If I had a penny for every time someone looked at an extremely wealthy person in the public eye and said to me, “If I had that kind of money, I’d go away, live a quiet life, and you’d never hear from me again, I’d be the person living a quiet life in a log cabin”.

Every day we, and here I mean non-rich people, look at the wealthy among us who are still grinding, still working, and think to ourselves, if I were you, I’d be satisfied. Why are you not satisfied? Why are you still chasing after more?

The philosophers

Hedonic treadmill

Brickman and Campbell propose a theory called the hedonic treadmill or hedonic adaptation. Here’s how it goes. You’ve been using public transport, and every time you complain about your experience, randos on the internet tell you to work hard and buy a car or shut all the way up. So, you grind, and you grind and you grind, and you buy a Vitz. You’re walking, nay, driving on literal sunshine. Excited, happy, satisfied cannot begin to describe how you feel. A few months go by and the excitement wanes; now the baseline you’re comparing everything to is not the old matatu experience but the Vitz. You’re starting to see some issues: the cargo space is tiny, it’s not great for long-distance travel, plus how many friends can you reasonably fit in it? You need a bigger car with a powerful engine.

That’s what happens to reach people. You have a need, a desire, and you’re excited and satisfied once that need is met, however, that becomes the new status quo. You adapt to it and it eventually stops feeling extraordinary. That luxury car soon becomes the ordinary car you drive to the supermarket. Now you need an improvement; cue the cycle.

Endless desire

Schopenhauer, a rather depressing philosopher, has a bleaker outlook. He says human existence is bleak: we desire something, suffer because we don’t have it, obtain it, experience temporary satisfaction, and then desire something else. It’s never-ending; we are insatiable. Dissatisfaction is built into desire itself.

Conspicuous consumption

Thorstein Veblen defined conspicuous consumption as purchasing goods in order to display wealth and signal social status. Rich and poor people alike engage in it. Class is not just about what you have but what you have in comparison to others. It’s about ranking and status, which means there is no end point. No matter how expensive your shoes are, there will be someone with a more expensive pair and when you compare yourself with them, that feeling of not enough returns. This is especially worse for rich people, as you get richer, you spend time around richer people and that increases the pressure you’re under as you compare yourself to wealthier people. You may be rich in absolute terms, but status is relative and so you keep striving. Once your survival needs are addressed, you proceed to the next level of the games, trying to come out on top. Enough becomes impossible as the target keeps moving.

So now what?

Is everyone who imagines that they would be satisfied with a certain amount of wealth lying, delusional, or ignorant? Or maybe all the above? Who knows? Here are some things people have suggested to get out of the cycle:

  1. Try and develop an attitude of gratitude where you take time to appreciate what you have.
  2. Consciously determine for yourself what is enough by distinguishing your needs from your wants.
  3. Deliberately try and consume less. Introduce periods of absence so that those pleasures retain their novelty.
  4. Replace that pursuit of more with a pursuit of a life of meaning, virtue and relationships.
  5. Define freedom by how much freedom and meaningful time you have.
  6. Constantly question the logic of this system, which continually manufactures new wants.
  7. Surround yourself with people who are also trying to get out of the accumulation rat race.

All the best to all of us, as we try to live meaningful lives.

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