This week I came across a “Life Report Card” I wrote for myself in 2017. This was arguably a low period in my life when I was in crisis over what to do about leaving my company. I was dealing with huge imposter syndrome, feeling like a complete fake and my life was going to come crashing down. I was avoiding talking to my business partner for reasons unknown to me. I suffered terribly and hadn’t yet found an action to take to help myself. All I knew was something had to change.
I wrote out 8 categories that were important to me at that time:
- Marriage
- Parenting
- Family relationships
- Friends
- Financial peace
- Feeling passion in what I do
- Helping Others
- Personal Health
I scored each one a 1 to 10.
It’s interesting to note that “work” or “business” was not included in those categories. The closest would be Financial Peace or Passion.
Upon rediscovering this time capsule this week, I decided to re-evaluate myself with the same categories.
Surprisingly, my overall score dropped by one. Most of the categories were scored the exact same.
How was this possible? In these past 6 years I’ve made huge changes to my life, invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in my growth and healing. Thousands of hours invested in myself. 4 years of couples therapy with my wife. I live a profoundly different life now, and yet… the score was slightly below what I gave myself when I was in crisis? This made no sense.
Turns out, there is an explanation – it’s called the Hedonic Treadmill.
That’s a term that explains human beings’ habit of adjusting to the new normal and returning to an old baseline. So, as your life gets better, you adjust to thinking of that as normal. This also explains human beings’ habit of thinking “everything sucks” now, when the reality is we live in amazing times that would be incomprehensible to our ancestors.
I’m grateful for this vivid example of how I’ve been on my own hedonic treadmill. How I’ve adjusted to and returned to this level of “normal” for me. It’s a reminder that this will always be true. That I can be in an endless chase.
In the short term we can feel bumps and progress, but over time, in my case this is a 6 year time frame, I returned to my baselines. No matter how incredibly my life has changed and how I’ve changed.
Of the 8 categories, my lowest is “Feeling passion for what I do”, I scored it a 5/10 in 2017, and I scored it a 5/10 today. Chasing this is a bit like chasing a dragon. It’s making me think I might have some nostalgia around feeling passion earlier in my life, when really it was moments of high intensity, just like how I recently traveled to Dubai to attend the COP28 summit. Now that that is done, I’ve returned to my baseline.
I’m going to give you some homework that will take the better part of the next decade to complete: Create your own 8 categories and rate yourself, record it, put it away, and return to it in several years. Rate yourself again. This will only work after several years. Not 6 months. You’re also not allowed to “guess” what your old scores could be. You can only evaluate yourself in the here and now.
And in the meantime, I invite you to allow yourself some grace in the places of your life you’re feeling less than. You’re moving in the right direction, even if it doesn’t feel like it at times. The “chase” keeps us hungry, and that’s OK.
Now that this has revealed itself to me, it gives me a lot of peace and I’ll reconsider just how “low” any parts of my life actually are.
