The Myth of Having More & Happiness

💭 Go deeper: We talk more about this in episode #284 of the Joy Lab Podcast

There is no amount of anything that will make you feel like enough. It's that age-old wisdom that we know, deep down, but so often forget.

Henry Emmons, MD, learned this not from a textbook but from a patient. His patient was a venture capital executive in his late 40s who had earned tens of millions of dollars for his firm, had a family that loved him, and was, by almost any measure, extraordinarily successful. He was also severely depressed. He compared himself not to the general population but to his partners, whose deals had earned hundreds of millions. He was certain he was about to be fired. He was, by his own private calculation, millions short of a savings target he had set for himself. In his mind, this constituted total failure.

Henry leaned on CBT as a modality to help his patient, but it didn't work. And that, Henry says, is when he learned viscerally what he had only known cognitively before: if you believe that external achievement is what proves your worth to the world (or to yourself) there will never, ever be enough to do that successfully.

The neuroscience helps explain why. Dopamine, the brain chemical most associated with reward and motivation, tracks more reliably with the anticipation of getting something than with actually getting it. And then there's hedonic adaptation, sometimes called the hedonic treadmill: the well-documented finding that big life events, positive or negative, shift our mood temporarily before we return to our baseline. The new car feels extraordinary for two weeks. The lottery win produces euphoria that fades. The promotion feels hollow faster than you expected. And so you conclude that you need more, or something different; without realizing, as Henry puts it, that you're Sisyphus, pushing the same rock up the same hill, getting the same result every time.

Aimee Prasek, PhD, discovered the same truth. Her father grew up watching his mom clean hotel rooms part time and his dad hustling for house painting and other odd jobs to simply make it week-to-week. So for him, grasping for more wasn't irrational; it was survival. The fear of not having enough had a real foundation. But somewhere along the way, having more became about proving worth rather than securing safety. He built his identity around the visible markers of success. When his business collapsed, everything he attached his worth to disappeared in a flash. 

Aimee remembers watching the items leave. A car driven away by someone from the bank. A boat pulled down the road. Each one a piece of him, because he had staked so much of himself on those things.

"It is completely futile," she says. "A lifetime of attention and effort built on quicksand."

The invitation isn't to give up on pleasure or achievement. You don't have to stop wanting things. But the inner compass, that knowing of your own worth, is always there underneath the false-self, the proving, the acquiring. It was never lost. It can always be returned to.

Listen to episode 284 of the Joy Lab Podcast to explore the psychology of having enough — and what it takes to step off the hedonic treadmill for good.