Don't a lot of spiritual/meditation practices claim a sustained improvement of hedonic tone? Isn't that what the positive psychology movement is all about?
Where I can't have a sustained improvement, cycling the positive hedonic inputs seems would seem like the natural thing to try.
It can be done, but it can't be done easily. I was going to say there are no one time things that will raise your happiness set point but it wouldn't surprise me immensely if LSD or other psychedelics had that effect for some.
Marriage increases happiness for most people, having more friends likewise, regular exercise ditto. Serious meditation demands something like an hour a day. All of these are ongoing time intensive commitments.
Today's post, Continuous Improvement was originally published on 11 January 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Humans seem to be on a hedonic treadmill; over time, we adjust to any improvements in our environment - after a month, the new sports car no longer seems quite as wonderful. This aspect of our evolved psychology is not surprising: it is a rare organism in a rare environment whose optimal reproductive strategy is to rest with a smile on its face, feeling happy with what it already has. To entirely delete the hedonic treadmill seems perilously close to tampering with Boredom itself. Is there enough fun in the universe for a transhuman to jog off the treadmill - improve their life continuously, leaping to ever-higher hedonic levels before adjusting to the previous one? Can ever-higher levels of pleasure be created by the simple increase of ever-larger floating-point numbers in a digital pleasure center, or would that fail to have the full subjective quality of happiness? If we continue to bind our pleasures to novel challenges, can we find higher levels of pleasure fast enough, without cheating? The rate at which value can increase as more bits are added, and the rate at which value must increase for eudaimonia, together determine the lifespan of a mind. If minds must use exponentially more resources over time in order to lead a eudaimonic existence, their subjective lifespan is measured in mere millennia even if they can draw on galaxy-sized resources.
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
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