Why more is never enough
Evolution has ensured that humans will invariably be dissatisfied with what we have, said Arthur Brooks in The Atlantic. That’s why the key to happiness is learning to want less.
I GLANCED INTO my teenage daughter’s bedroom one spring afternoon last year, expecting to find her staring absentmindedly at the Zoom screen that passed for high school during the pandemic. Instead, she was laughing uproariously at a video she had found. I asked her what she was looking at. “It’s an old man dancing like a chicken and singing,” she told me.
I came over to her laptop, not being above watching someone making an idiot of himself for 15 seconds of social-media fame. What I found instead was the septuagenarian rock star Mick Jagger, in a fairly recent concert, croaking out the Rolling Stones’ megahit “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”—a song that debuted on the charts when I was a year old—for probably the millionth time. An audience of tens of thousands of what looked to be mostly Baby Boomers and Gen Xers sang along rapturously.
“Is this serious?” she asked. “Do people your age actually like this?” I took umbrage but had to admit it was a legitimate question. “Kind of,” I answered. It wasn’t just the music, or even the performance, I assured her. To my mind, the longevity of that particular song—No. 2 on Rolling Stone magazine’s original list of the “500 Greatest Songs of All Time”—has a lot to do with a deep truth it speaks.
As we wind our way through life, I explained, satisfaction—the joy from fulfillment of our wishes or expectations—is evanescent. No matter what we achieve, see, acquire, or do, it seems to slip from our grasp.
I was on a roll now. Satisfaction, I told my daughter, is the greatest paradox of human life. We crave it, we believe we can get it, we glimpse it and maybe even experience it for a brief moment, and then it vanishes. But we never give up on our quest to get and hold on to it. “I try, and I try, and I try, and I try,” Jagger sings. How? Through sex and consumerism, according to the song. By building a life that is ever more baroque, expensive, and laden with crap. “You’ll see,” I told her.
MICK JAGGER’S SATISFACTION dilemma—and ours—starts with a rudimentary formula: Satisfaction = getting what you want.
It’s so simple, and yet its power is deeply encoded within us. Give a 3-year-old the french fry she is reaching for and see her satisfied expression. But then, after a couple of seconds, watch the wanting return. And that’s the actual problem, isn’t it? The Stones’ song should really have been titled “(I Can’t Keep No) Satisfaction.” It’s almost as if our brains are programmed to prevent us from enjoying anything for very long.
In fact, they are. The term homeostasis was introduced in 1926 by a physiologist named Walter B. Cannon, who showed in his book The Wisdom of the Body that we have built-in mechanisms to regulate our temperature, as well as our levels of oxygen, water, salt, sugar, protein, fat, and calcium. But the concept applies much more broadly than that: To survive, all living systems tend to maintain stable conditions as best they can.
When you get an emotional shock—good or bad—your brain wants to re-equilibrate, making it hard to stay on the high or low for very long. It’s why, when you achieve conventional, acquisitive success, you can never get enough. If you base your sense of self-worth on success—money, power, prestige—you will run from victory to victory, initially to keep feeling good, and then to avoid feeling awful.
The unending race against the headwinds of homeostasis has a name: the “hedonic treadmill.” No matter how fast we run, we never arrive. “At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his 1841 essay, “Self-Reliance.” “I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.”
Scholars argue over whether our happiness has an immutable set point, or if it might move around a little over the course of our life due to general circumstances. But no one has ever found that immediate bliss from a major victory or achievement will endure. “The nature of [adaptation] condemns men to live on a hedonic treadmill,” the psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald T. Campbell wrote in 1971, “to seek new levels of stimulation merely to maintain old levels of subjective pleasure, to never achieve any kind of permanent happiness or satisfaction.”
Yet even if you recognize all this, getting off the treadmill is hard. It feels dangerous. Our urge for more is quite powerful, but stronger still is our resistance to less. So you find yourself running simply to avoid being thrown off the back of the treadmill.
ACCORDING TO EVOLUTIONARY psychology, our tendency to strive for more is perfectly understandable. Throughout most of human history, starvation loomed closer than it does, for the most part, today. A “rich” caveman had a few extra animal skins and arrowheads, and maybe a few piles of seeds and dried fish to spare. With this plenty, he might survive a bad winter.
Our troglodyte ancestors didn’t just want to make it through the winter, though; they had bigger ambitions. They wanted to find allies and mates too, with the goal (whether conscious or not) of passing on their genes. And what would make that possible? Among other things, the accumulation of animal skins, demonstrating greater competence, prowess, and attractiveness than the hominid in the next cave over.
Surprisingly little has changed since then. Scholars have shown that our acquisitive tendencies persist amid plenty and regularly exceed our needs. Competing with rivals for mates helps explain our weird fixation on social comparison. When we think about satisfaction from success (or possessions or fitness or good looks), there’s another element to consider: Success is relative. Satisfaction requires not just that you continuously run in place on your
own hedonic treadmill, but that you run slightly faster than other people are running on theirs.
We live in a time when we are regularly counseled to get back to nature, to our long-ago past—in our diets, our sense of communal obligation, and more. But if our goal is happiness that endures, following our natural urges does not help us, in the main. That is Mother Nature’s cruel hoax. Happiness doesn’t help propagate the species, so nature doesn’t select for it. If you conflate intergenerational survival with happiness, that’s your problem, not nature’s.
In fact, our natural state is dissatisfaction, punctuated by brief moments of satisfaction. You might not like the hedonic treadmill, but Mother Nature thinks it’s pretty great. She likes watching you strive to achieve an elusive goal, because strivers get the goods—even if they don’t enjoy them for long. The urge to have more than others, to be more than others, tugs at us relentlessly.
The insatiable goals to acquire more, succeed conspicuously, and be as attractive as possible lead us to objectify one another, and even ourselves. When people see themselves as little more than their attractive bodies, jobs, or bank accounts, it brings great suffering.
Studies show that self-objectification is associated with a sense of invisibility and lack of autonomy, and physical self-objectification has a direct relationship with eating disorders and depression in women. Professional self-objectification is a tyranny every bit as nasty. You become a heartless taskmaster to yourself, seeing yourself as nothing more than Homo economicus. Love and fun are sacrificed for another day of work, in search of a positive internal answer to the question Am I successful yet? We become cardboard cutouts of real people.
FOR THE FAITHFUL, satisfaction has another name: heaven.
Many religions promise heaven to believers. We rarely think carefully about what that entails—harps and clouds?—but the Roman Catholic Church is helpfully specific about it. Heaven grants us the “beatific vision”: God showing himself to us face-to-face, making us know his true nature—and thereby granting us the “fulfillment of the deepest human longings, the state of supreme, definitive happiness.” Or, as the English mystic Juliana of Norwich wrote of heaven, “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” In other words, heaven is pure satisfaction that lasts.
Why can’t we seem to be so well on Earth? The 13th-century Catholic priest Thomas Aquinas answers this in his magisterial Summa Theologiae. Even if you are not a religious believer, Thomas’ list of the goals that beguile but never satisfy rings true. They include money, power, pleasure, and honor. As Thomas puts it in the case of money:
“In the desire for wealth and for whatsoever temporal goods...when we already possess them, we despise them, and seek others...The reason of this is that we realize more their insufficiency when we possess them: and this very fact shows that they are imperfect, and the sovereign good does not consist therein.”
The satisfaction problem is our natural attachment to these inadequate things. If this sounds a bit Buddhist to you, it should. It is very similar to the Buddha’s first “Noble Truth”: that life is suffering—duhkha in Sanskrit, also translated as “dissatisfaction”—and that the cause of this suffering is craving, desire, and attachment to worldly things. Thomas Aquinas and the Buddha (and Jagger, for that matter) were saying the same thing.
Note that neither Thomas nor the Buddha argued that worldly rewards are inherently evil. In fact, they can be used for great good. Money is crucial for a functioning society and supporting your family; power can be wielded to lift others up; pleasure leavens life; and honor can attract attention to the sources of moral elevation. But as attachments—as ends instead of means— the problem is simple: They cannot satisfy.
In truth, our formula, Satisfaction = getting what you want, leaves out one key component. To be more accurate, it should be:
Satisfaction = what you have ÷ what you want.
All of our evolutionary and biological imperatives focus us on increasing the numerator—our haves. But the more significant action is in the denominator—our wants. The modern world is made up of clever ways to make our wants explode without us realizing it. Even the Dalai Lama, arguably the world’s most enlightened man, admits to it. “Sometimes I visit supermarkets,” he says in The Art of Happiness. “I really love to see supermarkets, because I can see so many beautiful things. So, when I look at all these different articles, I develop a feeling of desire, and my initial impulse might be, ‘Oh, I want this; I want that.’”
The secret to satisfaction is not to increase our haves—that will never work (or at least, it will never last). That is the treadmill formula, not the satisfaction formula. The secret is to manage our wants. By managing what we want instead of what we have, we give ourselves a chance to lead more satisfied lives.
MY DAUGHTER WENT off to college a few months after our talk about the science of satisfaction. After the isolation and lockdowns of Covid, and the sad joke that was her senior year of high school, she made a run for the border, enrolling at a university in Spain. I am bereft. We do send each other several messages every day, though. They are almost never about work or school. Instead, we share small moments: a photo of a rainy street, a silly joke, the number of push-ups she just did.
I don’t know whether this is giving her a head start on freeing herself from the paradox of dissatisfaction, but it is like medicine for me. Each message is like the evening of the flower—a brief glimpse of the beatific vision of heaven, perhaps—bringing quiet satisfaction.
Each of us can ride the waves of attachments and urges, hoping futilely that someday, somehow, we will get and keep that satisfaction we crave. Or we can take a shot at free will and self-mastery. It’s a lifelong battle against our inner caveman. Often, he wins. But with determination and practice, we can find respite from that chronic dissatisfaction and experience the joy that is true human freedom.