Hedonic Treadmill
We think new things will make us happy. A new car, a new game. We buy the thing, and for a while, we're happy. Then our baseline happiness adjusts: suddenly we have the new car, the new game... and we're not happy! It wears off, so we need MORE car, MORE game, MORE raise, MORE money.
Maybe this next thing will make us happy, maybe, maybe, maybe.
But it never will. As long as our baseline continues to increase.
So we always keep up with the Joneses, racing unhappiness against unhappiness, each buying a bigger boat, hoping that THIS one will fill the gap. It won't. It can't. Stop.
Combating the treadmill
So what do we do?
We practice gratitude. We're thankful for what we have. We spend our money on experiences, not on things. We practice Minimalism. And we don't buy a thing just to have it.
Having vs Being
Erich Fromm observed that the postindustrial West’s “kind of ‘pursuit of happiness’ does not produce well-being,” because it is dominated by an attitude of “having” rather than “being.” Someone in the “having mode” who comes across a striking flower immediately wants to pick it, to possess it (or, in a digital context, to Instagram it or mint it as a nonfungible token), whereas someone in the “being mode” is able simply to enjoy the experience, free from the pangs of acquisitive desire.
The having mode drives people to acquire more and more stuff—property, profit, power, tokens of status. The being mode, by contrast, leads people “to share, to give, to sacrifice,” Fromm wrote. Whatever fulfillment you experience after purchasing some new thing, it is qualitatively different from what you would feel pursuing some intrinsically motivated activity in leisure.
Wage labor and career climbing are obvious corollaries to the having mode, because in each, “time becomes our ruler.” How we occupy ourselves is dictated by clocks, calendars, schedules, deadlines, and algorithms, but rarely if ever by our own well-considered motivations. From the having mode follow all kinds of now familiar pathologies. In a society bent on securing possessions and status, everyone is perpetually insecure, stricken by a fear of losing what they have gained or of falling behind. There is a constant itch for the new, because everything gets old soon enough.