Hi. My name is Irene. Within the last few blinks of time, I’ve developed an obsession with something called sociolinguistics. I’ve spent countless hours typing away to explain what sociolinguistics is, but I’ve never really gone into why I find it so interesting. So, I’m here, welcoming you to enter my mind.

Just a fair warning: my train of thought runs on one of those high-speed railways you find in China these days, and there are no stops to get off.

--My mind, this morning in physics class, at around 8:53 (?) AM:

Hedonic adaptation is defined as “the observed tendency of humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or life changes.” Thank you, Wikipedia, for that concise definition.

So, the idea of hedonic adaptation is that no matter what happens in a person’s life, he or she will eventually find a way back to that happy equilibrium--that individual level of inner peace. If a person were to become rich, their standards of living would rise in tandem; thus, they would never be satisfied as they have no permanent gain in happiness.

Side note: Wikipedia also pointed out that hedonic adaptation is also sometimes called the hedonic treadmill. I, personally, hate running on the treadmill because I feel like I never go anywhere.

No matter how slow or fast I run, no matter how long or short the distance, no matter if I’m there for an entire day or just ten minutes, I go nowhere. I return to the position I started in. Simply put, I have zero displacement.

In physics, we learned that Work is Force times Displacement. I can put in all the force I want and still have zero displacement, resulting in zero work. Nothing changes. Such is the limitation of a treadmill. Wikipedia, you done did good in your label of a “hedonic treadmill.”

I recently stumbled upon the term hedonic adaptation in a YouTube video I saw, in which the narrator of the video makes an interesting remark: at the beginning of her freshman year in college, she felt awe to be on campus every day. With (a relatively short period of) time, the wonder in being somewhere new faded, and she stopped pausing to appreciate her surroundings each day.

How does this relate to sociolinguistics at all? I’ll get there soon enough. I’m leading you down my own path to sociolinguistics, no matter how strange it might be. Patience is a virtue.

One of the first things we learned in calculus was how to find the critical points on a graph. We took the first derivative and found the points where that equalled zero. Then, we’d find the second derivative by taking the derivative of the first derivative (Is your head spinning with derivatives yet? Good thing we’re not on Taylor series!) and plug the critical values into the second derivative.

Where it results in a positive number, the graph is concave up--and the critical value is a relative minimum. The graph is concave down and the critical value is a maximum if the second derivative test gives a negative number. If it’s zero, the value is a point of inflection--where the graph changes concavity.

I say all of this because we did a little calculus review in physics today.

My physics teacher said the cool thing about this class was that we would finally be giving meaning to our calculus based numbers. After flip flopping some negative signs and replacing some Y’s with some potential energy, she introduced something called equilibrium.

Now that we could disregard the fundamentals of all things calculus and concavity, we could start building our physics terminology arsenal. Everything “concave down” was now called unstable equilibrium while “concave up” was stable equilibrium. Points of inflection, then, were at neutral equilibrium.

She told us to picture a “concave up” parabola--kind of like a U-shaped bowl. If you set a marble in it and pushed it to the right or left, it would eventually return back down to the center and lowest point of the curve. Thus, it is said to be at stable equilibrium because no matter how you tap it, the marble will go right back to where it came from. Though it might climb to higher Y-values fleetingly, it will always return to its original potential energy level.

Hmm. That sounds an awful lot like the hedonic treadmill, doesn’t it?

When I thought of the application of hedonic adaptation in my own life, I immediately think of my brother. I think of the first move: my brother and mom leaving for China with no return date in mind. I think it’s fairly safe to assume that each person has a different hedonic adaptation period; in this case, mine was pretty long. I spent a whole semester walking into those eighth grade doors just so that I could run straight into my counselor’s office and cry.

Soon, though, my life filled up with activities to keep me distracted. I think I returned to my stable equilibrium pretty nicely there. Each goodbye after that became softer, if even just by a sliver. My reaction period became shorter and shorter, and now I occasionally find myself consciously thinking about how to disrupt my stable equilibrium.

That, my friends, is where sociolinguistics comes in.

It wasn’t until very recently that I found the words to my emotions--the label that so nicely described how I was feeling. After I heard about hedonic adaptation and learned about stable equilibrium, my mind had a nice little epiphany. Aha! Now I can finally write about my infatuation with sociolinguistics!

We fit different social roles based on who is in our company. But you see, we also tend to change ourselves based on what we are engaging our minds in at the moment.

For me, my thought turns to liquid paint when I read good poetry; the words flow with my mind to paint a feeling I still can’t quite put a finger on (maybe I’ll be able to touch it when it’s dry… ha, get it, because it’s paint?). When I do calculus, my brain becomes a typewriter--each stroke of my pencil is a satisfying click of a key. At the end, a story is written.

When I think about language and psychology, though, my mind becomes a heart. Life is instilled in the form of blood pulsing, each heartbeat egging on the next bit of information I can find. It is the thing that brings me back to my stable equilibrium--the thing that pumps enough oxygen for me to run on the metaphorical hedonic treadmill until time outruns me.

To quote Wikipedia again, when “major positive or negative events or life changes” happen to me, I feel lost at first. No matter if it’s good news or bad, part of my identity becomes confused and searches for a way home. Throughout all of my schooling, I’ve never felt the certainty with a subject as I do with language and psychology.

I wander from science to math to English to history and back again, trying to find my niche. Each one contributes a little for me, bringing that marble back down--ever so slightly--to the center of the parabola, but none of them do it like sociolinguistics does.

Each time I reach the stable equilibrium, it’s because my heart of sociolinguistics has driven me there. I’m just another red blood cell, guided by the mastermind behind the masters of mind that we as humans are.

To sum it up in four words: sociolinguistics is my rock.