this holistic lifestyle and holistic business approach. Maybe they don't make me quite as much money

and maybe they don't get me quite as many likes on Instagram and maybe they're not as cool as what

other people are doing, but it creates a lifestyle for me that's so much more enjoyable. And to me,

that's priceless.

Welcome back to another midweek modern craftsman where today, I'm actually recording on a Monday because I had some meetings earlier.

I had the studio set up and I was like, you know what?

I have some things on my mind

that I want to dig into. So I was listening to a couple of podcasts while running last week and

just mental health, well-being, lifestyle podcast and something that they were discussing

was happiness and like true happiness and being content with life.

And the topic that they brought up that I hadn't heard about was called hedonic adaptation,

also known as the hedonic treadmill.

And it is the tendency for humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness, despite

major positive or negative life changes, right? When something really bad happens, it may seem

terrible, it may seem insurmountable, but eventually we're going to stabilize. If something really amazing happens, or,

you know, you say, I'm going to buy a new truck that's going to make me happy, I'm going to

chase this project that's going to make me happy. Eventually, that short-term happiness is going

to fade away and you're going to stabilize and you're going to be back to your baseline

happiness. So at the end of the day, what's really important to do is understand where your

baseline of happiness is and where that comes from and what can get you there because we're going to

have these highs and lows. We're going to chase certain things. There's going to be bad things that happen in our lives. And we're going to settle

back into that baseline of happiness and understanding what makes you happy is so much more important

...