I was absolutely implying this! That was a fundamental part of my system, which went unspoken and which I am happy to defend.
And it’s why I pointed out that you don’t seem to have even semicommon mass suicide in the classical world, before the rise of Judeo-Christian beliefs on Heavenly and Hellish fates, when people think of the afterlife as grey fuzz if they think there is an afterlife and when culture often considers it morally heroic to commit suicide, rather than sinful. It seems more common, then, but even then it’s very rare, almost always only in cases where people have strong predictive reason to believe things are about to get much worse and not going to get better, even though they don’t know about the hedonic treadmill.
(I think the most common case is ‘we’re about to be captured by an extremely cruel enemy, tortured, maybe killed, maybe worse, almost certainly enslaved if we survive’ - and even then I don’t think most of the population of sacked cities kills themselves first, it’s just something you hear about a noticeable minority of people doing, in what is basically the worst situation that can happen.)
And evolutionary pressure against suicide is what I presume produced the hedonic treadmill. “Whatever happens, on the macro scale you will be happy slightly above the suicide rate” seems like a great thing for evolution to engineer in, and I’m not really surprised it did.
I can understand that, logically speaking, but it does not suffice to convince me. This is especially true because of the % of people who attempt suicide, don’t die, and say later it was a giant mistake and they regret it. I could imagine a world in which people were usually or even often wrong both about committing suicide and not committing suicide, but it seems to me like a lot of added complexity.
I was absolutely implying this! That was a fundamental part of my system, which went unspoken and which I am happy to defend.
And it’s why I pointed out that you don’t seem to have even semicommon mass suicide in the classical world, before the rise of Judeo-Christian beliefs on Heavenly and Hellish fates, when people think of the afterlife as grey fuzz if they think there is an afterlife and when culture often considers it morally heroic to commit suicide, rather than sinful. It seems more common, then, but even then it’s very rare, almost always only in cases where people have strong predictive reason to believe things are about to get much worse and not going to get better, even though they don’t know about the hedonic treadmill.
(I think the most common case is ‘we’re about to be captured by an extremely cruel enemy, tortured, maybe killed, maybe worse, almost certainly enslaved if we survive’ - and even then I don’t think most of the population of sacked cities kills themselves first, it’s just something you hear about a noticeable minority of people doing, in what is basically the worst situation that can happen.)
And evolutionary pressure against suicide is what I presume produced the hedonic treadmill. “Whatever happens, on the macro scale you will be happy slightly above the suicide rate” seems like a great thing for evolution to engineer in, and I’m not really surprised it did.
Evolution has many dials other than just emotional affect, and we would naively expect evolution to use all of them if it can.
I can understand that, logically speaking, but it does not suffice to convince me. This is especially true because of the % of people who attempt suicide, don’t die, and say later it was a giant mistake and they regret it. I could imagine a world in which people were usually or even often wrong both about committing suicide and not committing suicide, but it seems to me like a lot of added complexity.