The Hedonic Treadmill and the Quiet Peace of Perfect Days

Maybe the biggest lie we were sold since we were kids is that life is a race.

That your worth is measured by your job, your money, and how many people know your name. Until years later you discover you’d been running without ever asking yourself where you were actually running to. So often, the path everyone is running down is the path furthest away from yourself.

The Achievement Race

In the last few years there’s been a strange phenomenon: people with good jobs and good money and everything that’s supposed to make them happy, yet still feeling an emptiness that’s hard to describe. Psychologists call this the “achievement race,” or the hedonic treadmill, which simply means a person quickly gets used to any success they reach. They buy a car and dream of a pricier one. They get promoted and eye the next rank. They hit a goal and start worrying about the next one. As if happiness is always standing one step ahead of you. Positive psychology has talked about this a lot, and started asking a very simple question: are we really sure that the kind of success society defined for us is actually the good life? Or did we inherit a ready-made definition and just followed it without thinking? Maybe the problem was never in life itself, maybe it was in the way we look at it.

Perfect Days

Cinema played with this question very cleverly, and the strange thing is that three completely different films decided to tell the same idea, each in its own language, each pulling you in through a different door, but all of them bringing you to the same place. The first door was Perfect Days, by Japanese director Wim Wenders, one of the most important European directors, whose films always lean toward contemplation rather than loud events. The first time you watch the film you’ll think there’s no story at all: a man wakes up in the morning, makes his bed, drinks his coffee, goes to clean public restrooms in Tokyo, listens to an old cassette tape, photographs sunlight filtering down through the leaves, reads a few pages of a book before he sleeps, and if someone described the film to you like that, you’d probably say, where’s the plot? Where’s the drama? But here’s the surprise: the film itself is trying to wean you off that addiction, the addiction to needing something huge to happen every single minute. The main character is named Hirayama, whose job is one of the least respected in society, and yet he’s about as at peace as a person can be. Not because he’s a poor man romantically happy the way some people took it, but because he’s come to notice details we’ve stopped noticing.

The Japanese word for that noticing even shows up in the film’s own texture: komorebi, the specific term for sunlight filtering down through tree leaves, which has no clean equivalent in English. Hirayama photographs it on his lunch breaks with an old film camera, developing the same kind of image over and over, and the film never treats this as a quirky hobby so much as a discipline — proof that attention, practiced daily, is its own quiet form of wealth.

The second door into this same idea is Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson, about a bus driver in New Jersey who writes poems on his breaks and comes home most nights to the same wife and the same dog. Nothing in his life would read as impressive on paper, and the film dares you to find that boring before slowly making the case that a life built on paying close attention to small, repeated things isn’t a lesser life at all. The third door is stranger: Groundhog Day, a comedy about a man trapped reliving one day, who tries out seduction and reckless indulgence long before he tries out kindness, running through every shortcut to satisfaction before discovering that peace only shows up once he stops trying to escape the day and starts living inside it properly.

Positive psychology has the research to back up what these three films are getting at from different angles. A famous study from the late 1970s compared recent lottery winners against people who’d survived catastrophic accidents and found something researchers didn’t expect: within about a year, both groups had drifted back toward roughly the same baseline level of happiness they’d had before the event that was supposed to change everything. Winning big and losing big both fade. What doesn’t fade nearly as fast, according to decades of research since, is the daily texture of a life — how much genuine attention a person brings to the ordinary hours nobody else is watching. None of that makes ambition worthless, only unreliable as a source of the thing people actually want from it.