What Societies Are Actually For
The Hedonic Treadmill, Eudaimonia, and Why the Most Rewarding Life Is One Spent Reducing Suffering
By Johan
Professor of Behavioral Economics & Applied Cognitive Theory
Former Foreign Service Officer
No one asked to be born.
The billionaire’s son in Manhattan didn’t choose his penthouse any more than the child in a Somali refugee camp chose the tent. I didn’t choose to be born American rather than Italian. You didn’t choose your country, your parents, your starting conditions. None of us did.
This isn’t an abstraction. It’s the fundamental reality of human existence. There’s no cosmic fairness mechanism distributing life circumstances based on merit. You get what you get, dropped into circumstances utterly beyond your control, and then you’re told to optimize within constraints you never agreed to.
So here’s the question: if no one chose their starting point, what is the point of building societies that punish people for losing a lottery they never entered? Why optimize for national power, GDP growth, military dominance? Metrics that mean nothing to the person born into poverty, or chronic illness, or a war zone, or under authoritarian control?
And here’s the deeper question, the one this piece is really about: even among those who “win” the lottery, who land in wealth and comfort and security, why do so many live such small, hollow lives?
The Ancient Answer We Keep Forgetting
The Greeks had a word for what we’re actually reaching for: eudaimonia.
It’s usually translated as “happiness,” but that’s a catastrophic mistranslation. Aristotle didn’t mean pleasure, contentment, or the good feeling you get from a fine meal or a paid-off mortgage. Eudaimonia means something closer to human flourishing: the full actualization of what you are capable of being. Living in accordance with your deepest nature and highest capacities. Functioning, as Aristotle put it, the way an excellent human being functions.
The crucial distinction is that eudaimonia isn’t a feeling. It’s an activity. It’s not something that happens to you; it’s something you do. You can’t achieve it by accumulating enough comfort that nothing bothers you anymore. You achieve it by engaging: with difficulty, with meaning, with other people, with the world’s suffering, with the question of what a good life actually requires.
The Stoics understood this too. Marcus Aurelius, emperor of Rome and possessor of more material power than any person alive, wrote his Meditations as a private discipline of self-correction. He kept reminding himself that virtue, not power, was the point. Happiness is what virtue feels like from the inside. It was never the point.
Being excellent in the pursuit of what matters is its own reward. That the person who retires at 50 with vast wealth and spends their years rearranging deck chairs has missed the entire point of being alive.
He was right. And behavioral science has spent fifty years proving it.
The Fool on the Treadmill
Here’s what we know about happiness (actual subjective wellbeing) from decades of research:
Beyond a relatively modest income threshold (enough for basic security and freedom from financial anxiety), additional wealth contributes almost nothing to life satisfaction. The person earning $400,000 is not meaningfully happier than the person earning $150,000 in a comparable city. The billionaire is not ten thousand times happier than the person who is merely comfortable.
And yet people behave as though money is the answer. They optimize for accumulation. They work 80-hour weeks to move from a nice house to a larger house. They defer meaning. “I’ll do the things that matter after I’ve made enough,” they tell themselves, and then discover that “enough” keeps migrating forward. This is the hedonic treadmill: the well-documented psychological phenomenon where we adapt to every new pleasure, every new acquisition, every upgrade in circumstance, and return to roughly our baseline level of satisfaction within months.
The Porsche loses its shine. The second home becomes an obligation. The third doesn’t even register. The diamond ring is a compressed rock with no function except to signal that you could afford it. All classic status games.
Meanwhile, the research on what actually produces lasting wellbeing, what generates eudaimonic flourishing rather than mere hedonic pleasure, points consistently toward things that can’t be purchased: deep relationships, contribution to something larger than yourself, engagement with meaningful work, autonomy over how you spend your time, growth, and the sense that your existence has made some difference.
Scott Barry Kaufman’s work on the “growth-driven life” makes this precise. Human flourishing isn’t the satisfaction of needs in a fixed hierarchy; it’s an ongoing process of expansion, connection, and transcendence. People who thrive aren’t those who’ve secured the most comfort. They’re those who’ve found purpose that stretches them, community that holds them, and contribution that justifies them.
The person who retired at 50 with enough money to never need anything, who spends their days on a boat, who follows the news but never acts, who has optimized their existence for comfort and disruption-minimization: this person is not winning. This person is, from the standpoint of their own deepest nature, wasting their life.
This isn’t moralism. It’s behavioral science. The comfort-maximizing life produces exactly the hollowness it was designed to avoid.
System 1 People and the Problem of Unconscious Living
Kahneman’s distinction between System 1 (fast, automatic, reactive) and System 2 (slow, deliberate, reflective) thinking maps onto something deeper than cognition.
There’s a type of person, common, unremarkable, content, who lives entirely within System 1. They react to immediate circumstances. They follow scripts: work, accumulate, consume, retire, die. They experience discomfort when confronted with suffering beyond their immediate circle and resolve that discomfort by looking away. They don’t ask big questions because big questions are uncomfortable and System 1 doesn’t do uncomfortable. They optimize for the absence of friction.
From a strictly utilitarian standpoint, these people are a net negative. Not because they’re evil (most aren’t). But because they consume resources, generate externalities, and contribute nothing to the project of reducing human suffering. They are, in the most precise sense, bystanders.
The antidote isn’t guilt. It’s awareness.
The people who live most fully, who achieve something resembling eudaimonia, are those who’ve made the transition from System 1 to System 2 consciousness about their own existence. Who’ve asked: what is actually happening in the world? What does my position of privilege or comfort or education actually obligate me to do? What would it mean to live in a way that actually matters?
This transition, from unconscious passenger to conscious participant, is what separates the person rearranging deck chairs from the person who is genuinely alive.
The Paradox: The Most Rewarding Life Is One Spent Reducing Suffering
Here’s what the research shows, and what philosophy has known for millennia: the most fulfilling lives are those oriented toward others.
Not self-sacrifice in the masochistic sense. Not martyrdom. Not the destruction of personal joy for the sake of abstract duty. But genuine engagement with the world’s suffering as a source of meaning, purpose, and deep satisfaction.
The neuroscience is straightforward: helping others activates the same reward circuits as receiving help. Cooperation produces oxytocin, serotonin, dopamine. Contribution to something larger than yourself activates the brain’s meaning-making architecture in ways that purchasing a luxury item simply cannot.
But beyond brain chemistry, there’s something more fundamental. The person consciously working to reduce suffering is living in contact with reality in a way the comfort-maximizer never is. The doctor in an underserved community, the researcher solving a problem that matters, the teacher transforming life trajectories, the organizer building power for the powerless, the aid worker in a difficult place: these people are awake.
Reality includes suffering. Reality includes injustice. Reality includes the fact that the circumstances you were born into are arbitrary, and that millions of people born into different arbitrary circumstances are experiencing things that would destroy you. To engage with that reality, to decide that you will do something about it, that your capacity and privilege create obligation, that making the world marginally less terrible is worth more than a larger boat, is to be fully awake.
And being fully awake, it turns out, is the precondition for eudaimonia.
The person who has retired early to comfort, who insulates themselves from the world’s difficulty, who performs meaning through consumption and travel and the curation of experience: this person is not awake. They are managing their existence rather than living it. And at the end, they will have the particular hollowness of someone who was given everything and did nothing with it.
Which Societies Enable This?
Now we get to the structural question, because this isn’t just about individual choices. As you are now aware, my focus is the macro: big systems, big change, and what it actually takes to move them. The capacity to live eudaimonically, to pursue meaning, to contribute, to reduce suffering rather than merely avoid it, is shaped enormously by the society you’re in.
Some societies create conditions for human flourishing. Others systematically prevent it.
The Bicycle Test
I can leave my Trek road bike outside a café in Zurich. Walk inside. Leave my laptop on the table, use the bathroom, return to find everything untouched. At 2 AM, I can walk into an unstaffed grocery store and pay via honor system. The entire social architecture assumes I will.
This isn’t naïveté. It’s high-trust individualism.
China has similar systems: unstaffed convenience stores, mobile payment infrastructure that assumes compliance. The mechanism looks identical. But the psychological foundation is inverted. Swiss trust emerges from robust institutions, genuine rule of law, and authentic social contract. Chinese compliance emerges from pervasive surveillance, social credit systems, and the knowledge that deviance carries consequences.
The bicycle stays safe in both places. But in one system, you don’t steal because you trust your neighbor and the institutions that bind you. In the other, you don’t steal because you fear the retribution apparatus.
Same behavior. Entirely different moral architecture. And entirely different conditions for eudaimonia.
You cannot flourish in a fear-based system. You can comply, survive, accumulate. But the growth-driven life, the one oriented toward meaning, contribution, authentic connection, requires safety that comes from trust, not surveillance. When your nervous system is calibrated to threat, the higher functions of existence (curiosity, creativity, compassion, genuine relationship) get crowded out by vigilance.
Three Axes That Actually Matter
Most analysis of societies collapses into a binary: individualist versus collectivist. But that misses the variables that determine flourishing.
The real axes are individual autonomy versus group obligation, trust versus fear as the mechanism binding society, and accountability versus concentrated power.
Switzerland threads an extraordinary needle: high individual autonomy plus high social trust plus robust democratic accountability. You’re free to pursue your own path, embedded in a social fabric where institutions work, neighbors are reliable, and democratic participation gives you genuine voice. When bonds form, they’re ironclad. “I will back you to the end of the world” isn’t rhetoric. It’s the social contract made visible.
The United States, by contrast, is individualist but increasingly low-trust. Individual autonomy exists formally, but institutional faith has collapsed, neighbor suspicion runs high (Ring doorbells are now standard in American homes; in most of Europe, they’re illegal), and every interaction becomes potentially adversarial. This produces the worst configuration: isolated and unsafe. Hence the violence, the social atomization, the declining happiness despite material abundance. The U.S. proves that individual freedom without trust produces suffering, not flourishing.
China offers collectivist orientation, some group belonging and meaning, but bound together through fear. Don’t stand out. Surveillance is everywhere. Conform. Your social credit score is watching. This produces compliance and some stability, but not the conditions for authentic human development. It cannot, by design.
The Societies That Have Figured It Out
Countries that consistently rank highest in wellbeing (Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Norway, Austria, New Zealand) share a structural profile. Not just democracy or individualism, because plenty of democracies are dysfunctional and plenty of individualist societies are violent and atomized.
What’s rare is the combination: individual autonomy to determine your own life course, high social trust embedded in reliable institutions, robust democratic accountability with citizens holding genuine power, strong rule of law protecting everyone including minorities and dissenters, and social safety nets that eliminate the existential terror of illness, unemployment, or bad luck.
That last element is underrated. The capacity to live meaningfully, to take risks, to pursue callings rather than just income, to contribute to something larger, requires a floor. When medical bankruptcy is possible, when job loss means catastrophe, when your children’s future depends entirely on your own continuous good fortune, your nervous system cannot afford eudaimonia. It’s too busy managing survival.
The Nordic model and Swiss model aren’t just better at redistribution. They’re better at creating the preconditions for meaning. When you’re not terrified about what happens if something goes wrong, you can think about what you actually want to do with your life. You can take the lower-paying job that matters. You can volunteer. You can ask the big questions.
Why Scandinavians Give, and Why It Matters
There’s a cultural element here that goes beyond policy, though policy shapes it.
The Scandinavian social contract is broadly “don’t think you’re better than others,” don’t flaunt, don’t individuate ostentatiously, has often been criticized as conformist, even repressive. And it can be. But its deeper function is egalitarian: it creates a social norm against the extraction of status from wealth or achievement, which channels energy toward contribution rather than display.
When showing off your money is actively discouraged, you ask: what else is there? The answer, in high-trust societies, tends to be: being useful. Making things. Building community. Reducing suffering for those around you.
This is why Nordic societies produce such disproportionate amounts of global public goods: aid, diplomacy, peacekeeping, international institutions. Not because Scandinavians are morally superior, but because their social architecture channels the human need for status and meaning toward contribution rather than consumption. You live well in Denmark by being respected for what you do for others, not what you own.
This is eudaimonia operationalized at the societal level.
The Dutch have a similar orientation: practical, anti-ostentatious, deeply engaged with the question of civic responsibility. Switzerland’s famous reserve hides extraordinary depth of commitment. Once a Swiss person’s loyalty is won, it is total, reliably directed toward maintaining the systems that allow everyone to flourish.
Some Americans live this too. The tradition of civic republicanism, the idea that self-governance requires engaged, virtuous citizens who contribute to the common good, runs through American history even as it gets buried under the dominant narrative of rugged individualism and wealth accumulation. The Americans who live most fully tend to be those embedded in communities of purpose: teachers, doctors, organizers, researchers, builders of local institutions. They’ve opted out of the hedonic treadmill and into something more demanding and more real.
The Moral Architecture of Suffering
Here’s the uncomfortable utilitarian argument, stated plainly:
People who are conscious of the world’s suffering and doing something about it are generating positive externalities. People who are not, who are insulated, comfort-focused, and disengaged, are generating negative ones.
This isn’t about judging individuals. It’s about systems. Every society has people oriented toward contribution and people oriented toward extraction. The question is which orientation the society rewards, normalizes, and structurally enables.
Societies that concentrate suffering on those without power, that allow poverty to persist alongside obscene wealth, that treat healthcare as profit extraction, that allow the circumstances of your birth to determine your life entirely, are not just failing. They’re making a choice. The choice to optimize for the interests of those who already have, at the expense of those who don’t.
This produces a particular kind of human being: the affluent, comfortable, disengaged person who has internalized the message that their comfort is earned and others’ suffering is deserved. Who has achieved exactly the life the system promised and feels, obscurely, that something is missing. Who cannot name the missing thing.
The missing thing is eudaimonia. The missing thing is the growth-driven life. The missing thing is the fundamental human experience of mattering, of being, in some small or large way, the reason someone else’s life is better.
No amount of boat time and LV handbags will replace it.
What a Life Actually Worth Living Looks Like
The research, the philosophy, and the direct observation of people who seem genuinely alive all converge on a similar picture.
A life worth living has contribution at its center, not as obligation but as the primary source of meaning. It has authentic relationships that go beyond networking and utility. It has engagement with difficulty, because difficulty is where growth happens and where meaning is made. It has autonomy: the freedom to direct your own energy toward what you’ve decided matters, which requires both internal clarity and external conditions that don’t make every wrong turn catastrophic.
It includes beauty: nature, art, connection, the specific textures of a place and a people, because humans are not just meaning-seeking creatures but aesthetic ones. It includes physical presence in the world: walking, touching things, being in weather, experiencing the non-digital.
And crucially, it includes being awake to suffering. Not overwhelmed by it. Not destroyed by it. But refusing to look away from it, and choosing, in whatever capacity you have, from whatever position you occupy, to do something about it.
The societies that enable this most consistently are the ones that have decided, structurally, that reducing suffering is more important than maximizing output. That trust is more valuable than compliance. That the floor matters more than the ceiling. That a good life is available to everyone, not just those who won the right lottery.
The Lottery You Never Entered
Remember: none of us chose this.
The woman carrying the weight of Chinese surveillance in a Lisbon café didn't choose to be born in Beijing. She didn't choose to live in a system where speaking freely from abroad means her family back home receives a visit, loses a job, or disappears into a detention process with no accountability. The American drowning in medical debt didn't choose to be born in a country that treats healthcare as profit extraction. The child in Ukraine didn't choose the war zone. The billionaire's heir didn't choose the fortune.
We’re all playing a game we never agreed to, born into circumstances utterly beyond our control.
Which means that when societies optimize for power instead of human flourishing, when they concentrate suffering on those without power, when they create systems that punish people for losing a lottery they never entered, they are not just failing. They are engaged in something morally incoherent.
And when individuals, having won the lottery of circumstance, choose to spend their winnings on comfort rather than contribution, when they retire early to boats and hedge funds and carefully curated lives of managed experience, they are also, in a quieter way, failing. Not morally failing in any dramatic sense. But failing to be fully alive. Failing to take the gift they were given and do something real with it.
Aristotle knew what the gift was for. The Stoics knew. The happiest people in the happiest societies know.
It is for flourishing. It is for contribution. It is for reduction of suffering wherever you find it and in whatever capacity you have.
It is for becoming, as fully as possible, the kind of person whose existence makes other people’s existence better.
That’s what societies are for. And it’s what the best ones have actually managed to build: the ones where the bicycle stays safe because your neighbor trusts you, not because cameras are watching.
The world does not need more people optimizing for comfort. It needs more people awake to suffering and choosing, deliberately, to reduce it. The research says this is also the best way to live. The philosophy says so too. And somewhere, deep in your nervous system, you already know it.
Why the Snail
It carries its home.
It moves with intention.
It leaves a trail.
So do I.
Johan is a behavioral scientist and former Foreign Service Officer. He writes about power, belief systems, and how humans make sense of collapse. Subscribe for essays on what happens when the maps no longer match the territory.
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