it upsets the fondest illusion of the human mind, which is that in the course of time everything may be made better and better. For it is the general opinion that were this not possible the life of man would lack all meaning and incentive. The only alternative to a life of constant progress is felt to be a mere existence, static and dead, so joyles

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The problem, though, is that once they fulfill a desire for something, they adapt to its presence in their life and as a result stop desiring it—or at any rate, don’t find it as desirable as they once did. They end up just as dissatisfied as they were before fulfilling the desire. One key to happiness, then, is to forestall the adaptation process:

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Furthermore, the growth of an acute sense of the past and the future gives us a correspondingly dim sense of the present. In other words, we seem to reach a point where the advantages of being conscious are outweighed by its disadvantages, where extreme sensitivity makes us unadaptable. Under these circumstances we feel in conflict with our own bod

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any attempt at a meaningful existence is undermined if your main focus is always on increasing your access to things – even if the “things” in question are wonderful experiences, deep relationships, and so forth, as opposed to sports cars and jewelery.

The most unsparingly pessimistic of philosophers, Arthur Schopenhauer, seems to have seen the emptiness of this sort of life as an unavoidable result of how human desire functions. We spend our days pursuing various accomplishments that we desire to achieve; and yet for any given accomplishment—attaining tenure at your university, say—it’s always t... See more