For example if you like sweet food, you can get into a cycle of eating more and more food that’s sweeter and sweeter. But the guy next door, who’s eating much less and periodically fasting to keep the association fresh, is actually getting more pleasure from food than you!
The other guy is having more pleasure per unit of food, and maybe per second spent eating deliberately tasty food. But does he necessarily have more pleasure in total? How do you know?
I do agree with your conclusion, for a different reason. Today’s affluent Western people have access to a huge range of fun activities, far more so than any previous human population. Enjoying any one activity has diminishing returns per unit time. So to maximize the total amount of enjoyment, we should sample many things instead of becoming experts in any one (fun-oriented) thing, even though becoming an expert can occasionally grant the highest possible momentary enjoyment of a masterpiece.
The difference from your formulation is that you wouldn’t fast to reset the reward value of tasty food; you just consider the opportunity cost of buying and preparing especially tasty food, and then don’t do it as much because you invest in other stuff instead. Some things, like sweetening the same food more and more, don’t have marginal costs and so become superstimuli, but I think most people are already aware that these are dangerous, for reasons beyond maximizing pleasure.
Some of the things you listed are different: people chase some dreams not to maximize fun, but for success, prestige, money, and other values. These things follow different reward curves than fun; for instance money can be invested and has increasing marginal returns, not diminishing ones.
The difference from your formulation is that you wouldn’t fast to reset the reward value of tasty food; you just consider the opportunity cost of buying and preparing especially tasty food, and then don’t do it as much because you invest in other stuff instead.
Yeah, I agree. Though searching for variety can also be the kind of trap I described.
If I’m previously used to eating a lot of tasty food, and then switch to eating mostly bland food and occasionally enjoying some really tasty treat, there would be a lot of confounders compared to someone who was never as used to eating lots of sweets all the time.
What would actually happen is that every drop of sugar would start tasting much sweeter, you’d begin to find the flavour even in bland food, and all the sugary stuff you used to eat would become too sweet to stomach (at least for the first few bites, after which your old “sugar addiction” would relapse).
Lately I’ve been alternately on-sugar/off-sugar. A couple of months ago I accidentally into a low-carb diet (I never really planned to avoid carbs specifically, it just turned out that a healthy diet doesn’t have many carbs in it), and the sweetest thing I used to eat was (very) dark chocolate, with 11% saccharides. I was eating about 20g/day of it, and every crumb tasted like sugary heaven. Then some well-meaning relatives came by with some homemade cookies that I just didn’t feel like resisting anymore (my appetite started leaning away from meat & veggies and towards carbs). A few days into that habit, I turn to the dark chocolate I had left. I was surprised to see how bitter it began tasting, and stopped eating carbs again just so that I could feel the sweetness in it.
Remember adaptation. (This actually draws a nice parallel to the topic of happiness even though the specific mechanisms here are of blood sugar and insulin.)
Everything you say is true, but doesn’t seem to contradict my point (if that’s what you intended).
What I meant was that while I would likely experience qualitatively similar patterns of happiness to someone who never ate much sugar, I wouldn’t know how my experience compared quantitatively, and that’s important when measuring ‘greatest sum of pleasure’.
The other guy is having more pleasure per unit of food, and maybe per second spent eating deliberately tasty food. But does he necessarily have more pleasure in total? How do you know?
I do agree with your conclusion, for a different reason. Today’s affluent Western people have access to a huge range of fun activities, far more so than any previous human population. Enjoying any one activity has diminishing returns per unit time. So to maximize the total amount of enjoyment, we should sample many things instead of becoming experts in any one (fun-oriented) thing, even though becoming an expert can occasionally grant the highest possible momentary enjoyment of a masterpiece.
The difference from your formulation is that you wouldn’t fast to reset the reward value of tasty food; you just consider the opportunity cost of buying and preparing especially tasty food, and then don’t do it as much because you invest in other stuff instead. Some things, like sweetening the same food more and more, don’t have marginal costs and so become superstimuli, but I think most people are already aware that these are dangerous, for reasons beyond maximizing pleasure.
Some of the things you listed are different: people chase some dreams not to maximize fun, but for success, prestige, money, and other values. These things follow different reward curves than fun; for instance money can be invested and has increasing marginal returns, not diminishing ones.
Yeah, I agree. Though searching for variety can also be the kind of trap I described.
You can test both approaches on your own happiness.
If I’m previously used to eating a lot of tasty food, and then switch to eating mostly bland food and occasionally enjoying some really tasty treat, there would be a lot of confounders compared to someone who was never as used to eating lots of sweets all the time.
What would actually happen is that every drop of sugar would start tasting much sweeter, you’d begin to find the flavour even in bland food, and all the sugary stuff you used to eat would become too sweet to stomach (at least for the first few bites, after which your old “sugar addiction” would relapse).
Lately I’ve been alternately on-sugar/off-sugar. A couple of months ago I accidentally into a low-carb diet (I never really planned to avoid carbs specifically, it just turned out that a healthy diet doesn’t have many carbs in it), and the sweetest thing I used to eat was (very) dark chocolate, with 11% saccharides. I was eating about 20g/day of it, and every crumb tasted like sugary heaven. Then some well-meaning relatives came by with some homemade cookies that I just didn’t feel like resisting anymore (my appetite started leaning away from meat & veggies and towards carbs). A few days into that habit, I turn to the dark chocolate I had left. I was surprised to see how bitter it began tasting, and stopped eating carbs again just so that I could feel the sweetness in it.
Remember adaptation. (This actually draws a nice parallel to the topic of happiness even though the specific mechanisms here are of blood sugar and insulin.)
Everything you say is true, but doesn’t seem to contradict my point (if that’s what you intended).
What I meant was that while I would likely experience qualitatively similar patterns of happiness to someone who never ate much sugar, I wouldn’t know how my experience compared quantitatively, and that’s important when measuring ‘greatest sum of pleasure’.