Why Doesn’t It Feel Like Enough?
I have grown up in a pretty average household. Not deprived or rich, just enough. Times have changed, and most of the things I used to dream of having are already in my life. So why don’t I feel satisfied enough yet? Why do I still reach for another milestone? A new phone, a better college, a different opportunity. They all pleased me at some point. But never as much as I thought they would. The dream house I had just moved into 2 months ago is just an ordinary house now. The boy I thought I could die for is now just a teenage love to me. I move on from things as if they never mattered. Yet I reach for them as I need them more than anyone. My first love faded, too. From constant messages to replies hours later. Then, eventually, it just said, “seen at 2:14 am.” I was the one ghosting. At one point, all of it felt like everything. Now it feels like something that happened.
The Psychology of Moving On
Our brain resets happiness like a thermostat. It peaks and then returns to a baseline, like highs and lows. Even big wins or losses fade emotionally over time. Feelings fade. We move on from people, from situations, from things we once believed were unreachable, almost like stars. And then we move on from them, too. We feel normal again. Psychologists call it hedonic adaptation, also known as the hedonic treadmill. It is the process of returning to a stable level of happiness after positive or negative life changes. It suggests that while circumstances may temporarily raise or lower happiness, people generally adapt, maintaining an emotional “set point” over time.
This idea was introduced by Philip Brickman and Donald T. Campbell in 1971. They argued that human beings possess a psychological set point for happiness. Wealth, health or status provide only temporary pleasure before emotional adaptation occurs. The metaphor of a treadmill suggests that people have to run fast enough to earn rewards just to be equally happy. So, you keep running but stay in the same place, emotionally. Brickman tested this further in 1978 in a study titled “Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative?”
Participants who had won large lottery prizes were not significantly happier than paraplegic accident survivors to a large extent, supporting the theory that human beings stabilise their happiness after major life events. Individuals adjust their expectations and attention to new realities. It’s a self-regulating process that helps us preserve emotional stability. Happiness from achievements fades as they become the “new normal,” and suffering from setbacks lessens as coping mechanisms develop. Researchers believe this adaptation evolved for survival, making sure that humans stay motivated and responsive enough to change rather than chronically distressed. This explains why external changes such as an increase in income, better grades, or desired possessions rarely provide lasting happiness, linking this to the Easterlin paradox in happiness economics. It highlights the strength that allows recovery after loss. So basically, no matter how big the change in your life is, it won’t permanently change how you feel.
The Problem With Chasing Intensity
Human beings are built to adapt. Novelty sparks dopamine, and repetition kills intensity. This kind of pattern shows up in the relationships as well. At the beginning, everything feels amplified. Uncertainty, mystery, and curiosity – to understand how they think, act, and behave – every message matters, every interaction feels charged, and you replay a conversation and wait for a reply, and your attention narrows. This phase feels like proof. Like certainty. Like this is what it’s supposed to feel forever. It isn’t. All of it fades away. What you are experiencing is novelty.
Your brain is responding to something new and unpredictable; dopamine spikes, and it feels intense because it is. Then slowly, it changes. The messages become normal. The presence becomes familiar. The emotional intensity levels out. And most people panic here; they assume something is wrong. The feelings are fading, or the connection is weakening. The intensity drops because your brain has adjusted. Not because the person has lost value. Some would argue this is just losing interest, and sometimes it’s true, but not always.
There’s a difference between boredom and stability. Early love is stimulation, but later love is structure. It is quieter and more stable, and if you keep chasing the loud phase, you stay stuck on the treadmill. Always starting and never staying. Now, the world we live in. It speeds everything up. You see better lives every minute on social media. Your expectations inflate faster than your reality. You cannot simply adapt to your life anymore. You are adapting while watching everyone else’s highlights. Every second of your life, you get influenced by people you see on the internet, your friends or even strangers. So when life improves, it doesn’t feel like enough. Because your baseline has already shifted.
Is It Possible to Break the Treadmill Completely?
From the moment we gain consciousness, we are placed into a system that makes us chase. The right career, the right person or when you get employed. The right moment. We tell ourselves that after graduation, after success or after stability, life will finally make sense. Then we will feel satisfied. But does life actually wait for “life” to happen? Because of hedonic adaptation, even the best moments lose their intensity over time. The idea of a perfect life does not exist. You will not wake up one day with nothing to worry about and nothing left to chase. You will have highs in life, and you will have lows, too. If excitement stayed forever, it would stop feeling like excitement. This is not a flaw; this is how life works. You cannot escape the treadmill. You can just stop expecting it to make you happy, and for that, you don’t get off the treadmill; you decide how fast you run.
The Temporary Nature of Dunya
This idea isn’t new. Long before psychology gave it a name, it was already being pointed out. In Islam, the concept of Dunya reflects something similar. “Dunya refers to the temporal, material world in which humans live before the afterlife.” The world feels intense, desirable and worth chasing. But that intensity does not last. It was never meant to. What feels like fulfilment fades into routine. What once felt like “enough” quietly becomes ordinary. And the chase begins again. This doesn’t mean the world is meaningless. It means it’s unstable as a source of lasting satisfaction. Some teachings associated with Prophet Muhammad consistently warn against becoming overly attached to temporary highs. Not because attachment is wrong, but because relying on it is unreliable. While psychology explains the mechanism, Islam has been warning about the outcome.
So What Actually Helps?
You can’t beat the system, but you can work with it. Instead of chasing intensity, start paying attention. Most people don’t enjoy things because life has got worse. They enjoy things less because they have stopped noticing them. They stopped being grateful for what they already have in life and just chase the next up high.
I believe that to escape the cycle, gratitude is the only thing that helps, but only when it’s specific. Not “I’m grateful for my life”, because that does not change anything; try going into depth. Ask yourself, what exactly felt good today? Even if it’s as small as a conversation. A quiet moment, or a good sleep after days of exhaustion, still matters. And you need to start recognising that it does. Next, slow down upgrades. Every time you jump to something better, you raise your baseline. You think you are improving your life. You are also making it harder to feel impressed.
Focus on meaning. Pleasure fades away; it always has. But things tied to effort, growth or purpose last longer. Not forever, but longer. Get out of the comparison loop. You are not just adapting to your life. You are adapting while watching thousands of better-looking versions of other lives. This will wreck your baselines. Stop thinking that the next thing will fix it. The next achievement. The next version of you. The next upgrade. Though for a moment it does, but then your brain does what it always does. It adjusts, it normalises and moves on. So the question is not why nothing feels like enough. The question is why you expect it to. Humans were never built to stay satisfied. They were built to keep wanting more. That sounds like a flaw. It’s not. It’s a system. But you can control a part of it. You can keep running to chase the next high, or you can stop for a second and notice what has already become invisible to you. Because most of what you once wanted is already in your life.
“He who is not contented with what he has would not be contented with what he would like to have.” — Seneca.