What Is It About the Human Condition That Means We Are Never Happy?

Jim Carrey knows what it feels like to get almost everything you ever wanted.

By the mid-1990s, the comedian had become one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, commanding $20 million a movie and enjoying the kind of fame and fortune most people can only imagine.

But reaching the top taught Carrey something unexpected.

“I wish everyone could get rich and famous and everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that that’s not the answer.”

It’s easy to dismiss that as something a millionaire would say. But psychology suggests Carrey was describing something surprisingly universal: getting what we want doesn’t necessarily make us happy for very long.

Psychologists call it “hedonic adaptation”: our tendency to become accustomed to changes in our circumstances, even positive ones.

The new car becomes simply the car. The hard-fought promotion becomes the job you complain about come Monday morning. Even achievements pursued for years can lose some of their shine surprisingly quickly.

That’s why it’s sometimes called the “hedonic treadmill”: we keep moving, but lasting satisfaction remains frustratingly beyond reach.

That persistent sense that we need something more — more success, more recognition, more reassurance about our worth — is part of the age-old mystery of the human condition: why are we intrinsically unsatisfied?

And understanding that mystery may matter far beyond whether we’re satisfied with our latest promotion.

WHY DOES UNDERSTANDING THE HUMAN CONDITION MATTER?

The question isn’t just philosophical. Understanding why we behave the way we do could have enormous consequences for how we live — and how we treat one another.

Historian and author Yuval Noah Harari argues that, for all humanity’s extraordinary knowledge about the world around us, we still need to better understand “ourselves, our minds and our desires”.

Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker goes further: “A robust understanding of human nature is a prerequisite to making the world a better place.”

And decades earlier, influential psychologist B.F. Skinner put the stakes even more starkly: “The major problems facing the world today can be solved only if we improve our understanding of human behavior.”

So there’s no shortage of agreement that understanding the human condition matters. What we don’t agree on is what actually explains it.

And there are some strikingly different answers.

WHAT ARE WE REALLY CHASING?

Social psychologist Mark Leary offers one explanation. His influential “sociometer theory” suggests that self-esteem evolved partly as an internal gauge of how much we are valued and accepted by others.

For our ancestors, belonging to the group could literally mean the difference between life and death. So perhaps it’s no surprise that rejection, criticism and feeling unimportant can still affect us so deeply today.

Harvard social scientist Arthur Brooks offers another evolutionary angle for our endless striving.

He argues that permanent satisfaction wasn’t particularly useful to our ancestors. The desire for more food, security and opportunity kept them striving and surviving — and that the instincts that kept them wanting haven’t disappeared simply because our circumstances have changed.

Brooks’ advice is simple: “The secret of satisfaction is to manage our wants.”

International charity Fix The World proposes another biological explanation of the human condition. It argues that beneath our search for validation lies a deeper insecurity about our worth.

According to its explanation, that insecurity arose millions of years ago when our species’ unique fully conscious mind emerged and began carrying out experiments in understanding our world. The problem, they maintain, is that our already established naturally selected, instinctive orientations to the world inevitably resisted these conscious mind experiments in self-management, treating them as if they were wrong, which left our conscious mind insecure about whether we were fundamentally good or bad — an insecurity we sought to compensate for through status, recognition and power.

In effect, our rigid instincts were intolerant of our conscious mind’s necessary search for knowledge, making us feel insecure and unworthy, hence our constant search for reinforcement and acceptance.

Fix The World argues that understanding this conflict removes the basis for the insecurity – our conscious mind was not doing something wrong, but undertaking a necessary process of experimentation and learning. With that insecurity resolved, the need to continually prove our worth can subside.

UNDERSTANDING THE TREADMILL

None of this means wanting things is bad. Ambition can be a wonderful force: it gets us out of bed in the morning, builds businesses, produces art, advances science and makes us attempt things that initially seem impossible.

The problem comes when we expect achievement to do something it was never capable of accomplishing: settle the question of our own worth.

Jim Carrey’s extraordinary career may have demonstrated something most of us never get the opportunity to test: getting everything you want doesn’t necessarily end the wanting.

Maybe that’s the real lesson behind the hedonic treadmill. The answer to our dissatisfaction may not be waiting at the top of the next mountain. It may lie in understanding why we keep climbing in the first place.