Neomania and Treadmill Effects

Neomania and Treadmill Effects

You are driving on the highway in your two-year-old Japanese car when you are overtaken by a vehicle of the same make, the latest version, that looks markedly different. And markedly better. Markedly better? The bumper is slightly larger and the taillights are wider. Other than these cosmetic details (and perhaps some hidden technical improvements) representing less than a few percentage points in variation, the car looks the same, but you can’t tell by just looking at it. You just see the lights and feel that you are due an upgrade. And the upgrade will cost you, after you sell your car, about the third of the price of a new vehicle—all that motivated by small, mostly cosmetic variations. But switching cars is a small cost compared to switching computers—the recovery value of an old computer is so negligible.

You use an Apple Mac computer. You just bought a new version a week before. The person on the plane next to you just pulled out of his bag an older version. It has a family resemblance to yours, but looks so inferior. It is thicker and has a much less elegant screen. But you forget the days when you used to have the same model and were thrilled with it.

The same with a cell phone: you look down at those carrying older, larger models. But a few years ago you would have considered these small and slick.

So with so many technologically driven and modernistic items—skis, cars, computers, computer programs—it seems that we notice differences between versions rather than commonalities. We even rapidly tire of what we have, continuously searching for versions 2.0 and similar iterations. And after that, another “improved” reincarnation. These impulses to buy new things that will eventually lose their novelty, particularly when compared to newer things, are called treadmill effects. As the reader can see, they arise from the same generator of biases as the one about the salience of variations mentioned in the section before: we notice differences and become dissatisfied with some items and some classes of goods. This treadmill effect has been investigated by Danny Kahneman and his peers when they studied the psychology of what they call hedonic states. People acquire a new item, feel more satisfied after an initial boost, then rapidly revert to their baseline of well-being. So, when you “upgrade,” you feel a boost of satisfaction with changes in technology. But then you get used to it and start hunting for the new new thing.

But it looks as though we don’t incur the same treadmilling techno-dissatisfaction with classical art, older furniture—whatever we do not put in the category of the technological. You may have an oil painting and a flat-screen television set inhabiting the same room of your house. The oil painting is an imitation of a classic Flemish scene made close to a century ago, with the dark ominous skies of Flanders, majestic trees, and an uninspiring but calmative rural scene. I am quite certain that you are not eager to upgrade the oil painting but that soon your flat-screen TV set will be donated to the local chapter of some kidney foundation.

The same with dishes—recall that we try to replicate nineteenth-century dinner customs. So there is at least one other domain in which we do not try to optimize matters.

I am initially writing these lines longhand, using a seasoned fountain pen. I do not fuss over the state of my pens. Many of them are old enough to cross decades; one of them (the best) I have had for at least thirty years. Nor do I obsess over small variations in the paper. I prefer to use Clairefontaine paper and notebooks that have hardly changed since my early childhood—if anything, they have degraded in quality.

But when it comes to transcribing my writing into electronic form, then I get worried that my Mac computer may not be the best tool for the job. I heard somewhere that the new version had a longer-lasting battery and I plan to upgrade soon, during my next impulse buying episode.

Note here is a strange inconsistency in the way we perceive items across the technological and real domains. Whenever I sit on an airplane next to some businessman reading the usual trash businessmen read on an e-reader, said businessperson will not resist disparaging my use of the book by comparing the two items. Supposedly, an e-reader is more “efficient.” It delivers the essence of the book, which said businessman assumes is information, but in a more convenient way, as he can carry a library on his device and “optimize” his time between golf outings. I have never heard anyone address the large differences between e-readers and physical books, like smell, texture, dimension (books are in three dimensions), color, ability to change pages, physicality of an object compared to a computer screen, and hidden properties causing unexplained differences in enjoyment. The focus of the discussion will be commonalities (how close to a book this wonderful device is). Yet when he compares his version of an e-reader to another e-reader, he will invariably focus on minute differences. Just as when Lebanese run into Syrians, they focus on the tiny variations in their respective Levantine dialects, but when Lebanese run into Italians, they focus on similarities.

There may be a heuristic that helps put such items in categories. First, the electronic on-off switch. Whatever has an “off” or “on” switch that I need to turn off before I get yelled at by the flight attendant will necessarily be in one category (but not the opposite as many items without an on-off switch will be prone to neomania). For these items, I focus on variations, with attendant neomania. But consider the difference between the artisanal—the other category—and the industrial. What is artisanal has the love of the maker infused in it, and tends to satisfy—we don’t have this nagging impression of incompleteness we encounter with electronics.

It also so happens that whatever is technological happens to be fragile. Articles made by an artisan cause fewer treadmill effects. And they tend to have some antifragility—recall how my artisanal shoes take months before becoming comfortable. Items with an on-off switch tend to have no such redeeming antifragility.

But alas, some things we wish were a bit more fragile—which brings us to architecture.