Deep Dish

All Life is an Experiment

hedonic treadmill

the problem with happiness research: it's all relative

Happiness is a Greased Pig Chase

October 18, 2020 | Richard Meadows

Despite having grown up in the country and attended my fair share of the agricultural shows and carnivals that pass for entertainment, I have never known the joy of chasing a pig—greased, or otherwise.

I no longer feel a desperate need to address this glaring gap in my childhood experience, because the last couple of years have given me a pretty good sense of what it must feel like.

Happiness is a greased pig chase. I don’t mean this in the ‘happiness is a warm blanket’ Peanuts sense, although clearly rural folks get a big kick out of it. I mean it in the sense that the concept itself is extremely difficult to pin down…

good enough cover running up stairs

Getting to ‘Good Enough’

November 26, 2019 | Richard Meadows

It’s always jarring and mildly insulting to hear that extremely famous and successful people are unhappy with their position in life. You ingrate! How dare you be miserable! Stop appropriating my culture!

The reason I feel betrayed by superstars like Tim Ferriss who talk openly about struggling with feelings of inadequacy is not so much actual class resentment, but the assault upon my own convictions that once I achieve [$NEXTBIGTHING] I will be content with my own position in life…

eating the same food every day

Same Salad, Different Day

August 31, 2019 | Richard Meadows

Probably you’ve read articles about how Obama wears the same suit every day, or Mark Zuckerberg has seventeen identical grey t-shirts in his wardrobe. The idea is to deliberately eliminate inconsequential daily choices and free up mental bandwidth for more important decisions; like ordering extrajudicial killings or strip-mining billions of people’s private information to sell to advertisers.

I say this lifehack is is much more useful and wide-reaching than streamlining your wardrobe: you can automate the important things, too.

If you wear the same outfit over and over, nothing bad happens. Maybe you don’t get invited to Fashion Week. But what if you eat the same food every day?

The Brave New World of Wireheading

Last updated: March 22, 2020 | Published on September 14, 2018 | Richard Meadows

The rat’s paw moves constantly, sometimes becoming a blur as it depresses the lever over and over. Once, twice, ten times, a hundred times, five thousand times in the space of an hour. With each push, an electrode sends a jolt of electricity coursing through its tiny rodent brain. The rat will push the lever for as long as 24 hours without stopping. It won’t eat, or sleep, or make any effort to leave the confines of its stainless steel cage. Unless the men in white lab coats cut off the current, it will stimulate itself to death.

It’s 1954, and science has just stumbled upon the brain’s pleasure center. Heady days! The excited researchers repeat the experiment on monkeys, and find, again, they can reach right into the hypothalamus and light it up like a Christmas tree, transforming their subjects into blissed-out automatons. The seminal paper concludes that these results could “very likely be generalized eventually to human beings—with modifications, of course”.

Of course…

Getting rid of all your stuff: an essay about why I want to get rid of everything

Getting Rid of All Your Stuff Feels Like Taking a Big, Dreamy Dump

Last updated: November 19, 2019 | Published on December 8, 2016 | Richard Meadows

Taking a big dreamy dump is the best way I can describe how it feels to get rid of your possessions. See also: Rasping the dead skin off your feet, taking a tactical chunder during a big night out, or achieving inbox zero. It’s the same sense of deep satisfaction. The deadweight is gone, leaving you feeling all shiny and streamlined. That’s why culling my entire life’s belongings down to the contents of a 22 litre day pack felt really fucking good.