Beautifully argued. I'd say there's a specific mechanism behind the mirage: hagioptasia - an evolved tendency to project specialness onto external things, making them shimmer with apparent promise. The function was never to deliver satisfaction, only to generate pursuit.
Love this and I agree with about 80% of it. The hedonic treadmill is real, the antisatisfiable nature of desire is brilliantly put, and the bullshit-protective armor framing is genuinely useful.
Where I'd push back is on the absolutism of "you will never be satisfied." Because I can genuinely look back across different periods of my life and identify sustained stretches where my overall level of happiness was markedly different. Not moment-to-moment satisfaction — you're right that that's a treadmill. But something more like a baseline. A sustained equilibrium that lasted months or years at a time.
And when I'm not in one of those periods, that baseline is exactly what I'm trying to get back to. Not some peak experience or fantasy of permanent bliss — just a way of living that I've already experienced and know is available to me.
Not saying it's easy. Not saying everyone can do it. And definitely not selling a course on it. But I think telling people they'll never be satisfied — however well-argued — risks becoming its own kind of bullshit if it convinces people to stop trying to build something that actually works.
Thanks. I’ll take 80% any day. I’m genuinely struggling to relate to the higher baseline thing. I can see that some parts of my life were better than others, but I can usually point to the cause—having to do with work or relationships or location. I don’t think I can point to any part of my life that had a higher baseline independent of those causes. But maybe I’m weird. Apparently some people have this experience—a few others have said something similar. In any case, I am generally against advising people to set their goals internally, to strive for some inner state of happiness or wellbeing or set point, because these things are just too hard to control, unpredictable, and bound to set people up for disappointment. I think it’s better for people to set their goals outward in the world toward things they can realistically achieve. Try to make a friend. Try to be closer to family. Try to get a better job. Try to be healthier. But I would say no, don’t try to be happy or satisfied or at a higher set point or whatever. That is a very bad idea imo. Mental illness is a different story. Depressed people should be treated for their condition. Antidepressants are great. But I’m generally against the pursuit of happiness, or the pursuit of anything inside the head, which I’ve written about extensively elsewhere (see Happiness Is Bullshit and Happiness Is Bullshit Revisited).
Great response. It makes me think of “the backwards law” which I thinks is an idea from Alan watts.
It refers to psychological phenomenon and how the more we chase them, the further away they get.
The more we chase happiness the sadder we feel. The more we chase confidence, the more inadequate and insecure we feel. The more we chase status, the more inferior we feel.
All this rings true to me. But arguably human psychology differs more than we tend to be aware of. There seem to be important innate temperamental differences in how different people experience life. Commenter Maria Trepp, for example, avers that she’s extremely satisfied and happy. We all know people who are usually cheerful and in a good and positive mood (not as a result of particularly happy circumstances, but simply because they have a natural proclivity to be that way) and whose “preternatural” sunny disposition appears nearly impervious to even “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune."
On another note, I agree that our higher consciousness gives us the singular ability to realize that we will never be satisfied, but quite possibly it is that very high consciousness that makes us singularly prone to being perpetually unsatisfied. I very much doubt that a cat, say, is constantly in a dissatisfied mood because whatever it is it most desires will never be fully attained. It is the very realization, unique to humans, that our desires are by their very nature ultimately unfulfillable, that may engender in us (at least in those of us not endowed with that perennial sunny disposition mentioned above) that sense of perpetual striving and only fleeting satisfaction that you so aptly describe.
Not sure I agree. Yes, we can’t fulfill our desires in the sense that we can’t arrive at some fixed state where we’ll be permanently satisfied, but that’s a feature, not a bug. Utopia would also have this property - you’d have the constant sense you’re moving towards something better and greater, it wouldn’t just be static bliss.
Our inability to be satisfied by finite states just means we’re wired to have infinite goals - goals we can pursue forever. Some goals, like power, status, happiness, pleasure, aren’t great infinite goals. But other goals, like meaning, beauty, and connectedness, seem worth pursuing forever. Would it be a waste if we perpetually deepened and improved the quality of welfare, art, and relationships?
To give another analogy, consider an amazing game. You wouldn’t want to be able to just win, because then you’d have to stop playing! The best possible game would be one you could play forever. And it would feel like as you continue to progress, the game keeps expanding, keeps revealing more depth, more layers, more connections, further and further and further.
Yes, static satisfaction doesn’t exist. But dynamic fulfillment does! - It’s the feeling you get when you are fully engaged with reality, and you’re building projects, art, and relationships that you truly believe in.
Good point. I think meaning or purpose or something like that, i.e. having goals you find valuable and worthwhile, is real and achievable. It’s not satisfaction per se, but it’s nice.
I agree we are never fully satisfied, but that is not entirely a bad thing. That restlessness is what drives progress. Otherwise, we would still be living in caves.
"The happiest countries and happiest U.S. states tend to have the highest suicide rates, according to research from the UK’s University of Warwick, Hamilton College in New York and the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco."
A 2019 county-level analysis failed to replicate this finding. Though they seem to think it's plausible that "relative deprivation of happiness or life satisfaction increase suicide (...), average subjective well-being of a county [is not] associated with suicide rates". https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-017-9938-y
Thanks for the clarification. I'm quite surprised that wasn't replicated! Seems like it'd be a straightforward post-hoc statistical analysis of independent datasets - the "Happiness Surveys" and population level mortality statistics.
It also fits intuition - Scandinavian countries are known for both being on the top of the Happiness Survey Metrics as well as suicide rates.
Honestly though my comment was more in playing the language game of cynical amusement rather than psychometric insight. David's article together with his earlier "Happiness is Bullshit" suggests that Happiness Surveys are a vague matter of "someone somewhere measuring something". He's also describing something more formally known to behavioral economists that expected utility maximization doesn't seem to fit human behavior, and adjusted-reference-point Prospect Theory is the leading alternative (see Lionel Page's series on happiness for more detail).
And that Humans don't make choices based on expected utility but Prospects relative to expectations makes sense from basic systems biological homeostasis principles plus natural selection - why would your body be constantly consuming metabolically expensive precursors for happy chemicals based on your absolute status level, when your S&R odds would be better served with it leveling off with hedonic adaptation and instead incentivizing you to seek more and more (as David described with the hypothetical endless power-status ascent)?
Enjoyed the read, but I think you arrive at your conclusions too hastily.
"Utopia is bullshit" seems like a failure of imagination. With sufficient wisdom and understanding, a happy world — one that circumvents the problems you mention — is entirely conceivable. You yourself decompose human desire into status-seeking and note that it is a never-ending process. Why wouldn't it be possible to engineer a satisfying world around these preferences after we fully figure them out? I think it would be premature to end our line of thinking here.
Also, I'm not sure what arguments Will Storr makes (the article is paywalled) but it seems like you are abruptly dismissing introspective/meditative work very broadly, based on the specific institution/cultural practice of Buddhism. To clarify - do you not think that it is possible to achieve lasting fulfillment with a deeper understanding of one's own mind, assuming it is done completely alone and unbeknownst to any member of a status hierarchy?
I think you do a very good job of illustrating why most of our desires, in the modern world, completely fall apart when taken to the logical extreme. But I think this should be the *start* of a bigger discussion, about what we (individually and as a civilization) should aim for, and why it is very important to be careful and reflect along the way. Not the end.
Thanks for your thoughtful pushback. To answer your question, I don't think it is possible to achieve lasting fulfillment with a deeper understanding of one's mind, though I do think it is possible to modestly shift one's mindset and achieve some therapeutic benefits with meditation. I agree this is not the end of the conversation but the beginning of a very complicated conversation. I've written about another anti-utopian aspects of our desires, how they are unavoidably relative to our peers, in my post "There's A Problem with Our Desires." I've also written extensively about how humans do not, and should not, pursue happiness as an end in "Happiness Is Bullshit" and "Happiness Is Bullshit Revisited." I've also written a bit about meditation and buddhism, and how my personal experience with it informed my skepticism about the pursuit of happiness, in my post "No Self, No Politics." Sorry to plug all my shit, but it's relevant to your point that this is a bigger topic, which I very much agree with. I never intend for any of my posts to be the last word on anything, which is why I end them all with "thanks for reading my bullshit." So, again, thanks for reading my bullshit.
Thanks for the response, I'll definitely be checking those posts out and maybe writing an article of my own to synthesize/comment. I'm glad we agree this is the beginning of a complex conversation.
I think I disagree, at the moment, that lasting fulfillment can't be achieved via introspective techniques because A) I see "lasting fulfillment" as a tangible state of existence that does not rely on the sort of achievement milestones outlined in the article, and is not somehow mystical/out of reach B) I've heard anecdotes suggesting otherwise from people I trust - but obviously this isn't conclusive data C) I think we have barely scratched the surface in terms of our understanding here.
But I am excited to see if your writing causes me to update!
One thing I find interesting here is that achieving your goals and gaining status/power brings both practical and psychological challenges. There's the psychological issue of always setting what you have as the baseline and wanting slightly more, which may be irrational, but there's also legitimate real world problems that come with moving up the hierarchy.
A relatable example for me is climbing the corporate ladder. As you move up the company pays you more and therefore expects more of you. There's far more pressure and stress when you are high up in the company. You also tend to be responsible for more people besides just yourself. Then let's say you parlay your impressive Regional Director of Entering Numbers Into Spreadsheets role into a landing a hot girlfriend. Now you have to worry about making her happy and whether she really likes you. You also have to keep an eye on other men who might try to steal her.
While we all want to climb the ladder, sometimes doing so only makes life harder.
I agree with the part about this being ironically comforting. I think there are two reasons for this. First, it lowers my expectations. Second, it makes me realize everyone else is struggling just like I am. If (per the 2nd to last paragraph) life is stressful, mediocre, and unsatisfying, maybe I can accept that and make the most of it.
There is something deeply satisfying being unsatisfied. Maybe I'm a bit strange, but figuring out how something in the world works at a deep, technical level is pleasing to me. There is a pleasure in finding things out. It's not a chore, it's usually not for anyone else, and it's always exciting. That I keep exploring is probably a trick of my mammalian mind where the play instinct - and its dopamine hit - didn't shut off like it does for most adults. I got lucky, I guess. I'm never bored and life is fun. The minute I know everything, I'll be uninterested in living!
Good job pointing out that suffering is caused by desire and the way to end suffering is to stop desiring…which is impossible. Contrary to what the Buddha said, there is no way out because, eight fold path or not, the desire to end desire is desire. And, no matter how much we got, we want more, more, more. I spent half of my life seeking enlightenment because I thought enlightenment was arriving at a state of bliss…non-attachment…”heaven on Earth”…but, no matter how hard I tried, enlightenment stayed just out of reach…Van Morrison (the singer) came to my rescue. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=lyrics+to+van+morrison+song+enlightehment&t=ipad&ia=web&iax=lyrics
The problem as a species is that satisfaction leads to ruin, we'd stop inventing stuff, striving and evolving. I think it's a kind of comfort to know that it's all for something so we can continue or at least our genes can.
Beautifully argued. I'd say there's a specific mechanism behind the mirage: hagioptasia - an evolved tendency to project specialness onto external things, making them shimmer with apparent promise. The function was never to deliver satisfaction, only to generate pursuit.
Love this and I agree with about 80% of it. The hedonic treadmill is real, the antisatisfiable nature of desire is brilliantly put, and the bullshit-protective armor framing is genuinely useful.
Where I'd push back is on the absolutism of "you will never be satisfied." Because I can genuinely look back across different periods of my life and identify sustained stretches where my overall level of happiness was markedly different. Not moment-to-moment satisfaction — you're right that that's a treadmill. But something more like a baseline. A sustained equilibrium that lasted months or years at a time.
And when I'm not in one of those periods, that baseline is exactly what I'm trying to get back to. Not some peak experience or fantasy of permanent bliss — just a way of living that I've already experienced and know is available to me.
Not saying it's easy. Not saying everyone can do it. And definitely not selling a course on it. But I think telling people they'll never be satisfied — however well-argued — risks becoming its own kind of bullshit if it convinces people to stop trying to build something that actually works.
Thanks. I’ll take 80% any day. I’m genuinely struggling to relate to the higher baseline thing. I can see that some parts of my life were better than others, but I can usually point to the cause—having to do with work or relationships or location. I don’t think I can point to any part of my life that had a higher baseline independent of those causes. But maybe I’m weird. Apparently some people have this experience—a few others have said something similar. In any case, I am generally against advising people to set their goals internally, to strive for some inner state of happiness or wellbeing or set point, because these things are just too hard to control, unpredictable, and bound to set people up for disappointment. I think it’s better for people to set their goals outward in the world toward things they can realistically achieve. Try to make a friend. Try to be closer to family. Try to get a better job. Try to be healthier. But I would say no, don’t try to be happy or satisfied or at a higher set point or whatever. That is a very bad idea imo. Mental illness is a different story. Depressed people should be treated for their condition. Antidepressants are great. But I’m generally against the pursuit of happiness, or the pursuit of anything inside the head, which I’ve written about extensively elsewhere (see Happiness Is Bullshit and Happiness Is Bullshit Revisited).
Great response. It makes me think of “the backwards law” which I thinks is an idea from Alan watts.
It refers to psychological phenomenon and how the more we chase them, the further away they get.
The more we chase happiness the sadder we feel. The more we chase confidence, the more inadequate and insecure we feel. The more we chase status, the more inferior we feel.
Thanks for responding 💪
All this rings true to me. But arguably human psychology differs more than we tend to be aware of. There seem to be important innate temperamental differences in how different people experience life. Commenter Maria Trepp, for example, avers that she’s extremely satisfied and happy. We all know people who are usually cheerful and in a good and positive mood (not as a result of particularly happy circumstances, but simply because they have a natural proclivity to be that way) and whose “preternatural” sunny disposition appears nearly impervious to even “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune."
On another note, I agree that our higher consciousness gives us the singular ability to realize that we will never be satisfied, but quite possibly it is that very high consciousness that makes us singularly prone to being perpetually unsatisfied. I very much doubt that a cat, say, is constantly in a dissatisfied mood because whatever it is it most desires will never be fully attained. It is the very realization, unique to humans, that our desires are by their very nature ultimately unfulfillable, that may engender in us (at least in those of us not endowed with that perennial sunny disposition mentioned above) that sense of perpetual striving and only fleeting satisfaction that you so aptly describe.
Not sure I agree. Yes, we can’t fulfill our desires in the sense that we can’t arrive at some fixed state where we’ll be permanently satisfied, but that’s a feature, not a bug. Utopia would also have this property - you’d have the constant sense you’re moving towards something better and greater, it wouldn’t just be static bliss.
Our inability to be satisfied by finite states just means we’re wired to have infinite goals - goals we can pursue forever. Some goals, like power, status, happiness, pleasure, aren’t great infinite goals. But other goals, like meaning, beauty, and connectedness, seem worth pursuing forever. Would it be a waste if we perpetually deepened and improved the quality of welfare, art, and relationships?
To give another analogy, consider an amazing game. You wouldn’t want to be able to just win, because then you’d have to stop playing! The best possible game would be one you could play forever. And it would feel like as you continue to progress, the game keeps expanding, keeps revealing more depth, more layers, more connections, further and further and further.
Yes, static satisfaction doesn’t exist. But dynamic fulfillment does! - It’s the feeling you get when you are fully engaged with reality, and you’re building projects, art, and relationships that you truly believe in.
Good point. I think meaning or purpose or something like that, i.e. having goals you find valuable and worthwhile, is real and achievable. It’s not satisfaction per se, but it’s nice.
I agree we are never fully satisfied, but that is not entirely a bad thing. That restlessness is what drives progress. Otherwise, we would still be living in caves.
Reminds me of this lovely finding
"The happiest countries and happiest U.S. states tend to have the highest suicide rates, according to research from the UK’s University of Warwick, Hamilton College in New York and the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco."
https://scienceblog.com/happiest-places-have-highest-suicide-rates-says-new-research/
A 2019 county-level analysis failed to replicate this finding. Though they seem to think it's plausible that "relative deprivation of happiness or life satisfaction increase suicide (...), average subjective well-being of a county [is not] associated with suicide rates". https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-017-9938-y
Thanks for the clarification. I'm quite surprised that wasn't replicated! Seems like it'd be a straightforward post-hoc statistical analysis of independent datasets - the "Happiness Surveys" and population level mortality statistics.
It also fits intuition - Scandinavian countries are known for both being on the top of the Happiness Survey Metrics as well as suicide rates.
Honestly though my comment was more in playing the language game of cynical amusement rather than psychometric insight. David's article together with his earlier "Happiness is Bullshit" suggests that Happiness Surveys are a vague matter of "someone somewhere measuring something". He's also describing something more formally known to behavioral economists that expected utility maximization doesn't seem to fit human behavior, and adjusted-reference-point Prospect Theory is the leading alternative (see Lionel Page's series on happiness for more detail).
And that Humans don't make choices based on expected utility but Prospects relative to expectations makes sense from basic systems biological homeostasis principles plus natural selection - why would your body be constantly consuming metabolically expensive precursors for happy chemicals based on your absolute status level, when your S&R odds would be better served with it leveling off with hedonic adaptation and instead incentivizing you to seek more and more (as David described with the hypothetical endless power-status ascent)?
Enjoyed the read, but I think you arrive at your conclusions too hastily.
"Utopia is bullshit" seems like a failure of imagination. With sufficient wisdom and understanding, a happy world — one that circumvents the problems you mention — is entirely conceivable. You yourself decompose human desire into status-seeking and note that it is a never-ending process. Why wouldn't it be possible to engineer a satisfying world around these preferences after we fully figure them out? I think it would be premature to end our line of thinking here.
Also, I'm not sure what arguments Will Storr makes (the article is paywalled) but it seems like you are abruptly dismissing introspective/meditative work very broadly, based on the specific institution/cultural practice of Buddhism. To clarify - do you not think that it is possible to achieve lasting fulfillment with a deeper understanding of one's own mind, assuming it is done completely alone and unbeknownst to any member of a status hierarchy?
I think you do a very good job of illustrating why most of our desires, in the modern world, completely fall apart when taken to the logical extreme. But I think this should be the *start* of a bigger discussion, about what we (individually and as a civilization) should aim for, and why it is very important to be careful and reflect along the way. Not the end.
Thanks for your thoughtful pushback. To answer your question, I don't think it is possible to achieve lasting fulfillment with a deeper understanding of one's mind, though I do think it is possible to modestly shift one's mindset and achieve some therapeutic benefits with meditation. I agree this is not the end of the conversation but the beginning of a very complicated conversation. I've written about another anti-utopian aspects of our desires, how they are unavoidably relative to our peers, in my post "There's A Problem with Our Desires." I've also written extensively about how humans do not, and should not, pursue happiness as an end in "Happiness Is Bullshit" and "Happiness Is Bullshit Revisited." I've also written a bit about meditation and buddhism, and how my personal experience with it informed my skepticism about the pursuit of happiness, in my post "No Self, No Politics." Sorry to plug all my shit, but it's relevant to your point that this is a bigger topic, which I very much agree with. I never intend for any of my posts to be the last word on anything, which is why I end them all with "thanks for reading my bullshit." So, again, thanks for reading my bullshit.
Thanks for the response, I'll definitely be checking those posts out and maybe writing an article of my own to synthesize/comment. I'm glad we agree this is the beginning of a complex conversation.
I think I disagree, at the moment, that lasting fulfillment can't be achieved via introspective techniques because A) I see "lasting fulfillment" as a tangible state of existence that does not rely on the sort of achievement milestones outlined in the article, and is not somehow mystical/out of reach B) I've heard anecdotes suggesting otherwise from people I trust - but obviously this isn't conclusive data C) I think we have barely scratched the surface in terms of our understanding here.
But I am excited to see if your writing causes me to update!
One thing I find interesting here is that achieving your goals and gaining status/power brings both practical and psychological challenges. There's the psychological issue of always setting what you have as the baseline and wanting slightly more, which may be irrational, but there's also legitimate real world problems that come with moving up the hierarchy.
A relatable example for me is climbing the corporate ladder. As you move up the company pays you more and therefore expects more of you. There's far more pressure and stress when you are high up in the company. You also tend to be responsible for more people besides just yourself. Then let's say you parlay your impressive Regional Director of Entering Numbers Into Spreadsheets role into a landing a hot girlfriend. Now you have to worry about making her happy and whether she really likes you. You also have to keep an eye on other men who might try to steal her.
While we all want to climb the ladder, sometimes doing so only makes life harder.
I agree with the part about this being ironically comforting. I think there are two reasons for this. First, it lowers my expectations. Second, it makes me realize everyone else is struggling just like I am. If (per the 2nd to last paragraph) life is stressful, mediocre, and unsatisfying, maybe I can accept that and make the most of it.
I remember a line from The Moral Animal: "We didn't evolve to be happy". Keeping that in mind has cleared up a lot of confusion for me.
Cleared up a lot of confusion for me too: https://www.everythingisbullshit.blog/p/happiness-is-bullshit
There is something deeply satisfying being unsatisfied. Maybe I'm a bit strange, but figuring out how something in the world works at a deep, technical level is pleasing to me. There is a pleasure in finding things out. It's not a chore, it's usually not for anyone else, and it's always exciting. That I keep exploring is probably a trick of my mammalian mind where the play instinct - and its dopamine hit - didn't shut off like it does for most adults. I got lucky, I guess. I'm never bored and life is fun. The minute I know everything, I'll be uninterested in living!
Good job pointing out that suffering is caused by desire and the way to end suffering is to stop desiring…which is impossible. Contrary to what the Buddha said, there is no way out because, eight fold path or not, the desire to end desire is desire. And, no matter how much we got, we want more, more, more. I spent half of my life seeking enlightenment because I thought enlightenment was arriving at a state of bliss…non-attachment…”heaven on Earth”…but, no matter how hard I tried, enlightenment stayed just out of reach…Van Morrison (the singer) came to my rescue. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=lyrics+to+van+morrison+song+enlightehment&t=ipad&ia=web&iax=lyrics
I wonder if we can be satisfied with being perpetually unsatisfied
I think we can accept it and be at peace with it. I’d like to think I am but maybe I’m full of it.
Do we have a choice?
This actually made me LOL. Thank you for the perspective. Much love!
The problem as a species is that satisfaction leads to ruin, we'd stop inventing stuff, striving and evolving. I think it's a kind of comfort to know that it's all for something so we can continue or at least our genes can.
All so true and, yes, weirdly comforting. Great piece.