the hedonic treadmill

Robert Wright’s Why Buddhism Is True explains concepts at the heart of Buddhism through the lens of evolutionary psychology. One of his most consistent points is that:

natural selection didn’t design your mind to see the world clearly; it designed your mind to have perceptions and beliefs that would help take care of your genes.

And just as selection pressure has placed little value on the accuracy of how we see the world, it’s likewise placed no value on our happiness. Indeed, the capacity for contentment may have even put our evolutionary ancestors at a disadvantage if it made them less likely to seek additional food, power, and mates. This is the legacy we have inherited:

If you put these three principles of design together, you get a pretty plausible explanation of the human predicament as diagnosed by the Buddha. Yes, as he said, pleasure is fleeting, and, yes, this leaves us recurrently dissatisfied. And the reason is that pleasure is designed by natural selection to evaporate so that the ensuing dissatisfaction will get us to pursue more pleasure. Natural selection doesn’t “want” us to be happy, after all; it just “wants” us to be productive, in its narrow sense of productive. And the way to make us productive is to make the anticipation of pleasure very strong but the pleasure itself not very long-lasting.

This endless seeking of fleeting pleasure is called the hedonic treadmill, and it’s built into our biology. Wright explains an experiment in which researchers gave fruit juice to monkeys and measured how much dopamine their brains released. (To wildly oversimplify things, dopamine is a “feel good” chemical our brains release to reward us for certain behavior.) Then, researchers began turning a light on before giving the fruit juice so that the monkeys knew it was coming. What they found was that over time, the release of dopamine (and the resulting pleasure) was increasingly associated with the light coming on and less with the actual taste of fruit juice. The implication here is that the more of some pleasurable thing we get, the more we desire it, but the less enjoyable the thing itself becomes. This served our ancestors well in conditions of scarcity: if hunter-gatherers came across a rare abundance of food, the ones whose brains kept them less satisfied and thus eating longer would have out-survived the ones who consumed their usual, scarce amount.

The first of Buddhism‘s “Four Noble Truths” is often translated as “All life is suffering,” but the word for “suffering”, dukkha, might just as well be translated as “unsatisfactoriness”. “All life is suffering” doesn’t mean life is always painful, but more that by pursuing the satisfaction of our desires, we will never achieve it. The more we get, the more we want.