I’m Paul, The Hedonic Treadmill Guy. I’ve spent my life failing to beat the Hedonic Treadmill. I’ve tried everything: getting rich, getting married, having kids… I’ve chatted with AI, I’ve spoken to Buddha (Jesus wasn’t available but I spoke to some lovely people that know him well), and I wrote a book about it.

The Hedonic Treadmill is the only thing we humans care about. Everything we do is an attempt to beat the treadmill - whether we jump out of bed in the morning, hit the gym and then work 20 hours in our AI startup, or if we turn over in bed and get another 2 hours sleep.. we are just trying to maximise how good we feel. And the thing that controls how good we feel isn’t what’s going on in the world around us, it’s the way our non-conscious minds are programmed to continually reset us to our happiness set point. That is the Hedonic Treadmill. It’s the most important thing in any human’s life and no one’s doing anything about trying to fix it.

The Hedonic Treadmill is evolution’s way of making humans successful — it’s why we aren’t still sitting in caves doing bad drawings of cows in berry juice on the walls. It’s what drove us to put on a bearskin and conquer the planet. We’ve built skyscrapers, rockets to the moon and iPhones — and we’re still no happier than our caveman ancestors. And that’s because happiness isn’t the reward for a life well-lived; it’s the mechanism our genes use to control our conscious choices.