The word appreciation can be interpreted in a variety of ways, a simple action of saying “thank you”, a reaction in the brain, an admiration of someone else, etc …
An appreciation can be directed towards everything, everything, everyone, in the world, around you, that you are grateful or thankful for.
However, through the course of human evolution, our instinct of appreciation has diminished because of Hedonic adaptation.
Hedonic adaption is the human ability to maintain an emotional status quo over our lives. Basically, you can call this: “getting used to things in our lives”. As seen in Figure 1, the fluctuation of events can be visualized as the green sinusoidal function. Of which, the tips are the good experiences that we encounter and the troughs are the bad experiences that happens.
As we can see, the hedonic adaptative psychological ability serves us greatly when we encounter bad experiences, allowing us to get over what happened. A real life example would be the failing of a exam, however a week later you overcome the emotional impact and go back toward life as normal.
However, this ability will activate when good experiences occur as well. As seen in the graph, when our emotions are at the top, it also quickly comes back as time goes on. Meaning that we get used to good things and experiences in our lives as well. This is a concept that can be seen in economics in the law of Decreasing Marginal Benefits: As a consumer’s consumption rate of a good increases, the benefit that the consumer extracts from the good decreases.
The blue line that is flat and static is the stable level of happiness that we are born with, determined by genetics. This is the flat point of happiness that the levels of happiness restores to either from a good or bad experience, the static point of happiness where nothing good or bad is happening.
In short, this trait that we have as humans makes us a creature that is never totally satisfied with their status quo, “unlimited human wants and desires”. Which causes us to lose sight of what we already have.
The lack of appreciation is becoming a more and more prevalent issue in today’s society. As a student, me and lots of people in the school fall in to this “trap” as well. I am somewhat of a complainer, I complain about my mouse clipping on to the table, having lots of school work. Likewise, people around me complain about school work as well, and maybe even more-so on things such as fashion and trends.
This dissatisfaction in everything creates negative energy and makes people’s lives less happy. Because if you really think about it, Happy and Dissatisfaction can’t really happen at the same time. This generally is caused by the envy for others, resulting in a dissatisfaction in self (For example: “Why am I not this, Why am I not that”). A big example is today’s social media, in which people are always posting their “flex” pics. Creating the negative social comparison between the viewer and the person that is flexing their “thing-to-be-jealous-of”.
When I took a step back and look at myself from a bigger perspective,
I realized I am so lucky to have things I have: school education, having a roof over my head, being able to write a medium article, having caring family, and others.
This had occurred to me when Raj, one of the directors of TKS (The Knowledge Society) was talking about his experience travelling to Haiti in 2010.
When you take a look at whats going on around the world, can you really call your problems, problems?
And there are so many other places where you can become grateful and express appreciation to, such as the great friends and family you have.
The importance of appreciation: gratitude, starts from the dawn of human time. At the beginning, gratitude was a biological feature in the human brain in which people felt when people helped each other out in times of hardship. It brought people together and forged resilient bonds (also in modern times).
Gratefulness stimulates the brain pathways of reward, counteracting negative feelings and harmful mindsets such as envy, social comparisons and helps you to comfortably live your life (Kurzgesagt).
A way of embracing appreciation in life is by self reflection and just writing down things that you are grateful everyday or week. While this may sound pretty useless, it allows you to transfer your focus onto things or people that you may have not appreciated or noticed around you, and what you would feel without them. Which allows you to further cherish and be thankful of what is around.
“Learn to appreciate what you have before time makes you appreciate what you had”
In summary, just stopping, reflecting and looking around you, would make you a much happier person. By entering this more appreciative state, I was able to become much more aware of great friends/family around me.
