Why the Thirst Does Not End Even for a Billionaire

Introduction: Suppose the Copying Had Worked

How billionaires build assets, and how they think, are already well documented. What this article takes up is the place beyond that. When a person has successfully obtained a great deal of money, are they finally satisfied?

This is also a response to the toughest objection imitation can raise: whatever the reasoning, if you actually become wealthy, surely that settles it. That objection is met here head-on.

Here is the conclusion first. The feeling of not being satisfied does not arise because wealth is insufficient. It is supplied continuously by the mechanism that raises the standard automatically every time wealth is obtained.

The Moment You Obtain It, the Standard Escapes With It

Psychology has established an awkward property of human happiness: adaptation level, or the hedonic treadmill [Brickman & Campbell, 1971].

Our standard of satisfaction is continually readjusted in line with what we currently hold. Immediately after obtaining something new, joy does arise. But the joy does not last long. Before long the obtained state becomes “normal,” and the standard of satisfaction itself is lifted to meet it.

The level that was once a dream becomes the floor of everyday life, and from that floor a person looks up again at the next height. A revolving platform on which you run and run and stay in the same place. That is what the treadmill means.

There will be something you recognise. The pay rise waited for so long, the car finally bought, the new home — the elation of the moment of obtaining becomes part of the scenery within weeks. The promise that obtaining this will satisfy you escapes, standard and all, the moment it is obtained. Believing we were approaching the goal of satisfaction, we were pushing the goal itself forward with our own feet.

This lifting is not confined to money. Not long ago, a device that settled every errand in the palm of a hand was a dreamlike convenience. Now nobody is moved by its existence; it is taken for granted, and its failure to connect is an irritation. Yesterday’s luxury quietly becomes the floor of what is owed, and from that floor a person looks up at a new insufficiency.

What Happened to People Who Received a Sudden Fortune

The event that tests this promise most vividly is a large lottery win. If the quantity of money determined the quantity of satisfaction, a person who suddenly received an incomparable sum would spend the rest of life in incomparable happiness.

The well-known study by Brickman and colleagues examined the results of this “experiment” [Brickman et al., 1978]. The findings ran against most people’s intuition. The winners’ sense of happiness returned quietly, some time after the win, to a level not greatly different from that of people who had not won. The initial elation was real, but it did not persist; the win became the floor of a new ordinary life.

There was a further finding worth pausing on. The winners had come to feel the pleasures of small everyday events less than before. To a mind that has experienced a very large win, small happiness comes to look faint. Large money, rather than increasing the total of happiness, may have dulled the sensitivity with which happiness is felt.

Recent work points the same way. Kahneman and Deaton, examining large-scale data, found that income does lift one’s evaluation of life. But day-to-day emotional wellbeing — how comfortably today was spent — levels off above a certain point [Kahneman & Deaton, 2010].

What imitation promised was mostly the latter. The promise of a feeling: become wealthy and every day will be full. Yet felt happiness turned out to be the part money cannot keep buying.

▸ How the “common traits” themselves are manufactured is taken up in how the common traits of successful people get made.

The Mechanism Itself Is Not a Defect

One thing to add here. The working by which the standard of satisfaction catches up with what has been obtained is not a defect of human beings. If anything it is a wise mechanism, indispensable to living.

Without it, we would go on grieving everything we have ever lost at the same depth forever. That people struck by great misfortune eventually recover and regain ordinary life is precisely because this power of adaptation gently softens the standard of pain as well. Adaptation is a double-edged working: it thins joy, and in exchange it thins sorrow.

The problem does not lie in the mechanism. It lies with whatever promises, ignoring this wise mechanism, that becoming wealthier will keep satisfaction going indefinitely. Given a mind built to grow quietly accustomed to what it gains, a product promising unlimited satisfaction contradicts the construction of the mind from the outset.

Wealth Measured by Position Has No Terminus

The reason the thirst does not end lies not only inside us. Outside, another mechanism reproduces it. We never measure our own wealth in isolation [Festinger, 1954].

People sense their wealth not as an absolute quantity but as a position relative to those around them. Double an income while everyone else’s doubles too, and almost no sense of having become wealthier is available.

Here is the root of the endlessness. Climb one step and the view changes; people on higher steps, invisible until then, come into sight. The more you climb, the further up the comparison shifts. However far you climb, the sense that there is still someone above does not disappear. Easterlin’s paradox — that as a whole country grows wealthier, average happiness does not rise — is explained by this same relativity [Easterlin, 1974].

What deepens the thirst further is a feature of the present age. Once, the people we compared ourselves with were limited to neighbours and colleagues, living lives continuous with our own. Now, only the most radiant moments of the most successful people in the world flow past on the screen. As the comparison shifted from a reachable neighbour to the summit of the world, however wealthy a person becomes, the sensation of looking up cannot be escaped.

There may be a reply: then stop looking up and attend to what you already have. It is a piece of wisdom. But imitation, from its very starting point, was an activity that commanded looking up. “Take a successful person as your model” nails the gaze to someone above.

The More You Centre External Rewards, the Further Satisfaction Retreats

Psychology has gone a step further. There is evidence that the more strongly a person pursues externally granted rewards — wealth, status, fame — as the central goal of life, the lower their sense of fulfilment tends to run [Kasser & Ryan, 1993, 1996].

Why? One explanation is that external goals do not satisfy what the mind actually needs — the sense of choosing one’s own life, the sense of being deeply connected to someone, the sense that one is capable of something. External rewards are no substitute for these. So however far the outside is filled, the thirst inside remains untouched.

As a thirsty person is not relieved by drinking salt water, external reward was never the kind of water that reaches an inner thirst.

There is also the property of pulling a person away from that nourishment the harder they chase. Someone who has centred wealth and status postpones their own time and their relationships in order to get them. Once comparison becomes habit, the people around them look less like company than competitors to be overtaken. External goals not only fail to supply the mind’s nourishment; they thin the soil that produces it.

Conclusion: What to Suspend Is Not Desire but the Upward Promise

A careful distinction. This is not a claim that seeking money is a mistake. Getting out of a state short of food and shelter genuinely makes life easier. Wishing for stability, wanting a better environment — neither is denied.

What is in question is the upward promise: that becoming wealthier than you are now will make the present thirst disappear. And when the content of that promise — what kind of successful person to become — is also supplied from outside, it is borrowed twice over.

Letting go of the promise is not being robbed of a dream. While believing that becoming wealthy will satisfy you, a person lives the present life as “an incomplete state, before satisfaction.” Real life begins after wealth arrives — believing that, they postpone this moment, always.

Once the promise is doubted, a more honest question comes up for the first time: what, in truth, would actually quench this thirst?

The whole picture is gathered in why copying a millionaire mindset does not make you rich.

References

Academic papers and theory

• Brickman, P., & Campbell, D. T. “Hedonic Relativism and Planning the Good Society” in Adaptation-Level Theory (1971) Academic Press
• Brickman, P., Coates, D., & Janoff-Bulman, R. “Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36(8) (1978)
• Kahneman, D., & Deaton, A. “High Income Improves Evaluation of Life but Not Emotional Well-Being” PNAS, 107(38) (2010)
• Festinger, L. “A Theory of Social Comparison Processes” Human Relations, 7(2) (1954)
• Easterlin, R. A. “Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot? Some Empirical Evidence” (1974) Academic Press
• Kasser, T., & Ryan, R. M. “A Dark Side of the American Dream” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65(2) (1993)
• Kasser, T., & Ryan, R. M. “Further Examining the American Dream” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 22(3) (1996)