I think our culture teaches us the wrong mental model for happiness. We think of it like wealth: a quantity to try to maximize. If 1 happiness is good, then 2 is better, 10 is really good, and 100000 is amazing.
But that's not how our emotions work at all. Thanks to the hedonic treadmill, it's not possible to experience long-term joy over any consistent period. Active joyful enthusiasm is by nature an ephemeral experience.
Instead of happiness, what we want long term is something more akin to peace, satisfaction, or tranquility. A sense that all is right with where we are in the world.
And the model for that is much more like hunger and satiety. No one thinks that if eating one steak is good then eating a hundred steaks is great and a million is amazing. Hunger exists to address an imbalance. The goal of it is to get you back to a comfortable neutral point where you are satieted but not unpleasantly stuffed.
Unhappiness works in a similar fashion. It tells us something is off balance in our emotional life. So when you find yourself craving some experience or activity and thinking "this will make me happy", it means "this will fix a thing making me unhappy". It doesn't mean that scaling that craving up will make you extra super happy.
But that's not how our emotions work at all. Thanks to the hedonic treadmill, it's not possible to experience long-term joy over any consistent period. Active joyful enthusiasm is by nature an ephemeral experience.
Instead of happiness, what we want long term is something more akin to peace, satisfaction, or tranquility. A sense that all is right with where we are in the world.
And the model for that is much more like hunger and satiety. No one thinks that if eating one steak is good then eating a hundred steaks is great and a million is amazing. Hunger exists to address an imbalance. The goal of it is to get you back to a comfortable neutral point where you are satieted but not unpleasantly stuffed.
Unhappiness works in a similar fashion. It tells us something is off balance in our emotional life. So when you find yourself craving some experience or activity and thinking "this will make me happy", it means "this will fix a thing making me unhappy". It doesn't mean that scaling that craving up will make you extra super happy.