Rethinking Lifestyle

It is the month of December, and yet the city is at this very moment in a sweat. License is given to the general merrymaking. Everything resounds with mighty preparations, – as if (Christmas) differed at all from the usual business day! So true it is that the difference is nil, that I regard as correct the remark of the man who said: ‘Once December was a month; now it is a year.’

Seneca the Younger wrote those words about 2000 years ago in his letter “On Festivals and Fasting”, although he did not actually refer to Christmas, of course. He was writing about the Saturnalia, a December festival of freedom and leisure celebrated by Romans before the advent of Christianity. There’s something strangely familiar about the world Seneca describes, which he found difficult to reconcile with his beliefs about simplicity and personal resilience. Seneca was a Stoic, and practiced a form of self-discipline that was as out of style in his time as it is today. He observed that people do not become happier with more pleasures, but will actually grow accustomed, then dependent on them. He saw hedonism (the enjoyment of pleasures) as a kind of treadmill that leads nowhere. It’s an observation that has been proven in modern psychology, and it’s known as “Hedonistic Adaptation”. Consider a prisoner who’s released after 10 years behind bars. His first breaths of fresh air are indescribably sweet, and the sun’s warmth on his face is blissful. If he continued to enjoy these pleasures as he did in those first moments, he would be happy for the rest of his life. But after only a few days, perhaps months, the novelty wears off and he becomes accustomed to his new condition. The same is true for us.

The world we live in is filled – packed wall-to-wall – with pleasures. Electricity, food from all corners of the world, digital communication, modern housing with central heat, clothing so inexpensive that we give it away before it wears out… the list goes on. All of these pleasures are like water to us now – the only effect they have on our happiness is to sustain it. Yet if any one of these things were lost, we would feel deprivation and loss.

But there is a remedy, for anyone bold enough to find true happiness. For two thousand years it has been known that mindfulness and gratitude are an effective antidote to the hedonic treadmill. Look around you now, and actually see the pleasures that have faded into expectation. Understand that your starting point is to be standing alone, with no clothes, no food, and no home. Invisibly, you’re provided all of these things, which you cannot create on your own. Be aware of the precariousness of your situation. And now again, see what you have. Be thankful, be overwhelmed with joy! And have a truly Merry Christmas!