The idea of meaning as mesa-level wellbeing is new to me, but has a lot of intuitive appeal to it, particularly in thinking about the hedonic treadmill.
I’ve kept feeling like there must be some way to avoid its seemingly nihilistic implications, but have come up blank. Previously I’d thought something like “the more sophisticated you can be in identifying the drivers of wellbeing the less of a problem it presents”, but this is kinda just wishful thinking on my part.
Similarly for the fact that negatively valenced experiences (like your sad song example) can quite clearly have positive effects, but any assessment of wellbeing I’ve seen has some different failure mode by which this isn’t captured.
The idea of meaning as mesa-level wellbeing is new to me, but has a lot of intuitive appeal to it, particularly in thinking about the hedonic treadmill.
I’ve kept feeling like there must be some way to avoid its seemingly nihilistic implications, but have come up blank. Previously I’d thought something like “the more sophisticated you can be in identifying the drivers of wellbeing the less of a problem it presents”, but this is kinda just wishful thinking on my part.
Similarly for the fact that negatively valenced experiences (like your sad song example) can quite clearly have positive effects, but any assessment of wellbeing I’ve seen has some different failure mode by which this isn’t captured.