"Every day is a good day." The man who said it had his leg crushed in a door by his own teacher.

Tenth-century China. Yunmen Wenyan asks the assembly for one phrase about what comes after the fifteenth day. The monks say nothing. So he answers himself, in five words, and those words later end up on thousands of mugs and posters. Except his leg stayed crippled for life, and he never had a single day without pain.

Then in 1978 three psychologists interviewed twenty-two people who had recently won the Illinois State Lottery. The usual retelling of that study is "money doesn't buy happiness." The table says something else, and the something else is worse. The winners were not happier than the control group, but the ordinary things — breakfast, a friend's joke, a conversation — gave them noticeably less pleasure. Three point three three against three point eight two. After a peak, the ordinary goes pale.

This video works through the arithmetic of waiting: how many days a year a person agrees to count as life, why one island cannot hold the weight put on it, and what happens in the first, second, third and fourth week if you start differently.

And it says the thing that has to be said: when "learn to enjoy the small things" stops being advice and starts working as an accusation.

Disclaimer

This video is educational and is not medical or psychological advice. It states plainly, in a section of its own, that if pleasure has gone not in places but entirely, if the things you always liked stopped landing, if you have had no strength to get up for weeks, that is not a matter of noticing better and is a reason to see a doctor — and that telling someone in that state to enjoy the small things does harm. Ordinary exhaustion is addressed separately, where the problem is rest rather than philosophy, and the video says outright that a job destroying your health and a relationship where you are being hurt should be changed, not accepted. None of this argues for giving up wanting: renouncing desire is called anaesthesia rather than wisdom. The 1978 study is presented with its sample sizes and together with the later revision of the theory; the episode with Yunmen's teacher is given as tradition, not as documented fact.

Subscribe: @the-quiet-monk

Sources

Brickman, P., Coates, D. & Janoff-Bulman, R. "Lottery winners and accident victims: Is happiness relative?" Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1978 — full text with the table: https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/1978...

Brickman, P. & Campbell, D. "Hedonic Relativism and Planning the Good Society," 1971 — the paper that introduced the term "hedonic treadmill."

Diener, E., Lucas, R. & Scollon, C. "Beyond the Hedonic Treadmill," 2006 — the revision of set-point theory in five corrections: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic...

Yunmen Wenyan, 864–949; 日日是好日, Blue Cliff Record (Biyan lu), Case 6, compiled in the early twelfth century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nichini...

On the koan of the fifteenth day: https://www.treetopzencenter.org/yun-...