Walt Whitman came across death and misery as he searched for his wounded brother, George, in the aftermath of the Battle of Fredericksburg. He would later describe the ordeal as “three days of the greatest suffering I have ever experienced in my life.”
He eventually found his brother alive and well but the horrors he witnessed during those days remained with him forever. All other worries in his life seemed trivial after that.
In his entertaining and enlightening book, Stumbling on Happiness, Harvard professor Dan Gilbert calls this the “Experience Stretching Hypothesis”. Basically, if you think of your subjective response to any situation as falling on a scale from 1 (totally miserable) to 8 (couldn’t be happier), the ends of this scale are stretched up and down by experience.
So after seeing the aftermath of Fredericksburg Whitman’s everyday cares and difficulties no longer brought him down as much because he had a new idea of what “1” really was. The same thing happens with extremely positive experiences; they make everything else seem less amazing by comparison.
Further, our responses adjust so what got me to an “8” yesterday might only get me to a “6” today and a “5” tomorrow.
Andy's Quote of the Day 