The secret to everlasting joy.
(Part I: The problem)
You're a bartender.
You did a pretty good job on your shift today. Someone recognizes your efforts and they slip you a $200 dollar tip.
Wow, thank you kind stranger.
You think about it the rest of the day. You think about how awesome and lucky you are. Your brain is swimming with the spike of happy-feel-good brain chemicals.
You do another shift the next night. Though the patrons are different, someone slips you a $200 dollar tip again.
Is this a joke? Where are the cameras? You got me ha ha. Before you can ask, they slip back into the rest of the crowd.
You scan the crowd but you don't see anything amiss. Just another night of people mingling and drinking. The next night, it happens again.
Maybe you have an admirer? As long as they keep on slipping you these benjies, you decide to let a good thing be.
A few days turns into weeks. Weeks turn into months. Without fail, someone slips you $200 dollars. Your head is dizzy with disbelief. You look forward to this damn job every day.
A year passes by and this influx of cash has become a regular thing you come to expect. You see the flash of the two 100 dollar bills on the counter. You quietly pocket it without much fanfare. Not a word is said. The patron always disappears into the crowd. At this point, the money might as well even just be two dollars. You don't really register it anymore. It's just something that happens. Just another part of the backdrop of life like everything else.
Your brain isn't swimming in the same happy juice anymore. And just like that, the extraordinary becomes ordinary. Your brain has moved on. It's looking for the next hit.
It doesn't just have to be money thought right? It can be that new suit you wear to work, that new car you bought or perhaps even that new house you moved into. It is a simple fact of life that you get used to things, no matter how awesome nor life-changing.
What is going on?
This phenomenon is known as the Hedonic Treadmill.
Just like this poor cat, the moment you arrive at your destination, the treadmill turns on and pushes you back to where you were.
You convince yourself that buying this plasma TV with the gaming console is different. Falling in love with this man or woman is different. You inherit one hundred million dollars. You never wipe your butthole ever again because you have a guy that does it for you now. How can your life not be better?
But right on cue, the treadmill hums to life and the gears start churning. Days turns to weeks turns to years. No matter how awesome or exciting your life becomes, like a fundamental law, your mental state and capacity for joy reverts back to the average of how you feel day-to-day.
Is happiness and joy then a futile exercise? Why do things that were exciting sometimes get stale? Why does it takes more and more of a drug to get the same high?
The simple answer is because your brain is an adapting machine. It is evolutionarily advantageous to be able to quickly adapting to the extremes of your environment and function appropriately.
In your brain is a reward center. In this center, neurons are exchanging little packets of chemicals. One of these chemicals is called dopamine, the "happy brain chemical."
When someone gives you that 200 dollar bill initially, an influx of dopamine flows through your reward center. Like a baseball glove, receptors on the ends of neurons exist to receive these little chemicals, continuing the cascade of signaling in the brain that is in totality, processed and interpreted as joy.
You would think that by continually stimulating the reward system, you would live a life of continual bliss and enjoyment but unfortunately, the receptors in our brains adapt to this persistent saturation and bombardment.
Someone giving you 200 dollars every day? Your brain is suddenly faced with more dopamine than it knows what to do with. Give it enough time and adaptive biochemical changes start to occur that actually decrease the amount of receptors available to receive these incoming dopamine reward signals.
It's like this. No matter how loudly you scream, no one will hear you if everybody around you is dead... I mean deaf. Ah whatever, you get the idea.
All that increased dopamine from all your new fancy cars will simply sit uselessly inert because there are no receptors for these little molecules to plug into. And so, they sit there until they are cleared away and broken down by an army of metabolic and digestive proteins.
While it's inherently troubling to experience this phenomenon in real life and in real-time (eg. the beauty and shininess of that new car smell fading a few months in), what is even more troubling is resulting numbing of your ability to experience joy even in more simple terms.
Once you're desensitized to getting 200 dollars tips, a 20 dollar tip almost feels like an insult. "WTF? Just 20?" The pang of disappointment and saltiness you feel when your expectations are not met is the symptom of withdrawal from that hedonic treadmill.
That's how crazy it gets. The little squirt of dopamine that comes with this small tip doesn't even register anymore. Compared to the hose of happy juice your brain has become adapted to, it's but a drop in the bucket.
Despite the obvious reason why 200 dollars are better than 20 dollars, I actually envy the person whose brain has not yet become accustomed to the 200. The joy they can still get from receiving a 20 dollar tip is an experience that has now been possibly forever lost to the other.
If you are homeless and used to sleeping on the streets, staying in a roach-infested one-star motel with an actual bed would actually bring tears of joy to your eyes. Sir Bob on the other hand, who's used to 5-star hotels, would probably rather eat his own top hat and monocle than be seen even a few feet near a 3-star Holiday Inn.
The obvious solution is to try to strive for both worlds. To be both the person who gets 200 dollar tips but at the same time, still retain the ability to enjoy 20s.
Okay I hear you, but I'm just fine you say. No one is giving me 200 dollar tips every day you crazy wacko. My brain would be buzzing happily if someone gave me 20 bucks.
Okay fair enough, but chances are good you are may still be an ungrateful asshole. Or at the very least, not grateful as you could be. (I should probably not make it a habit to insult my readers... sorry reader!) I may not be too far off to say the majority of your thoughts focus more on what you don't have rather than what you do have. Whether or not you are actually an asshole, I'm not privy to say.
And that makes sense since most of our goals are different variations of transforming our material lives for the better. You focus on what you don't have so you can go and strive for that.
But if your other goal (which I will argue may be just as important if not more than the first) is to maximize the joy you have in life, you will need to focus your thoughts more on what you already have.
In other words, you need to learn to be more grateful and focus on the 20 dollar bills coming your way.
Lifestyle inflation is a real thing. It plagues our checkbooks and ravages our motivation. Chasing a bigger car, a bigger house or a bigger boat can feel good, but is ultimately unsustainable. Your brain is working against you. The treadmill keeps on turning.
It's going to get harder and harder to get that bigger boat. They only make yachts in extra large and jumbo king size large. If you're going to have to own and charter a Royal Caribbean cruise-liner all for yourself to be able to generate that extra amount of dopamine to hit that one remaining receptor you have left in your brain, you are setting yourself up for a world of hurt.
My philosophy in life is always to minimize the amount of conditions you need for happiness. If your happiness is conditional on
making a million dollars
having a large house
marrying the perfect person
having three kids
having a dog that talks to you
having a fan club
and having an asteroid named after you
… you're just setting yourself up for failure.
Alternatively, if your happiness is conditional on things you yourself can definitely control or better yet, already have, then you've already made it! Life achievement unlocked. Everlasting joy awaits you.
How do you get there? It all comes down to the brain once again. You need to change and move things at the molecular level.
Number one.
If you are running low on receptors, you need to first increase the number of receptors that are there.
Number two.
Once you've maximized the number of receptors available, you want to maximize your ability to feed those receptors with dopamine on command. In other words, you want the flow of dopamine to always be accessible and not conditional on factors outside of your control.
Number three.
You want to be able to titrate this flow so that it is controlled and not excessive to the point where adaptive effects occur. You'll know that this is occurring when you need more and more dopamine to produce the same sense of joy or pleasure.
In other words, you need to start training your brain to be in this perfectly balanced state of mind.
Lucky for you, I’m about to show you how. Stay tuned for part deux coming to a screen near you!