Every month or two, the media offers up a new tale of a sad-looking wealthy couple, explaining how they’re living hand-to-mouth or planning to leave the country for a cheaper life: the spiralling school fees, second home and twice-annual ski trips to St Moritz have simply become too much. This is the journalistic equivalent of lion-feeding time at the zoo, with the unsuspecting couple as hunks of meat. It’s a splendid opportunity for materially fortunate people – like me, and maybe you – to cackle at the un-selfawareness of the extremely fortunate, which feels better than laughing at the poor. But I still feel guilty. Because anyone who knows anything about psychology knows how swiftly we adapt: before we know it, things that were once luxuries have become non-negotiable. Cackle all you like, but there is probably no number of ski trips or holiday homes that can’t start to feel impossible to give up.
And human psychology is even more annoying than that: you can be entirely aware that your luxuries are luxuries, but still make yourself crazy trying to preserve them. In a recent New Yorker essay, the investment manager Gary Sernovitz explained the torment of belonging to Global Services, the highest frequent-flyer category on United Airlines, with perks including first-class upgrades, no security queues and limousine transfer between terminals. He diagnosed himself with “Global Services maintenance anxiety disorder” – a compulsive effort not to lose his status, made worse by United’s refusal to reveal the basis on which it’s awarded. Among the symptoms: otherwise pointless “mileage runs”, flights made solely to gain the favour of the airline gods. Why not just relax and, if you lose your status, so be it? Apparently, that’s not an option.
This psychological mechanism, “hedonic adaptation”, is famous, yet I don’t think we’ve begun to appreciate the role it plays in life – how many of our choices, large and small, are made on the basis of fundamentally misjudging what we couldn’t live without. Next time you’re laughing at the squeezed super-rich, consider your own life, which doubtless includes plenty of things you don’t technically need in order to live. Would it hurt to give them up? Obviously; and there’s no reason to assume it’s different higher up the ladder.
But the saving grace, which people in the grip of hedonic adaptation never remember, is that it works in the other direction. Make a sacrifice in your quality of life, and the chances are you’ll quickly forget what you’re missing. As the psychologist Adam Alter notes, that’s one reason most of the people threatening to leave the US if Donald Trump is elected won’t do so: we exaggerate the intensity and duration of the pain we’ll feel if a dreaded prospect comes to pass. That’s useful to remember when contemplating a life-choice that might threaten your material comfort: you’re almost certainly ascribing too much weight to that downside. It probably also follows that, living in New York, I should be less panicked by the thought of a Trump presidency. But I’m still working on that one.
oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com
