiming only for eudaimonic happiness. Well, not quite* – we do need them both since they basically describe a balance between focusing our attention inward (hedonic) and outward (eudaimonic). We need to take care of ourselves sufficiently to have enough energy and resources to take care of each other.

*But don’t worry – I’ll still manage to turn it into a lecture of sorts!

But obviously we need to find an appropriate balance here that leads to personal happiness as well as a healthy planet and society. We haven’t evolved so far just to sit around all day eating ice cream! (Having said that, some people would better serve society if that’s all they did).

In any case, as you may have discovered for yourselves, dear readers, the pleasure of eating ice cream diminishes, the more you eat. That’s the same for many hedonic activities, which give us pleasure via dopamine in our brains.

Dopamine: pain is so close to pleasure

As we experience pleasure (while eating ice cream, for example) dopamine levels in our brains increase and then dip below normal before returning to baseline levels. However, if we keep chasing those highs (eating ice cream all day long) then the dopamine spikes become smaller, the dip becomes lower, and baseline levels will become depressed. That lower dopamine baseline is likely to be experienced as depression, or some other non-happy state.

So, getting to the point of this lecture post I want to describe two ways in which ethical consumption can help us rebalance the two forms of happiness: hedonic and eudaimonic.  

1. Ethical consumption balances inward and outward perspectives.

This is the obvious one. As consumers, when we attempt to make a choice that’s better for the planet/society, we are looking both inward and outward. In other words, we are activating both hedonic and eudaimonic pathways to happiness. Yay, chocolate (hedonic), balanced with Oh yeah, I should try to find a fair trade product (eudaimonic).

This may feel like making a small sacrifice and in fact that’s one way to know that there’s a eudaimonic element. Often our sacrifice is just the effort that it takes to seek out alternatives to the ingrained choice. Or there may be a small delay in obtaining it, rather than the instant gratification that we have become so used to. But it’s actually more like an investment than a sacrifice, in the end, helping us find a better balance between the two sources of happiness.

2. Ethical consumption limits your options

Whaaaaaa…? I hear you cry. Why would I want to limit my options?  

Dr. Anna Lembke, author of Dopamine Nation, explains that “we’ve transformed the world from a place of scarcity to a place of overwhelming abundance,” and that this has turned us all into potential addicts. She describes a few approaches we can take to reduce the kind of compulsive consumption that leads to a dopamine deficit state.

Dr. Lembke calls her main approach self-binding, a reference to Odysseus asking his crew to tie him to the mast of their ship so he can listen to the Sirens without giving in to them. The version of self-binding that has the most relevance here is categorical self-binding, or reducing consumption that doesn’t align with our goals and values.

The point that I’m dancing around here is that ethical consumption limits our options in a way that benefits us personally and collectively. Personally, it helps us avoid a dopamine deficit state induced by overconsumption, and then we benefit collectively when consumers make ethical choices (e.g., mitigating climate change and extreme poverty).

Explain that to me like I’m six

Do you like ice cream? I started this post with vegan ice cream cones because they led me to thinking about hedonism, but also because ice cream serves as a good example here. I cut down a lot on ice cream at some point, but I wouldn’t say that health was the main reason (even though it’s a good reason). I had decided to reduce my intake of all dairy products after taking a closer look at the impacts of dairy on the environment and animal welfare.

I think that if I was only looking inward, for hedonic happiness, I would not have made this change. I had basically gone through a kind of ice cream detox after considering the product from external (eudaimonic) as well as internal (hedonic) perspectives. Then, after this tolerance break, I gradually rediscovered ice cream as companies started making plant-based versions that are actually really good.

I do feel that all of this has brought upsides for me, personally – an uptick in contentment that’s maybe rooted in a better balance between hedonic and eudaimonic happiness. But it’s also related to the fact that my options are more limited and for good reasons – a categorical self-binding, as Dr. Lembke puts it. Now I get excited by new products, like those vegan ice cream sundae cones (even though they sound like a trifle, ho ho).

An elusive treat rather than more of the same.

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I’ll do another excerpt from Climactic shortly, as it goes a little deeper into the topic of happiness, looking at the psychological concept known as self-determination theory.