I want to get off the hedonic treadmill

for days when being twisted apart in a kaleidoscope doesn't feel so good

I’M SO ON TOP OF THINGS. I’m always doing something! I’m always going somewhere! I show up for every occasion in the perfectly selected outfit, a bag full of essentials that can take my look from day to night and cover every eventuality in between. I’m one of the most emotionally stable people I know. I have every minute of my days planned out, schedules lasting from now until there’s a semi-decent planet in retrograde, but I can maybe fit you in for a mid-morning coffee in 17 Saturdays time?

I wish I had time to call my parents and tell them how well I’m doing, how happy and fulfilled. Oh well! Today I get to read another seventeen essays to help me understand an internet concept that really is super relevant to society, and will help me decode our culture. I have to have a full understanding right now before the terminology fades in three weeks time like the rest of them. I’ll probably take a break from that by sending a voice note, maybe explaining why that new film isn’t as good as everyone thinks it is, or maybe sharing the latest gossip about the boyfriend of a friend of a friend. I’ll donate a few minutes to recommend vintage shops in a comment section because I’m a woman about town. In the afternoon, I have to be angry about someone else’s poorly argued article, superficially written bestseller, clumsily crafted tweet that I read on my walk to the shop. Then I get to tell my friends all about it at drinks tonight!

I can’t hear the music playing in my ears on the tube but I let it play anyway, because, as I always say, I love the tube! It’s such a great opportunity to take in media uninterrupted! I’d definitely read if my head wasn’t spinning. I watch over the shoulder of a stranger sat next to me who double taps his way through a Youtube video, spending more time skipping than watching, then setting the speed to 1.5x. The mouths in the celebrity interview jolt unnervingly quickly as the participants twitch their way through the performance. Fixing my eyes on his phone screen makes me feel sick, partly dizziness, partly because I see my own gulping down of content mirrored in him and it’s suddenly starkly clear how futile it is. Writing magnum opuses on my phone while I pace on the stairmaster with my heart beating in my eyes, forgetting I’m alive. Listening to a song five times because I’m not actually listening. Fiending for something I can’t put my finger on so tapping through clips of people I don’t care about on any platform that’ll have me, taking in three seconds at a time and soothed in the momentary hope that this will be the one that satiates me, the next one, the next. Tinny royalty free music and dialogue blare from my friend’s phone while we wait for the Uber. I’m disgusted by how small it sounds when it’s not chosen by me. But where else can I peruse the goings wrong? It’s no wonder I’m nauseous.

I can’t afford for anything to be slow, otherwise I’ll miss something; forever rushing towards something or other. I walk into the off licence and realise I don’t know what I came in for, so I leave immediately. My calendar is full until July and I don’t understand what with. In my head I’m dancing, in my dreams I’m a marionette. I’m in a car full of smoke speeding down the motorway and it’s not my hands on the wheel and I don’t remember taking off my seatbelt. I roll the window down and push my head out of it. I gulp from a glass bottle, gripped tightly by the neck, to trick myself into feeling as though the wind rushing past feels good.

Chipped nail polish in my mouth as I lick the lime juice off my fingertips. I look at my reflection in the window of a parked car and come face to face with a neighbour I’ve never met. I always derided the books with girls who swan about capitals wearing flea market-sourced satin and lace, racking up tabs that other people will inevitably pick up. But here I am, name dropping staff to get past bouncers, greeting bartenders like old friends in exchange for free drinks and special attention, giving unsolicited relationship advice to anyone who’ll put a shot in my hand (I try to find a polite way to tell him he’s the worst). I don’t really like wine, but sure! I’ll force down a dry slice of toast that scratches my throat to balance it out. It’s a Wednesday. No! A Tuesday.

forever seeing stars, even where I’m not supposed to

Midweek I can feel my chest tighten and my eyes unfocus, begging to close, to roll back into my head for a moment. I shake, I stutter, I miss steps as I put my foot down and stumble in public. I love my job! I cry at work often. I also cry on the bus. I cry in the supermarket. I cry in the street. I cry at the gym. I go to the gym! In the changing rooms of a session I had to leave early because my heart is thumping too hard, too fast, a woman strides around naked. With nothing on, she walks over to the mirrors at the opposite end of the room, leans over the counter, and pours over a space between her eyebrows where I assume she has some kind of imperfection. The ugliest part of myself deplores her for presumably knowing her body is what we’re here to become. I put my hand on my chest to check whether the pulsing has calmed yet. It hasn’t. 

Metal chunks pull me in. It’s not their speed I gravitate towards, it’s their solidity; I want impact. You’ve always felt you give more than you receive but when you’re surrounded by people begging to prop you up, you make them give you a reason why they need to be fixed more. It feels good to care about people! What’s this song called? It would sound really good on my playlist. I’m late, again. I swipe under my eyes to catch running mascara and dash into the meeting, rifling through a pocket book of standard apologies. If I can perfect that look that says “the day I’ve had” I can get away without justifying anything. Let me count the reasons why it’s someone else’s fault.

What are you going to wear this weekend? I feel perpetually like I’m being thrown about, shut in a box and shaken, set alight, dropped into an hour glass and upturned. I need a coffee, I need a drink, I need to buy a crystal, I need to come off birth control. I need to travel, I need to stay put. I need to cut down on caffeine, I need to change the world, I need a new pair of jeans, I need to hear a good song, I need to be held. Isn’t this fun? Please answer. I find a plum under my bed and pretend to myself that I don’t remember how long ago it fell under there. The juice drips down my chin. No, I’m fine, I just never grew out of  ————— ——— —— — ————— ————.

I wonder if vulnerability will help. I pour my heart out at every opportunity. I have so much to say. I fill every space and still drown in the backlog. I have always had a penchant for the iambic. . But poetry and confession are different. I read a battered car boot sale copy of American Psycho at a much too tender age and at the time it was the most access to anything sexually explicit I’d experienced. Sometimes I want to ask people if it shows. Ever the renaissance woman. Was the thing I sent to the group chat funny or no? We should try that new coffee shop/bar/market/your childhood bedroom (show me all of your favourite trinkets before you jettison them forever) this weekend. Wait, just let me reply to this message. Okay sorry, yep, I’m listening. Shit, I forgot to take my laundry out of the machine again. 

I can feel my ears ringing before the band is even done playing, which is a NUMBER ONE TOP GOOD SIGN that I’m at least doing a good enough job of pretending to be relaxed that the beat can hit me. Neck twitching so I can keep an eye on who sees me from which angle and guess what they might be thinking. Whole days and nights consumed with wanting to be anyone else. With wanting to be wanted. After the show I sit in the bathroom cubicle and inspect the red crescents in my arm. I didn’t have a drink in my hand and I had to hold something. I am not supposed to be here. The next morning I’ll find an apple core in my jacket pocket. I self actualise 3 times a month. Can you tell this shirt has a stain on it? I should focus on something outside of myself. I can’t hear what you’re asking me to do because the traffic is loud but whatever it is, I’ll get to it on my lunch break. I’ll probably never write that book. We should go out tonight!

I should stay away from the content I gulp down; I know too much. I should cherry pick. I don’t need to know about the latest trend that’s eroding us from the inside out. I don’t need to learn every essential lesson there is to be taken from the breakdown of a relationship I’m a million miles away from. Seeing who what wore where and why it caused tectonic shifts can be a simple joy but I feel as though I’m pulling candy coloured canvas out of my throat square by square. And it all has to mean something. It all has to be a stitch in the tapestry.

I have been told my whole life how put together I am. The most organised person you know is hoping there’s a stray contraceptive pill behind her bathroom sink that she can blow the dust off, because the pharmacy will be shut this late on a Sunday. It’s not because I’m in my messy girl indie sleaze Fleabag era. It’s not because I’m ‘just a girl’. When the bile rises, when I feel tears breaching my eyelashes, when my heart sinks for the fifth time this week, I tell myself that I’m human; atoms collided so that I could feel the whole spectrum. Gone are the days where I felt the soles of my feet burn in churches that I only entered so I could slip a folded up piece of paper into the prayer box, having found a less blunt way to say ‘please ask God if he can make me feel something’. If I knew who to thank, I’d be thanking them.

filled with the dissonance of a sacred heart!

In a different life I had a conversation with a stranger that changed everything. He told me about the hedonic treadmill, and patiently explained the concept and how true he felt it was. At the time, I felt a release in gaining this lens. Now I feel like I’m trapped by the concept. The theory (coined by Brickman and Campbell in 1971) is that most people have a natural tendency to regain balance in their emotions, to return to contentment. We’re dropped into the depths of despair, face heartache, realise lifelong fears, We feel the most intense of pleasures, earn inordinate sums of money, achieve goals that have been chasing us for years, and the next day go back to our normal routine. Upon first integrating this into my worldview, it was a safety net; a moment to understand that no matter how bad things could be, there would be birdsong and sunlight again. Now I feel as though there’s a glass wall between me and full appreciation of the pinballing, bounding from surface to surface. As though when I zoom out I can’t see the extremes, because I’ve already reached the end of the cycle, and in the moments of highs and lows I can’t access the neutral.

I change my bed sheets and the dust settles. Waves crash. The city breathes a sigh of relief into my lungs. I wash my hair and the tulips unfurl. I spend the evening sauntering down canal tow paths with a friend who buys me an iced matcha as a thank you for writing her a job reference, and we say everything there is to say about our relationships, and some more. I rekindle. I finally return the book the library thinks I’ve lost; I can try and read it another time, when it’s not overdue. On days where I lick the back of my molars and taste dirt, I remind myself of the hands that are waiting to catch me. I have someone who’ll leave out fresh coffee for me, someone who’ll always make sure I get home safe, someone who’ll brush my hair for me as an act of love, not the pity I’m desperate to believe it is. This beautiful life won’t leave me alone and I want to deserve it. Even if it takes pleasure in catapulting me from side to wretched side.

Stalking through Shoreditch I pull out my phone and furtively type the line: “something’s always happening here and it’s never happening to me”. I delete it letter by letter. This isn’t true. By design, I’m at the centre of a whirlwind of activity. Maybe that’s what I am, a harmonised mass of movement finding my footing. Where there’s nothing happening, I make it happen, sometimes to my detriment. There’s so much to be done that I swear I’ll suffocate if I’m not pulling people into me. It makes the moments of peace, few and far between, that bit sweeter. This may not be the way forward, as the fog I operate in grows thicker, but sometimes you have to let the hedonic treadmill trick you into thinking you’re moving, even if it’s really keeping you static, chasing your tail where you need to be.

Copyright © 2024 Eve Carcas