I've Heard This Refered To As The Hedonic Treadmill And It's Related To A Lot Of Things, Not Just Social

I've heard this refered to as the hedonic treadmill and it's related to a lot of things, not just social media.

Once you get to a certain level of success, amount of money, happiness, etc, your baseline expectations move with it - earning 10k dollars doesn't hit quite as nicely when you're a billionaire.

For the average person I think the easiest way to illustrate this is videogames. Your average RPG has you start out quite weak, fighting weak enemies. Then you find a sword that does more damage, and you can fight tougher enemies. Then you get a sword that does even more damage, and you can fight even tougher enemies. Then you get the legendary sword of legendary legends that lets you kill anything with 1 legendary swing, and that first sword that helped you get a foothold to eventually get here seems like a piece of garbage by comparison. You wouldn't look twice if you found one like that again. This constant scaling of your character and the enemies leaves you at net zero - your sword is always *just enough* to handle the enemies you're encountering, but the numbers that pop up from hitting them keep getting larger and larger. Like a treadmill.

And that's largely how it goes with any rising numbers in our lives. Every time you reach a higher number, the ones below it seem smaller and smaller as time goes on. Doesn't help that humans tend to naturally think in fractions and exponents - once you get from 1 to 10, the next target is more likely to be 100 than 20. I think it's important to recognize that kind of bias in ourselves and try to appreciate and enjoy what we already have a little bit more.

Not too long ago...

I was posting art on Tumblr and getting like, 2 notes. In those days, if I got 5 notes anywhere, I'd be thrilled...and if it went to 10 I'd be positively jubilant! TENPEOPLESAWMYARTAAAA.

A few days ago, I posted something and it unexpectedly climbed to almost 300 notes! Must've done something right with the hashtags I dunno...but here's the thing-

Since that day, I've posted a few more times and I've started getting so pissed if the notes don't come. Now even 50 notes (which would ordinarily have made me faint with ecstasy) seems disappointing...

Makes me wonder. I've seen artists here get many tens of thousands of likes/comments/reblogs on their art. Does an artist who regularly gets >10,000 notes on their art feel dejected when they get just 6 to 7000 on something?