Arthur C. Brooks explains the hedonic treadmill: humans acquire resources but emotions quickly reset to baseline, making new possessions feel temporary. Chasing more leaves people unsatisfied because they haven't learned to use what they have in ways that actually create lasting happiness.
There's this assumption that if you have more resources. Because Mother Nature endows you with this tendency to want resources. We think if we meet all these animal impulses, then the thing that we really want, which is happiness, will actually come to us. That's not right. What will come to us is indeed more mating partners and more stuff and more hierarchy, more place in the hierarchy. But we won't actually get happier. And so the result is that we assume that we just needed more. That's called the hedonic treadmill. The more, more, more you homeostatically go back to your emotional baseline very quickly. And that is to say you get. You're happy because something good happens to you in worldly terms. But your emotions don't exist to give you a permanent good day. They're an alarm system to tell you that certain things are happening around you. And then when your emotions reset and you realize that you can't. As Mick Jagger almost sang, you can't keep no satisfaction, then you assume that you needed more, and it's more, more, more, more, more, all the way to the moon. That's a real problem. But the people who are experiencing that, they actually didn't figure out how to use resources in a way that does bring lasting happiness. And there are ways to do it. They're just not the. They're not the ways that you think of.
