Siddhartha on the Hedonic Treadmill

Introduction

Siddhartha reminds me of the hedonic treadmill and a book I loved titled Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction by Judith Grisel. Siddhartha experiences and seeks awakening, enlightenment, wisdom, and salvation. But it seems that regardless of what he learns and experiences, it isn't enough.

The hedonic treadmill has been consuming my attention. Like the little boy in Sixth Sense, except instead of ghost, I see treadmills. I see Siddhartha and Hesse on their own treadmills. Success after success, but never satisfied.

I'm skeptical of psychology research and findings. After reading a couple of the methods of studies related to adaptive psychology theories, I'm more skeptical of the news, talks, and reports of these studies. But with that said, hedonic adaptions makes for a great look into Siddhartha the character and Hesse the writer and person. I don't intend this literary analysis to be a comprehensive look at Siddhartha nor Hesse. It is an exercises in examining Siddhartha through hedonic adaption, continuously returning to a baseline emotional state and or never having enough.

The ending of Siddhartha could offer a solution or contradiction to hedonic adaption. In general, hedonic adaption as a literary lens falls apart towards the end of the story, when Siddhartha meets his son, and spoiler warning, finds contentment and fulfillment.

The Hedonic Treadmill

"The hedonic adaptions, also known as hedonic adaptation, is the observed tendency of humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or life changes. According to this theory, as a person makes more money, expectations and desires rise in tandem, which results in no permanent gain in happiness."

There are many examples, the first bite of ice cream is a lot better than the last. There is research to suggest winning the lotto doesn't produce lasting effects on happiness. Research also suggests the opposite idea. Illnesses and accidents, as long as they're not degenerative, don't impact long term happiness. For the most part, people return to an emotional baseline level after positive and negative experiences. (Why bother going on vacation???? That's for another rant.)

Evolutionarily this makes sense. Those more ambitious ancestors could pass on more genes. Perpetual ambition during reproductive years may have been critical in at least one environment humans evolved. 

The problem now is humans live in extremely stable and secure civilizations. Civilizations we didn't evolve for. I have 100s of times more than any of my ancestors, and I don't feel like it's enough. Further, I probably feel similar, and possibly worse than many of them. This might be why I love and connect with Siddhartha and Hesse.

Back to literature after some brief Hesse biography. I'm going to analyze Siddhartha's contentment and fulfillment throughout the novel.

Hermann Hesse's Life

Siddhartha and Hermann Hesse were born with a golden ticket at their time. They were smart, highly educated, affluent, attractive, self determined, and highly successful; Hesse less attractive. Yet, they both were unfulfilled, seeking, and thirsty.

Hesse, like his most famous protagonist Siddhartha, was a seeker. Unlike Siddhartha, he failed to find lasting happiness, contentment, or fulfillment. This is the hedonic treadmill, a universal problem that readers will relate with at least at some point in life.

In Hesse's biography titled Hesse: The Wanderer and His Shadow, the author, Gunnar Decker, introduces Hesse as independent, self reliant, and neurotic. "Any utopia [Hesse] posits is at any time fully cognizant of the anti-utopia inherent within it."¹ Any reader of Hesse's life will connect Hesse's inner conflicts with those of his protagonists. The first stanza of the poem "Stufen," from The Glass Bead Game, expresses Hesse's hedonic adaptions. Hesse's artistic definition of the phenomenon. I prefer the artistic one!

"Just as every blossom fades
and all youth yield to old age,
so every stage of life, each flower of wisdom
and every virtue reaches its prime and cannot last forever.
Whenever life calls, the heart must be ready to leave
and make a fresh start and to enter bravely
into different and new liaisons.
And a magic inhabits every new beginning,
protecting us and helping us to live."

"Hermann Hesse is regarded as the “author of the crisis”, as a poet who subjected himself to tormenting self-analysis while writing, always in search of his own, real identity."4 He attempted suicide as a teen. He did psychoanalysis with one of Carl Jung's employees. He was a difficult person to be around and spend a lot of his life in solitude. Hesse wrote the novel Siddhartha at middle age. In the novel, Siddhartha solves the problem of life, but Hesse didn't. Hesse continued to struggle and seek for "a magic inhabiting every new beginning, protecting us and helping us to live."²

Siddhartha's Treadmill

I'm proposing Siddhartha's baseline contentment is a 3-4 out of 10. This is where he starts the story as a young man. He seeks, he finds, it's never enough until it is. During his journey, Siddhartha keeps returning to his baseline state of a 3-4.

Act 1 Self Denial

In the opening paragraphs, Siddhartha is described as loved and a source of joy for everyone. But, "Siddhartha had started to nurse discontent in himself, he had started to feel that the love of his father and the love of his mother, and also the love of his friend, Govinda, would not bring him joy forever and ever, would not nurse him, feed him, satisfy him."3

Siddhartha and Govinda leave their homes and families to join the ascetics. Govinda praises Siddhartha for how quickly and well he learned from the Samanas. Although the story doesn't describe Siddhartha's initial emotions upon joining the ascetics, we can assume there were at least trills and gratification in Siddhartha's initial quest and successes as an ascetic. He must have felt many positive emotions to build the courage and confidence to master self denial. However much contentment Siddhartha achieved was replaced with contempt by the time the reader finds him in chapter 2 "With the Samanas:"

"[Siddhartha] slipped out of his self into thousands of other forms, was an animal, was carrion, was stone, was wood, was water, and awoke every time to find his old self again, sun or moon shone, was his self again, turned round in the cycle, felt thirst, overcame the thirst, felt new thirst..."

Siddhartha returns to his baseline. He tells Govinda, "I’m suffering of thirst, O Govinda, and on this long path of a Samana, my thirst has remained as strong as ever." He is discouraged and unsatisfied with his path. When news of the historical Buddha, Gotama, reaches the Samanas, Govinda persuades Siddhartha to seek the teachings of Gotama. 

Act 2 Self Exploration

Siddhartha rejects Gotama's teachings over a small gap. This leads Siddhartha to a new awakening. His baseline boosts. Siddhartha is an 9.0 to 10 in contentment and outlook for the future. He is determined to listen to his inner voice and begin to learn about himself without teachings and learning.

Siddhartha meets the beautiful Kamala. He becomes a businessman to earn her respect, craft, and friendship. The novelty of Siddhartha's new life and goals fulfill him over the next chapter of the novel. By the end of chapter 6, "With the Childlike People," Siddhartha is has approached his baseline.

"Years passed by!" The narrator summarizes Siddhartha's return to his baseline by describing an hedonic treadmill in chapter 7, "Sansara:"

"Years passed by; surrounded by the good life, Siddhartha hardly felt them fading away. He had become rich, for quite a while he possessed a house of his own and his own servants, and a garden before the city by the river... Siddhartha’s new life, which he had started after his separation from Govinda, had grown old, lost colour and splendour as the years passed by... He played the game due to a pain of his heart, losing and wasting his wretched money in the game brought him an angry joy, in no other way he could demonstrate his disdain for wealth, the merchants’ false god, more clearly and more mockingly. Thus he gambled with high stakes and mercilessly, hating himself, mocking himself, won thousands, threw away thousands, lost money, lost jewelry, lost a house in the country, won again, lost again... While he was worried about losing high stakes, that fear he loved and sought to always renew it, always increase it, always get it to a slightly higher level, for in this feeling alone he still felt something like happiness, something like an intoxication, something like an elevated form of life in the midst of his saturated, lukewarm, dull life."

Samsara, the Indian religious belief, is most commonly know as reincarnation. The more general ideas are that all life, matter, and existence is in a cycle; or that life is a cycle of aimlessness and mundanness. 

After contemplating suicide, Siddhartha finds the river and decides to follow and live with the ferryman, Vesudeva. 

Act 3 Self Actualization

Siddhartha lives with the Ferryman for 11 years. 

"There was something about... the two ferrymen which was transmitted to others... It happened occasionally that a traveller, after having looked at the face of one of the ferrymen, started to tell the story of his life, told about pains, confessed evil things, asked for comfort and advice. It happened occasionally that someone asked for permission to stay for a night with them to listen to the river. It also happened that curious people came, who had been told that there were two wise men, or sorcerers, or holy men living by that ferry. The curious people asked many questions, but they got no answers, and they found neither sorcerers nor wise men, they only found two friendly little old men, who seemed to be mute and to have become a bit strange and gaga."

Siddhartha appears to content. But one day Kamala appears with his son. Kamala dies from a snake bite and Siddhartha becomes the care taker for his son. Siddhartha struggles to reach the boy, who is described as spoiled. Siddhartha is torn between love for his son and suffering as a struggling parent: 

"[Siddhartha] did sense very well that this love, this blind love for his son, was a passion, something very human, that it was Sansara, a murky source, dark waters. Nevertheless, he felt at the same time, it was not worthless, it was necessary, came from the essence of his own being. This pleasure also had to be atoned for, this pain also had to be endured, these foolish acts also had to be committed."

Once again, Siddhartha finds himself back near the emotional and psychological state where he started the novel. Siddhartha suffers a trauma from the rejection of his love for his son. This time, Siddhartha becomes one of the "childlike people." 

Siddhartha "now looked upon people, less smart, less proud, but instead warmer, more curious, more involved. When he ferried travellers of the ordinary kind, childlike people, businessmen, warriors, women, these people did not seem alien to him as they used to: he understood them, he understood and shared their life, which was not guided by thoughts and insight, but solely by urges and wishes, he felt like them. Though he was near perfection and was bearing his final wound, it still seemed to him as if those childlike people were his brothers, their vanities, desires for possession, and ridiculous aspects were no longer ridiculous to him, became understandable, became lovable, even became worthy of veneration to him."

Siddhartha finally hears the river laughing. He looks and in the river he sees his father, who suffered his son's rejection. He sees and hears everyone and everything in the river. Siddhartha understands the world as ever changing. "His wound blossomed, his suffering was shining, his self had flown into the oneness." The story comes full circle when Govinda, an old man still seeking and suffering, visits Siddhartha. Siddhartha tells Govinda a solution to their hedonic adaptions.

"In deep meditation, there is the possibility to put time out of existence, to see all life which was, is, and will be as if it was simultaneous, and there everything is good, everything is perfect, everything is Brahman." 

Conclusion

The monotony of day to day living returns people to their baseline, keeping them on the treadmill, never enough!

Hesse implies that the simple rural living of Siddhartha and Vesudeva is part of the solution to the suffering and cyclical nature of hedonic adaption. Vesudeva suggestions that Siddhartha's life and background aren't necessary. Fun connection, Vesudeva is the "god of gods" by some Hindus. 

If the novel is correct, meditative processes and listening, whether listening to the river, wind, or rocks, can reveal the impermanence of reality and free people from the emotional angst and suffering in life.

This could be an interesting empirical study. All the buzz and hype around meditation the last ten plus years suggests the popularity has some utility. I'd wager there is an inverse correlation between meditative practices, focusing on impermanence of nature and oneness, and depression.

The beauty of the idea is that Vesudeva is not educated, not a thinker, nor an orator or teacher. But he finds fulfillment and happiness with a life of poverty by the river. as a ferryman. 

I want to be like Vesudeva, you might too. Good luck!

Works Cited

1. Decker, Gunnar. Hesse: The Wanderer and His Shadow.

2. Hesse, Hermann. "Stufen" Das Glasperlenspiel
3. Hesse, Hermann. Siddhartha. Standard Ebook Online
4. "Life of Crisis" Hermann Hesse Website (translated to English by google translate)