I have a mild aphasia. I need to struggle for words. Most people can't relate...until they hit a situation where there is no word. Then they know how I feel!
In this case, the phrase does exist, but it's nowhere near as well-known as the condition it describes. I constantly see people reaching for a term to describe people with a kneejerk compulsion to always do the opposite thing. Say, for example, members of a staunchly anti-Russian political party, seeing the opposing party try to block Russia from slaughtering and obliterating its neighbor, turn around and start rooting against the obliterees, just to be dicks. What do you call that?
Oppositional Defiance Disorder.
There you go. You're welcome.
Hedonic adaptation, aka Hedonic treadmill, is a term I just heard for the first time. It refers to the fact that people have a steady level of happiness they "shoot for", so when they become too happy, they ratchet themselves right back down again. It's like a thermostat for happiness, keeping you nice and "meh" (or worse - depressives, I'm looking at you!).
"Ballasting Happiness", second on the Hits List in the left margin, was one of my proudest breakthroughs. And, yeah, I was just too ignorant to know it was already figured out back in, like, yeesh, 1971.
I can console myself because I also posited how we do it, accounting for otherwise inexplicable human behavior. But still, my greatest fear is that the ideas I've grinded on for 30 or 40 years, popping out insights that strike me as gratifyingly unique and fresh, are actually banal and everyone knows this stuff but me. I.e. I'm the slow child breaking through. Hey, good for yooooou, buddy!
That's how I feel perpetually: the slow child breaking through. Remember the time I conceptually reinvented glue?
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