2022.02.08 如何减少需求

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HOW TO WANT LESS
The secret to satisfaction has nothing to do with achievement, money, or stuff.

By Arthur C. Brooks
Illustrations by Paul Spella
FEBRUARY 8, 2022
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Iglanced into my teenage daughter’s bedroom one spring afternoon last year, expecting to find her staring absentmindedly at the Zoom screen that passed for high school during the pandemic. Instead, she was laughing uproariously at a video she had found. I asked her what she was looking at. “It’s an old man dancing like a chicken and singing,” she told me.

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I came over to her laptop, not being above watching someone making an idiot of himself for 15 seconds of social-media fame. What I found instead was the septuagenarian rock star Mick Jagger, in a fairly recent concert, croaking out the Rolling Stones’ megahit “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”—a song that debuted on the charts when I was a year old—for probably the millionth time. An audience of tens of thousands of what looked to be mostly Baby Boomers and Gen Xers sang along rapturously.


“Is this serious?” she asked. “Do people your age actually like this?” I took umbrage, but had to admit it was a legitimate question. “Kind of,” I answered. It wasn’t just the music, or even the performance, I assured her. To my mind, the longevity of that particular song—No. 2 on Rolling Stone magazine’s original list of the “500 Greatest Songs of All Time”—has a lot to do with a deep truth it speaks.

As we wind our way through life, I explained, satisfaction—the joy from fulfillment of our wishes or expectations—is evanescent. No matter what we achieve, see, acquire, or do, it seems to slip from our grasp.

I was on a roll now. Satisfaction, I told my daughter, is the greatest paradox of human life. We crave it, we believe we can get it, we glimpse it and maybe even experience it for a brief moment, and then it vanishes. But we never give up on our quest to get and hold on to it. “I try, and I try, and I try, and I try,” Jagger sings. How? Through sex and consumerism, according to the song. By building a life that is ever more baroque, expensive, and laden with crap.

“You’ll see,” I told her.

My daughter’s mirth now utterly extinguished, she had the expression I imagine Jean-Paul Sartre’s daughter must have had every day. “So life is just a rat race, and we’re doomed to an existence of dissatisfaction?” she asked. “That sucks.”

“It does suck,” I said. “But we’re not doomed.” I told her we can beat this affliction if we work to truly understand it—and if we’re willing to make some difficult changes to the way we live.

Want to explore more about the science of happiness? Join Arthur C. Brooks and other experts May 1–3 at The Atlantic’s In Pursuit of Happiness event. Learn more about in-person and virtual registration here.

“Like what?” she asked, her eyes narrowing with the healthy suspicion that comes from being the child of a social scientist, and thus an unwitting participant in many behavioral experiments.

I paused. It was in fact a question to which I’d devoted a lot of my time over the previous few years—not just professionally but personally, and with sometimes uneven results.

Even the most successful people suffer from the dissatisfaction problem. I remember once seeing LeBron James—the world’s greatest basketball player—with a look of abject despair on his face after his Cleveland Cavaliers lost the NBA championship to the Golden State Warriors. All of the world’s wealth and accolades were like straw in that moment of loss.

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Abd al-Rahman III, the emir and caliph of Córdoba in 10th-century Spain, summed up a life of worldly success at about age 70: “I have now reigned above 50 years in victory or peace; beloved by my subjects, dreaded by my enemies, and respected by my allies. Riches and honors, power and pleasure, have waited on my call.”

And the payoff? “I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot,” he wrote. “They amount to 14.”

As an observer, I understand the problem. I write a column about human happiness for The Atlantic and teach classes on the subject at Harvard. I know that satisfaction is one of the core “macronutrients” of happiness (the other two being enjoyment and meaning), and that its slippery nature is one of the reasons happiness is often so elusive as well.

Listen: Arthur C. Brooks’s podcast, How to Build a Happy Life

Yet time and again, I have fallen into the trap of believing that success and its accompaniments would fulfill me. On my 40th birthday I made a bucket list of things I hoped to do or achieve. They were mainly accomplishments only a wonk could want: writing books and columns about serious subjects, teaching at a top school, traveling to give lectures and speeches, maybe even leading a university or think tank. Whether these were good and noble goals or not, they were my goals, and I imagined that if I hit them, I would be satisfied.

I found that list nine years ago, when I was 48, and realized that I had achieved every item on it. I had been a tenured professor, then the president of a think tank. I was giving frequent speeches, had written some books that had sold well, and was writing columns for The New York Times. But none of that had brought me the lasting joy I’d envisioned. Each accomplishment thrilled me for a day or a week—maybe a month, never more—and then I reached for the next rung on the ladder.

Getting off the treadmill is hard. It feels dangerous.
I’d devoted my life to climbing those rungs. I was still devoting my life to climbing—beavering away 60 to 80 hours a week to accomplish the next thing, all the while terrified of losing the last thing. The costs of that kind of existence are exceedingly obvious, but it was only when I looked back at my list that I genuinely began to question the benefits—and to think seriously about the path I was walking.

And what about you?

Your goals are probably very different from mine, and perhaps your lifestyle is too. But the trap is the same. Everyone has dreams, and they beckon with promises of sweet, lasting satisfaction if you achieve them. But dreams are liars. When they come true, it’s … fine, for a while. And then a new dream appears.

Mick jagger’s satisfaction dilemma—and ours—starts with a rudimentary formula: Satisfaction = getting what you want.

It’s so simple, and yet its power is deeply encoded within us. Give a 3-year-old the french fry she is reaching for and see her satisfied expression. But then, after a couple of seconds, watch the wanting return. And that’s the actual problem, isn’t it? The Stones’ song should really have been titled “(I Can’t Keep No) Satisfaction.” It’s almost as if our brains are programmed to prevent us from enjoying anything for very long.

In fact, they are. The term homeostasis was introduced in 1926 by a physiologist named Walter B. Cannon, who showed in his book The Wisdom of the Body that we have built-in mechanisms to regulate our temperature, as well as our levels of oxygen, water, salt, sugar, protein, fat, and calcium. But the concept applies much more broadly than that: To survive, all living systems tend to maintain stable conditions as best they can.

Watch: Jeff Goldberg and Arthur C. Brooks on the science of happiness

Homeostasis keeps us alive and healthy. But it also explains why drugs and alcohol work as they do, as opposed to how we wish they would. While that first dose of a new recreational substance might give you great pleasure, your previously naive brain quickly learns to sense an assault on its equilibrium and fights back by neutralizing the effect of the entering drug, making it impossible to get the first feeling back. As the Bucknell University neuroscientist Judith Grisel explains brilliantly in her book, Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction, addiction is in part a by-product of homeostasis: As the brain becomes used to continual drug-induced production of dopamine—the neurotransmitter of pleasure, which plays a large role in nearly all addictive behaviors—it steeply curtails ordinary production, making another hit necessary simply to feel normal.

The same set of principles works on our emotions. When you get an emotional shock—good or bad—your brain wants to re-equilibrate, making it hard to stay on the high or low for very long. This is especially true when it comes to positive emotions, for primordial reasons that we’ll get into shortly. It’s why, when you achieve conventional, acquisitive success, you can never get enough. If you base your sense of self-worth on success—money, power, prestige—you will run from victory to victory, initially to keep feeling good, and then to avoid feeling awful.

The unending race against the headwinds of homeostasis has a name: the “hedonic treadmill.” No matter how fast we run, we never arrive. “At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his 1841 essay, “Self-Reliance.” “I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.”

Read: Arthur C. Brooks’s articles on how to build a life

Scholars argue over whether our happiness has an immutable set point, or if it might move around a little over the course of our life due to general circumstances. But no one has ever found that immediate bliss from a major victory or achievement will endure. As for money, more of it helps up to a point—it can buy things and services that relieve the problems of poverty, which are sources of unhappiness. But forever chasing money as a source of enduring satisfaction simply does not work. “The nature of [adaptation] condemns men to live on a hedonic treadmill,” the psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald T. Campbell wrote in 1971, “to seek new levels of stimulation merely to maintain old levels of subjective pleasure, to never achieve any kind of permanent happiness or satisfaction.”

a flat, black and yellow happy face leans against a stick with a rope tied to it to make a trap
Yet even if you recognize all this, getting off the treadmill is hard. It feels dangerous. Our urge for more is quite powerful, but stronger still is our resistance to less. That’s one of the insights that earned Princeton’s Daniel Kahneman the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics, for work he did with the late Stanford psychologist Amos Tversky.

So you try and you try, but you make no lasting progress toward your goal. You find yourself running simply to avoid being thrown off the back of the treadmill. The wealthy keep accumulating far beyond anything they could possibly spend, and sometimes more than they want to bequeath to their children. They hope that at some point they will feel happy, their lives complete, and are terrified of what will happen if they stop running. As the great 19th-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said, “Wealth is like sea-water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become; and the same is true of fame.”

According to evolutionary psychology, our tendency to strive for more is perfectly understandable. Throughout most of human history, starvation loomed closer than it does, for the most part, today. A “rich” caveman had a few extra animal skins and arrowheads, and maybe a few piles of seeds and dried fish to spare. With this plenty, he might survive a bad winter.

Our troglodyte ancestors didn’t just want to make it through the winter, though; they had bigger ambitions. They wanted to find allies and mates too, with the goal (whether conscious or not) of passing on their genes. And what would make that possible? Among other things, the accumulation of animal skins, demonstrating greater competence, prowess, and attractiveness than the hominid in the next cave over.

Surprisingly little has changed since then. Scholars have shown that our acquisitive tendencies persist amid plenty and regularly exceed our needs. This owes to our vestigial urges—software that still exists in our brains from ancient times.

From the June 2009 issue: What makes us happy?

Competing with rivals for mates helps explain our weird fixation on social comparison. When we think about satisfaction from success (or possessions or fitness or good looks), there’s another element to consider: Success is relative. Satisfaction requires not just that you continuously run in place on your own hedonic treadmill, but that you run slightly faster than other people are running on theirs. This is why people with hundreds of millions of dollars can feel like failures if their friends are billionaires, and why famous Hollywood actors can be despondent that others are even more famous.

At some level, we all know that social comparison is ridiculous and harmful, and extensive research confirms this: “Keeping up with the Joneses” is associated with anxiety and even depression. In a series of experiments that required subjects to solve puzzles, for instance, the unhappiest people were consistently those paying the most attention to how they performed relative to other subjects. The small rush of pleasure we get from doing better than some can easily be swallowed up by the unhappiness from doing worse than others. But the urge to have more than others, to be more than others, tugs at us relentlessly.

We live in a time when we are regularly counseled to get back to nature, to our long-ago past—in our diets, our sense of communal obligation, and more. But if our goal is happiness that endures, following our natural urges does not help us, in the main. That is Mother Nature’s cruel hoax. Happiness doesn’t help propagate the species, so nature doesn’t select for it. If you conflate intergenerational survival with happiness, that’s your problem, not nature’s.

In fact, our natural state is dissatisfaction, punctuated by brief moments of satisfaction. You might not like the hedonic treadmill, but Mother Nature thinks it’s pretty great. She likes watching you strive to achieve an elusive goal, because strivers get the goods—even if they don’t enjoy them for long. More mates, better mates, better chances of survival for our children—these ancient mandates are responsible for much of the code that runs incessantly in the deep recesses of our brains. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve found your soul mate and would never stray; the algorithms designed to get us more mates (or allow us to make an upgrade) continue whirring, which is why you still want to be attractive to strangers. Neurobiological instinct—which we experience as dissatisfaction—is what drives us forward.

There are many other, related examples of evolved tendencies that militate against enduring happiness—for example, the tendency toward jealous misery in our romantic relationships. (Mother Nature, while inviting us to cheat, would also like us to be highly alert to the possibility that our partner might be cheating. Studies find that men, who are at risk of spending resources to unwittingly raise children who aren’t theirs, fixate most on sexual infidelity; women, who are at risk that their mate will become attached to—and thus divert resources to—another female and her children, respond most negatively to emotional infidelity.)

The insatiable goals to acquire more, succeed conspicuously, and be as attractive as possible lead us to objectify one another, and even ourselves. When people see themselves as little more than their attractive bodies, jobs, or bank accounts, it brings great suffering. Studies show that self-objectification is associated with a sense of invisibility and lack of autonomy, and physical self-objectification has a direct relationship with eating disorders and depression in women. Professional self-objectification is a tyranny every bit as nasty. You become a heartless taskmaster to yourself, seeing yourself as nothing more than Homo economicus. Love and fun are sacrificed for another day of work, in search of a positive internal answer to the question Am I successful yet? We become cardboard cutouts of real people.

From the January/February 2003 issue: Does money buy happiness?

It makes no sense in modern life to use our energies to have five cars, five bathrooms, or even five pairs of sneakers, but we just … want them. Neuroscientists have looked into this. Dopamine is excreted in response to thoughts about buying new things, winning money, acquiring more power or fame, having new sexual partners. The brain evolved to reward us for the behaviors that kept us alive and made us more likely to pass on our DNA. This may be an anachronism, at least to some degree, but it is a fact of our lives nonetheless.

For the faithful, satisfaction has another name: heaven.

Many religions promise heaven to believers. We rarely think carefully about what that entails—harps and clouds?—but the Roman Catholic Church is helpfully specific about it. Heaven grants us the “beatific vision”: God showing himself to us face-to-face, making us know his true nature—and thereby granting us the “fulfillment of the deepest human longings, the state of supreme, definitive happiness.” Or, as the English mystic Juliana of Norwich wrote of heaven, “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” In other words, heaven is pure satisfaction that lasts.

Why can’t we seem to be so well on Earth? The 13th-century Catholic priest Thomas Aquinas answers this in his magisterial Summa Theologiae. He defines the satisfaction problem as one of misbegotten goals: idols that distract us from God, the true source of our bliss. Even if you are not a religious believer, Thomas’s list of the goals that beguile but never satisfy rings true. They include money, power, pleasure, and honor. As Thomas puts it in the case of money,

In the desire for wealth and for whatsoever temporal goods … when we already possess them, we despise them, and seek others … The reason of this is that we realize more their insufficiency when we possess them: and this very fact shows that they are imperfect, and the sovereign good does not consist therein.
In other words, (It don’t bring no) satisfaction. Thomas Aquinas might not fill a stadium with Boomers, but he describes the Jaggerian Dissatisfaction Matrix far better than old Mick himself.

The satisfaction problem, then, is our natural attachment to these inadequate things. If this sounds a bit Buddhist to you, it should. It is very similar to the Buddha’s first “Noble Truth”: that life is suffering—duhkha in Sanskrit, also translated as “dissatisfaction”—and that the cause of this suffering is craving, desire, and attachment to worldly things. Thomas Aquinas and the Buddha (and Jagger, for that matter) were saying the same thing.

Note that neither Thomas nor the Buddha argued that worldly rewards are inherently evil. In fact, they can be used for great good. Money is crucial for a functioning society and supporting your family; power can be wielded to lift others up; pleasure leavens life; and honor can attract attention to the sources of moral elevation. But as attachments—as ends instead of means—the problem is simple: They cannot satisfy.

And this leads us back to my daughter’s question: Are we doomed, in this earthly life at least, to an existence of continual dissatisfaction?

If you ever visit Taiwan, the one attraction you must not miss is the National Palace Museum. Arguably the greatest collection of Chinese art and artifacts in the world, the museum contains roughly 700,000 items whose dates range from more than 8,000 years ago, during the Neolithic period, all the way to the modern era.

If there is one problem with the museum, it is precisely its abundance. No one can take in more than a fraction of it in a single visit. That’s why, one afternoon a few years ago, I hired a guide to show me a few famous pieces and explain their significance. Little did I know that, with one remark, my guide was about to help me crack my own satisfaction puzzle.

Looking at a massive jade carving of the Buddha from the Qing dynasty, my guide offhandedly remarked that this was a good illustration of how the Eastern view of art differs from the Western view. “How so?” I asked.

He answered my question with a question: “What do you think of when I ask you to imagine a work of art yet to be started?”

“An empty canvas, I guess,” I responded.

“Right,” he said. Many Westerners tend to see art as being created from nothing. But there’s another way to view it: “The art already exists,” and the job of artists is simply to reveal it. He told me that his image of art yet to be started was an uncarved block of jade, like what ultimately became the Buddha in front of us. The art is not visible until the artist takes away the stone that is not part of the sculpture, but it is already there nonetheless. Not all artistic philosophy fits this East-versus-West distinction; Michelangelo once said, “The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work … I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.” But I took my guide’s point in—as it were—broad strokes.

Art mirrors life, and therein lies a potential solution to the satisfaction dilemma.

As we grow older in the West, we generally think we should have a lot to show for our lives—a lot of trophies. According to numerous Eastern philosophies, this is backwards. As we age, we shouldn’t accumulate more to represent ourselves, but rather strip things away to find our true selves—and thus, to find happiness and peace. The Tao Te Ching, a Chinese text compiled around the fourth century B.C. that is the foundation of Taoism, makes this point with elegance:

People would be content
with their simple, everyday lives,
in harmony, and free of desire.

When there is no desire,
all things are at peace.

In my early 50s, when I visited the National Palace Museum, my life was jammed with possessions, accomplishments, relationships, opinions, and commitments. It took an offhand remark from a museum guide to help me absorb the teachings of Thomas Aquinas and the Buddha—or for that matter, modern social science—and commit to stop trying to add more and more, but instead start taking things away.

In truth, our formula, Satisfaction = getting what you want, leaves out one key component. To be more accurate, it should be:

Satisfaction = what you have ÷ what you want
All of our evolutionary and biological imperatives focus us on increasing the numerator—our haves. But the more significant action is in the denominator—our wants. The modern world is made up of clever ways to make our wants explode without us realizing it. Even the Dalai Lama, arguably the world’s most enlightened man, admits to it. “Sometimes I visit supermarkets,” he says in The Art of Happiness. “I really love to see supermarkets, because I can see so many beautiful things. So, when I look at all these different articles, I develop a feeling of desire, and my initial impulse might be, ‘Oh, I want this; I want that.’ ”

The secret to satisfaction is not to increase our haves—that will never work (or at least, it will never last). That is the treadmill formula, not the satisfaction formula. The secret is to manage our wants. By managing what we want instead of what we have, we give ourselves a chance to lead more satisfied lives.

a yellow happy face forms the top round part of a keyhole glowing on a green background
These were the ideas I related to my daughter that spring afternoon. She listened with interest, then made a brief rejoinder. “So what you’re saying is that the secret to satisfaction is simple,” she said. “I just have to go against several million years of evolutionary biology,” plus the entirety of modern culture, “and I’ll be all set.”

Obviously, I couldn’t leave the topic there. One of the reasons people often don’t trust academics like me is that we always talk about problems, but rarely provide realistic solutions. Even worse, we often ignore our own wisdom. I’ve known plenty of bankrupt economists and miserable happiness experts.

But she knew this wasn’t all just theory to me. We’d moved two years before, from Bethesda, Maryland, a power suburb of Washington, D.C., to a small town outside Boston. I’d resigned from a chief-executive position to teach and write, trading away virtually all day-to-day contact with political and business elites—and was quickly forgotten by most. I hadn’t hidden the reason for the move, and my family was fully behind it: I was taking my own advice, published in these pages three years ago, to find a new kind of success and a deeper kind of happiness. That project was not about satisfaction alone; it also involved recognizing that, professionally, most people peak earlier in life than they expect to, and decline faster—and that to resist this is counterproductive and ultimately futile. But it entailed getting off the hedonic treadmill—swapping evanescent professional thrills for more enduring fulfillment that could last well into the back half of my life. When life’s rhythms involuntarily slowed further during the pandemic, I had all the more time to think about making that transition work.

So I did have some practical suggestions for my daughter on how to beat the dissatisfaction curse—three habits I have developed for my own life that are grounded in philosophy and social-science research.

I. GO FROM PRINCE TO SAGE
One scholar who did propose real solutions to life’s problems was Thomas Aquinas. He didn’t just explain the satisfaction conundrum; he offered an answer and lived it himself.

The youngest son of Count Landulf of Aquino, Thomas was born around 1225 in his family’s castle in central Italy. He was sent to be educated at the first Benedictine monastery, at Montecassino. As the youngest son of a noble family, he was expected to one day become the abbot of the monastery, a post of enormous social prestige.

But Thomas had no interest in this worldly glory. Around the age of 19, he joined the recently created Dominican order, a group of friars dedicated to poverty and itinerant preaching. This, he felt, was his true identity. The life of wealth and privilege needed to be chipped away to find it.

Thomas pursued the work of a scholar and teacher, producing dense philosophical treatises that are still profoundly influential today. He is known as the greatest philosopher of his age. But this legacy was never his aim. On the contrary, he considered his work to be nothing more than an expression of his love for God and a desire to help his fellow human beings.

The Buddha cracked the satisfaction code in a strikingly similar way. He was born a prince named Siddhartha Gautama around the sixth century B.C., in the region that is now on the border between Nepal and India. After his mother died just days after his birth, his father vowed to protect the infant prince from life’s miseries, and thus kept him shut inside the palace, where all his earthly needs and desires would be met.

Siddhartha never ventured beyond that palace until he was 29 years old, when, overcome by curiosity, he asked a charioteer to show him the outside world. On his tour, he encountered an old man, another man wracked with disease, and a decaying corpse. He was troubled by these sights, which his charioteer told him were inevitable in our mortal lives. He then encountered an ascetic who, through renunciation of worldly goods, had achieved not a release from disease and death but, rather, a release from the fear of them.

Siddhartha left his kingdom soon after, and renounced all his attachments. Sitting under the Bodhi tree, he became the Buddha. He spent the rest of his life sharing his wisdom with a growing flock that today numbers more than half a billion people.

I am no Saint Thomas and no Lord Buddha. And my current post at Harvard hardly qualifies as a repudiation of the world’s rewards. Even so, I’ve tried to take a lesson from their lives—that satisfaction lies not in attaining high status and holding on to it for dear life, but in helping other people—including by sharing whatever knowledge and wisdom I’ve acquired. That’s one reason I stepped down from a job in the public eye to concentrate on writing and teaching. If I take another leadership role in my career, my focus will be on what I want to share with others, not what I want to accumulate for myself.

II. MAKE A REVERSE BUCKET LIST
One practical way to whittle down our wants is to simply look at the counsel we get that is turning us into dissatisfied Homo economicus, and then do the opposite. For example, many self-help guides suggest making a bucket list on your birthday, so as to reinforce your worldly aspirations. Making a list of the things you want is temporarily satisfying, because it stimulates dopamine. But it creates attachments, which in turn create dissatisfaction as they grow.

I’ve instead begun to compile a “reverse bucket list,” to make the ideas in this essay workable in my life. Each year on my birthday, I list my wants and attachments—the stuff that fits under Thomas Aquinas’s categories of money, power, pleasure, and honor. I try to be completely honest. I don’t list stuff I would actually hate and never choose, like a sailboat or a vacation house. Rather, I go to my weaknesses, most of which—I’m embarrassed to admit—involve the admiration of others for my work.

Then I imagine myself in five years. I am happy and at peace, living a life of purpose and meaning. I make another list of the forces that would bring me this happiness: my faith, my family, my friendships, the work I am doing that is inherently satisfying and meaningful and that serves others.

Inevitably, these sources of happiness are “intrinsic”—they come from within and revolve around love, relationships, and deep purpose. They have little to do with the admiration of strangers. I contrast them with the things on the first list, which are generally “extrinsic”—the outside rewards associated with Thomas’s list of idols. Most research has shown that intrinsic rewards lead to far more enduring happiness than extrinsic rewards.

It’s not just about having less stuff to weigh you down.
I consider how extrinsic things compete with the intrinsic underpinnings of my happiness for time, attention, and resources. I imagine myself sacrificing my relationships for the admiration of strangers, and the result down the line in my life. With this in mind, I confront the bucket list. I reflect on each item, telling myself that while a particular desire is not evil, it won’t bring me the happiness and peace I seek. Finally, I go back to the list of things that will bring me real happiness. I commit to pursuing these things.

Given my itch for admiration, I have made a point of trying to pay less attention to how others perceive me, by turning away these thoughts when they emerge. I have let many relationships go that were really only about professional advancement. I work somewhat less than I did in years past. It takes conscious effort to avoid backsliding—the treadmill beckons often, and little spritzes of dopamine tempt me to return to my old ways. But my changes in behavior have mostly been permanent, and I’ve been happier as a result.

I’m not arguing here that there’s anything wrong with visiting the exotic place you’ve always dreamed of seeing, or running a marathon, or otherwise pushing your capabilities to do or make something difficult, professionally or otherwise. Work that feels more like a mission provides purpose; travel can be inherently valuable and enjoyable; learning a skill or meeting a challenge can bring intrinsic satisfaction; meaningful activities pursued with friends or loved ones can deepen relationships. But ask yourself whether the attraction of your bucket-list items, be they professional or experiential, derives mostly from how much they will make others admire or envy you. These motivations will never lead to deep satisfaction.

III. GET SMALLER
Lately, there has been an explosion of books on minimalism, which all recommend downsizing your life to get happier—to chip away the detritus of your life. But it’s not just about having less stuff to weigh you down. We can, in fact, find immense fullness when we pay attention to smaller and smaller things. The Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh explains this in his book The Miracle of Mindfulness: “While washing the dishes one should only be washing the dishes, which means that while washing the dishes one should be completely aware of the fact that one is washing the dishes.” Why? If we are thinking about the past or future, “we are not alive during the time we are washing the dishes.”

For many years I had a beloved friend, someone a couple of decades my senior with whom I worked throughout my 20s. In his 40s, he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer, and given six months to live. By some miracle or another, he survived those six months, and then another six, and then almost three decades more.

He was never “cured,” however. His doctor told him the cancer was a wolf at the door, biding its time. Sooner or later the wolf would slip in, which it ultimately did a couple of years ago. But the three decades under this cloud were not a burden. On the contrary, they reminded him every day of the gift that was the current day, and thus, to look for his satisfactions not in audacious, multiyear life goals, but in tiny, everyday moments of beauty with his beloved wife and daughter.

Some years ago, a few close friends were at his home, eating and drinking out in his garden. It was dusk, and he asked us to gather around a plant with small, closed flowers. “Watch a flower,” he instructed. We did so, for about 10 minutes, in silence. All at once, the flowers popped open, which we learned that they did every evening. We gasped in amazement. It was a moment of intense satisfaction.

But here’s the thing I still can’t get over: Unlike most of the junk on my old bucket list, that satisfaction endured. That memory still brings me joy—more so than many of my life’s earthly “accomplishments”—not because it was the culmination of a large goal, but because it was an unexpected gift, a tiny miracle.

The prince will always skip the small satisfactions of life, forgoing a flower at dusk for money, power, or prestige. But the sage never makes this mistake, and I try not to either. Each day, I have an item on my to-do list that involves being truly present for an ordinary occurrence. A lot of this revolves around my religious practice as a Catholic, including daily Mass with my wife and meditative prayer. It also includes walks with no devices, listening only to the world outside. These are truly satisfying things.

My daughter went off to college a few months after our talk about the science of satisfaction. After the isolation and lockdowns of COVID-19, and the sad joke that was her senior year of high school, she made a run for the border, enrolling at a university in Spain. I am bereft. We do send each other several messages every day, though. They are almost never about work or school. Instead, we share small moments: a photo of a rainy street, a silly joke, the number of push-ups she just did.

I don’t know whether this is giving her a head start on freeing herself from the paradox of dissatisfaction, but it is like medicine for me. Each message is like the evening of the flower—a brief glimpse of the beatific vision of heaven, perhaps—bringing quiet satisfaction.

Each of us can ride the waves of attachments and urges, hoping futilely that someday, somehow, we will get and keep that satisfaction we crave. Or we can take a shot at free will and self-mastery. It’s a lifelong battle against our inner caveman. Often, he wins. But with determination and practice, we can find respite from that chronic dissatisfaction and experience the joy that is true human freedom.


This essay is adapted from Arthur C. Brooks’s new book, From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life. It appears in the March 2022 print edition with the headline “The Satisfaction Trap.”

When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Arthur C. Brooks is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, the William Henry Bloomberg Professor of the Practice of Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, and a professor of management practice at the Harvard Business School. He’s the host of the podcast series How to Build a Happy Life and the author of From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life.




如何减少需求
获得满足的秘诀与成就、金钱或东西没有关系。

作者：Arthur C. Brooks
插图：保罗-斯佩拉
2022年2月8日
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去年春天的一个下午，我瞥见我十几岁的女儿的卧室，以为会发现她心不在焉地盯着放大的屏幕，那是大流行期间的高中。相反，她正对着她找到的一个视频笑得前仰后合。我问她在看什么。"她告诉我："那是一个老人像鸡一样跳舞和唱歌。

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我走到她的笔记本电脑前，不忍心看别人为了15秒的社交媒体名声而出丑。我发现的是七十多岁的摇滚明星米克-贾格尔在最近的一场音乐会上，唱出了滚石乐队的大歌"（I Can't Get No）Satisfaction"--一首在我一岁时就在排行榜上亮相的歌曲--可能是第一百万次了。数以万计的观众，看起来大多是婴儿潮一代和X世代的人，他们兴高采烈地跟着唱起来。


"这是真的吗？"她问。"你这个年龄的人真的喜欢这个吗？" 我不以为然，但不得不承认这是个合理的问题。"有点吧，"我回答。我向她保证，这不仅仅是音乐，甚至是表演。在我看来，这首特殊的歌曲的长寿--在《滚石》杂志最初的 "有史以来最伟大的500首歌曲 "名单中排名第二--与它所表达的深刻真理有很大关系。

我解释说，当我们在生活中蜿蜒前行时，满足感--从实现我们的愿望或期望中获得的快乐--是短暂的。无论我们取得了什么，看到了什么，获得了什么，或者做了什么，它似乎都会从我们手中溜走。

我现在已经开始行动了。我告诉女儿，满足感是人类生活中最大的悖论。我们渴望它，我们相信我们可以得到它，我们瞥见它，甚至可能短暂地体验它，然后它就消失了。但我们从未放弃过对它的追求和坚持。"我努力，我努力，我努力，我努力，"贾格尔唱道。怎么试？根据这首歌，通过性和消费主义。通过建立一个更加巴洛克式的、昂贵的、充满了垃圾的生活。

"你会看到的，"我告诉她。

我女儿的笑声现在完全熄灭了，她的表情是我想象中让-保罗-萨特的女儿每天都会有的。"所以生活只是一场老鼠赛跑，我们注定要在不满意中生存？"她问。"那很糟糕。"

"确实很糟糕，"我说。"但我们不是注定的。" 我告诉她，如果我们努力去真正理解它--如果我们愿意对我们的生活方式做出一些困难的改变，我们就能战胜这种痛苦。

想探索更多关于幸福的科学吗？请在5月1日至3日参加《大西洋月刊》的 "追求幸福 "活动，与Arthur C. Brooks和其他专家一起探讨。在这里了解更多关于现场和虚拟注册的信息。

"像什么？"她问道，她的眼睛眯成了一条缝，因为她是一个社会科学家的孩子，因此是许多行为实验的不知情的参与者。

我停顿了一下。事实上，这是一个我在过去几年中投入大量时间的问题--不仅仅是职业上的，还有个人的，而且有时结果不平衡。

即使是最成功的人也有不满意的问题。我记得有一次看到勒布朗-詹姆斯--世界上最伟大的篮球运动员--在他的克利夫兰骑士队输给金州勇士队的NBA冠军后，脸上露出了绝望的表情。在那个失落的时刻，世界上所有的财富和荣誉都像是稻草。

推荐阅读

什么使我们快乐？
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一个面包师将一批面包面团形状的笑脸装进砖砌的烤箱。
工作中幸福的秘密
亚瑟-C-布鲁克斯
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PAUL BLOOM
10世纪西班牙科尔多瓦的埃米尔和哈里发阿卜杜勒-拉赫曼三世在大约70岁时总结了他的世俗成功生活："我现在已经在胜利或和平中统治了50多年；受到我的臣民的爱戴，受到我的敌人的畏惧，受到我的盟友的尊重。财富和荣誉，权力和快乐，都在等待我的召唤。"

那么回报呢？他写道："我勤奋地数着落在我身上的纯粹和真正的幸福的日子，"。"它们达到了14天。"

作为一个观察者，我理解这个问题。我为《大西洋月刊》写了一个关于人类幸福的专栏，并在哈佛大学教授关于这个主题的课程。我知道，满足感是幸福的核心 "营养素 "之一（另外两个是享受和意义），而且它的滑稽性也是幸福经常如此难以捉摸的原因之一。

请听。阿瑟-C-布鲁克斯的播客，《如何打造幸福生活》。

然而，我一次又一次地落入陷阱，相信成功和它的伴随物会满足我。在我40岁生日的时候，我列出了一份我希望能做的事情或实现的目标清单。它们主要是一个知识分子才会想要的成就：写关于严肃主题的书和专栏，在顶级学校教书，旅行演讲，甚至可能领导一所大学或智囊团。无论这些目标是否良好和高尚，它们都是我的目标，我想象如果我实现了这些目标，我就会感到满意。

九年前，当我48岁时，我发现了那张清单，并意识到我已经实现了上面的每一个项目。我曾经是一名终身教授，然后是一个智囊团的主席。我经常发表演讲，写了一些畅销的书，还在为《纽约时报》写专栏。但这些都没有给我带来我所设想的持久的快乐。每项成就都让我兴奋了一天或一周，也许是一个月，从来没有更多，然后我就伸手去拿梯子上的下一个阶梯。

走出跑步机是困难的。它感觉很危险。
我把我的生命献给了攀登这些梯级。我仍然在把我的生命投入到攀登中--每周花60到80个小时来完成下一件事，同时害怕失去最后一件事。这种生存方式的代价是显而易见的，但只有当我回头看我的清单时，我才真正开始质疑其好处，并认真思考我所走的路。

那么你呢？

你的目标可能与我非常不同，也许你的生活方式也是如此。但陷阱是一样的。每个人都有梦想，它们向你招手，承诺如果你实现它们，就会有甜蜜、持久的满足。但梦想是骗子。当它们成真时，它......很好，有一段时间。然后，一个新的梦想出现了。

米克-贾格尔的满意困境--也是我们的困境--始于一个基本的公式。满意=得到你想要的东西。

它是如此简单，但它的力量却深深地编码在我们体内。给一个3岁的孩子提供她想要的炸薯条，看看她满意的表情。但是，几秒钟之后，看她的渴望又回来了。这就是实际的问题，不是吗？斯通斯的歌真的应该被命名为"（我不能保持没有）满足感"。这几乎就像我们的大脑被设定为阻止我们长时间地享受任何东西。

事实上，它们就是这样。同态一词是由一位名叫沃尔特-B-坎农的生理学家在1926年提出的，他在《身体的智慧》一书中表明，我们有内在的机制来调节我们的温度，以及我们的氧气、水、盐、糖、蛋白质、脂肪和钙的含量。但这个概念的适用范围比这要广得多。为了生存，所有生物系统都倾向于尽可能地维持稳定的条件。

观看。杰夫-戈德堡和阿瑟-C-布鲁克斯谈幸福的科学

平衡状态使我们活着并保持健康。但它也解释了为什么毒品和酒精会像它们一样发挥作用，而不是我们希望的那样。虽然第一剂量的新娱乐物质可能会给你带来巨大的快乐，但你以前天真的大脑很快就会学会感觉到对其平衡的攻击，并通过中和进入的药物的效果进行反击，使你不可能再获得第一种感觉。正如巴克内尔大学的神经科学家朱迪思-格里塞尔（Judith Grisel）在她的书《永不满足》（Never Enough）中出色地解释的那样。成瘾的神经科学和经验》一书中，成瘾在某种程度上是平衡状态的一个副产品。当大脑习惯于持续产生药物诱导的多巴胺--快乐的神经递质，它在几乎所有的成瘾行为中都起着很大的作用--它陡然遏制了普通的生产，使得再吸一次就能感觉正常。

同样的一套原则也适用于我们的情绪。当你得到一个情绪上的冲击--好的或坏的--你的大脑想要重新平衡，使你很难在高点或低点停留很长时间。当涉及到积极情绪时，这一点尤其真实，因为我们很快就会了解到原始的原因。这就是为什么，当你取得传统的、获得性的成功时，你永远也得不到满足。如果你把你的自我价值感建立在成功上--金钱、权力、声望--你会从一个胜利跑到另一个胜利，最初是为了保持良好的感觉，然后是为了避免糟糕的感觉。

这种无休止的与同质化风的竞赛有一个名字："享乐型跑步机"。无论我们跑得多快，我们都不会到达。"在家里，我梦想在那不勒斯，在罗马，我可以沉醉于美丽，并失去我的悲伤，"拉尔夫-瓦尔多-爱默生在他1841年的文章《自力更生》中写道。"我收拾好行李，拥抱我的朋友，踏上了大海，最后在那不勒斯醒来，在我身边的是严酷的事实，悲伤的自己，不屈不挠，一模一样，我逃离了。"

阅读。阿瑟-C-布鲁克斯关于如何建立生活的文章

学者们争论的是，我们的幸福是否有一个不变的设定点，或者它是否可能在我们的生活过程中由于一般情况而发生一些变化。但没有人发现，从重大胜利或成就中获得的即时幸福感会持续下去。至于钱，更多的钱在一定程度上是有帮助的--它可以购买东西和服务，缓解贫穷的问题，这是不快乐的来源。但是，永远追逐金钱作为持久满足的来源是行不通的。心理学家菲利普-布里克曼和唐纳德-T-坎贝尔在1971年写道："[适应]的性质注定了人要生活在享乐的跑步机上，""寻求新的刺激水平，只是为了维持旧的主观快乐水平，永远无法实现任何形式的永久幸福或满足。"

一张扁平的、黑色和黄色的快乐脸庞靠在一根绑着绳子的棍子上，做一个陷阱
然而，即使你认识到这一切，离开跑步机也很难。它感觉很危险。我们对更多的冲动是相当强大的，但更强大的是我们对更少的抵抗。这是普林斯顿大学的丹尼尔-卡尼曼（Daniel Kahneman）获得2002年诺贝尔经济学奖的见解之一，他与已故斯坦福大学心理学家阿莫斯-特维斯基（Amos Tversky）共同完成了这项工作。

因此，你尝试了又尝试，但你没有朝着你的目标取得持久的进展。你发现自己跑步只是为了避免被从跑步机上甩下来。富人不断积累，远远超过他们可能的花费，有时甚至超过他们想留给孩子的东西。他们希望在某个时候他们会感到幸福，他们的生活是完整的，并且害怕如果他们停止跑步会发生什么。正如19世纪伟大的哲学家阿瑟-叔本华所说："财富就像海水，我们喝得越多，就越口渴；名声也是如此。"

根据进化心理学，我们争取更多的倾向是完全可以理解的。在人类历史的大部分时间里，饥饿的阴影比今天的大部分时间都更近。一个 "富有的 "穴居人有一些额外的兽皮和箭头，也许还有几堆种子和鱼干。有了这些丰富的东西，他可能会度过一个糟糕的冬天。

不过，我们的穴居人祖先并不只是想度过这个冬天；他们有更大的野心。他们也想找到盟友和伴侣，目的是（无论是否有意识地）传递他们的基因。那么是什么让这成为可能呢？除其他外，就是积累动物皮毛，显示出比隔壁洞穴中的人类更强的能力、才干和吸引力。

令人惊讶的是，自那时以来，几乎没有什么变化。学者们已经证明，我们的获取性倾向在富足中持续存在，并经常超过我们的需求。这要归功于我们残存的冲动--从远古时代就存在于我们大脑中的软件。

来自2009年6月号的文章。什么使我们快乐？

与对手争夺配偶有助于解释我们对社会比较的奇怪固定。当我们考虑从成功（或财产或健身或美貌）中获得满足时，还有一个因素需要考虑。成功是相对的。满足感不仅要求你在自己的享乐主义跑步机上不断地原地跑步，而且要求你比其他人在他们的跑步机上跑得稍快。这就是为什么拥有数亿美元的人，如果他们的朋友是亿万富翁，他们会觉得自己是失败者，以及为什么好莱坞著名演员会因为其他人更有名而感到沮丧。

在某种程度上，我们都知道社会比较是荒谬和有害的，大量研究证实了这一点。"紧跟琼斯 "与焦虑甚至抑郁症有关。例如，在一系列要求受试者解决难题的实验中，最不快乐的人始终是那些最关注自己相对于其他受试者表现的人。我们从做得比别人好中获得的小快感很容易被做得比别人差的不快感所吞没。但是，拥有比别人更多的东西，成为比别人更多的人，这种冲动无情地牵动着我们。

我们生活在一个经常被劝告回归自然的时代，回归我们久远的过去--我们的饮食、我们的社区义务感，以及更多。但是，如果我们的目标是持久的幸福，遵循我们的自然冲动，主要是没有帮助我们。那是大自然母亲的残酷骗局。幸福对繁殖物种没有帮助，所以自然界不会选择它。如果你把代际生存与幸福混为一谈，那是你的问题，不是自然的问题。

事实上，我们的自然状态是不满意，被短暂的满足感所点缀。你可能不喜欢享乐主义的跑步机，但大自然认为这很好。她喜欢看你为实现一个难以捉摸的目标而努力，因为努力的人可以得到货物--即使他们不能长久地享受它们。更多的配偶，更好的配偶，为我们的孩子提供更好的生存机会--这些古老的任务是对在我们大脑深处不断运行的大部分代码负责。你是否已经找到了你的灵魂伴侣，并且永远不会偏离，这并不重要；旨在让我们获得更多伴侣（或让我们进行升级）的算法继续呼呼作响，这就是为什么你仍然希望对陌生人有吸引力。神经生物学的本能--我们将其体验为不满--是推动我们前进的动力。

还有许多其他相关的例子，这些进化的倾向不利于持久的幸福--例如，在我们的浪漫关系中，嫉妒的痛苦的倾向。(大自然在邀请我们出轨的同时，也希望我们对我们的伴侣可能出轨的可能性保持高度警惕。研究发现，男性有可能花费资源在不知不觉中抚养不属于他们的孩子，他们对性不忠的反应最强烈；女性有可能因为他们的伴侣会依附于另一个女性和她的孩子而转移资源，她们对情感不忠的反应最消极）。

贪得无厌的目标是获得更多的东西，取得明显的成功，并尽可能地吸引人，这导致我们彼此物化，甚至是自己。当人们把自己看成只是他们有吸引力的身体、工作或银行账户时，会带来巨大的痛苦。研究表明，自我物化与隐形感和缺乏自主性有关，身体上的自我物化与女性的饮食失调和抑郁症有直接关系。职业上的自我卑躬屈膝是一种同样讨厌的暴政。你成为一个对自己无情的任务主管，把自己看成只是经济人。爱情和乐趣都被牺牲掉了，只为了再多工作一天，以寻求对 "我成功了吗 "这一问题的积极的内部答案。我们成为真人的纸板剪影。

摘自2003年1月/2月号。钱能买到幸福吗？

在现代生活中，用我们的精力去拥有五辆汽车、五个浴室、甚至五双运动鞋是没有意义的，但我们就是......想要它们。神经科学家们对此进行了研究。多巴胺是在对购买新东西、赢得金钱、获得更多权力或名声、拥有新的性伙伴的想法作出反应时排泄的。大脑进化到奖励我们的行为，这些行为使我们活着，并使我们更有可能传递我们的DNA。这可能是一个不合时宜的现象，至少在某种程度上是如此，但它仍然是我们生活中的一个事实。

对于信徒来说，满足感有另一个名字：天堂。

许多宗教都向信徒们承诺会有天堂。我们很少仔细思考这意味着什么--马蹄声和云彩--但罗马天主教会对此有帮助的具体规定。天堂给予我们的是 "光明的景象"。上帝向我们面对面地展示自己，使我们了解他的真实本性，从而授予我们 "人类最深的渴望的满足，最高的、最终的幸福状态"。或者，正如英国神秘主义者诺里奇的朱莉安娜所写的天堂，"一切都会好起来，一切都会好起来，所有的事情都会好起来"。换句话说，天堂是持续的纯粹满足。

为什么我们在地球上似乎不能这么好？13世纪的天主教神父托马斯-阿奎那在其巨著《神学概要》中回答了这个问题。他将满足感问题定义为错误的目标之一：使我们远离上帝的偶像，即我们幸福的真正来源。即使你不是一个宗教信徒，托马斯列举的这些目标也是真实的，这些目标使人受骗，但永远不会满足。它们包括金钱、权力、快乐和荣誉。正如托马斯在谈到金钱时所说的那样。

在对财富和任何世俗物品的渴望中......当我们已经拥有它们的时候，我们就会鄙视它们，并寻求其他的......其原因是，当我们拥有它们的时候，我们更加意识到它们的不足：而这一事实表明，它们是不完美的，主权的善并不包括在其中。
换句话说，（它不会带来任何）满足。托马斯-阿奎那可能不会让一个体育场充满潮人，但他对贾格尔的不满矩阵的描述远比老米克本人要好。

那么，满意度问题是我们对这些不充分的东西的自然依恋。如果这对你来说听起来有点像佛教，那应该是。它与佛陀的第一个 "崇高真理 "非常相似：生命是痛苦的--梵语为duhkha，也译为 "不满足"--而这种痛苦的原因是对世俗事物的渴望、欲望和依恋。托马斯-阿奎那和佛陀（以及贾格尔，就这一点而言）说的是同一件事。

请注意，托马斯和佛陀都没有争辩说世俗的奖赏本质上是邪恶的。事实上，它们可以被用来做大好事。金钱对于一个正常的社会和支持你的家庭来说是至关重要的；权力可以被用来提升他人；快乐可以浸润生活；荣誉可以吸引人们关注道德提升的来源。但是作为附件--作为目的而不是手段--问题很简单。它们不能满足。

这使我们回到了我女儿的问题。至少在这个尘世的生活中，我们是否注定要在持续的不满足中生存？

如果你到过台湾，你一定不能错过的一个景点是故宫博物院。该博物馆可以说是世界上最伟大的中国艺术和文物收藏，它包含大约70万件物品，其年代从8000多年前的新石器时代一直到现代。

如果说博物馆有什么问题，那正是它的丰富性。没有人能够在一次参观中了解到它的一小部分。这就是为什么几年前的一个下午，我雇了一个导游，让他给我看几件著名的作品并解释它们的意义。我不知道的是，我的导游只说了一句话，就帮我破解了我自己的满意难题。

看着一个巨大的清代玉雕佛像，我的导游不经意间说，这是一个很好的例子，说明东方的艺术观与西方的艺术观有什么不同。"怎么说？" 我问道。

他用一个问题回答了我的问题。"当我让你想象一件尚未开始的艺术作品时，你会想到什么？"

"一个空的画布，我想，"我回答。

"对，"他说。许多西方人倾向于将艺术视为从无到有的创造。但也有另一种看法。"艺术已经存在，"而艺术家的工作只是揭示它。他告诉我，他对尚未开始的艺术的印象是一块未经雕琢的玉石，就像最终成为我们面前的佛像。在艺术家拿走不属于雕塑的石头之前，艺术是看不到的，但它还是已经存在了。并非所有的艺术哲学都符合这种东西方的区别；米开朗基罗曾经说过："在我开始工作之前，雕塑已经在大理石块中完成了......我只是要把多余的材料凿掉。" 但我接受了我的导游的观点--也就是宽泛的笔触。

艺术是生活的写照，这也是解决满足感困境的一个潜在办法。

在西方，随着我们年龄的增长，我们通常认为我们应该有很多东西可以展示给我们的生活--很多战利品。根据许多东方哲学，这是倒退。随着年龄的增长，我们不应该积累更多的东西来代表自己，而应该剥离一些东西来寻找真正的自我，从而找到幸福和和平。道德经》是一部大约在公元前四世纪编纂的中国文本，是道教的基础，它优雅地提出了这一观点。

人们会满足于
满足于他们简单的、日常的生活。
和谐，无欲无求。

当没有欲望的时候。
万事万物都是和平的。

在我50岁出头的时候，当我参观故宫博物院时，我的生活被财产、成就、关系、意见和承诺塞满了。博物馆导游的一句不经意的话语，帮助我吸收了托马斯-阿奎那和佛陀的教诲，或者说是现代社会科学的教诲，并承诺不再试图增加更多的东西，而是开始把东西拿走。

事实上，我们的公式，满意=得到你想要的东西，遗漏了一个关键部分。更准确地说，它应该是。

满意=你所拥有的÷你所要的
我们所有的进化和生物的需要都集中在增加分子--我们的拥有。但更重要的行动是在分母上--我们的愿望。现代世界是由一些巧妙的方法组成的，使我们的欲望在不知不觉中爆发。即使是达赖喇嘛，可以说是世界上最开明的人，也承认了这一点。他在《幸福的艺术》中说："有时我会去超市，"。"我真的很喜欢看超市，因为我可以看到这么多美丽的东西。因此，当我看着所有这些不同的物品时，我产生了一种欲望的感觉，我最初的冲动可能是："哦，我想要这个；我想要那个。 "

满足的秘诀不是增加我们的拥有--那永远不会奏效（或者至少，它永远不会持久）。那是跑步机公式，不是满足公式。秘诀在于管理我们的需求。通过管理我们想要的东西而不是我们拥有的东西，我们给自己一个机会过上更满意的生活。

在绿色背景上，一个黄色的快乐面孔构成了钥匙孔的顶部圆形部分，闪闪发光。
这些是我在那个春天的下午向我女儿提出的想法。她饶有兴趣地听着，然后做了一个简短的反驳。"所以你的意思是，满意的秘密很简单，"她说。"我只需要违背几百万年的生物进化论，"再加上整个现代文化，"我就可以了。"

显然，我不能把这个话题留在那里。人们经常不信任像我这样的学者的原因之一是，我们总是谈论问题，但很少提供现实的解决方案。更糟糕的是，我们经常忽视自己的智慧。我认识很多破产的经济学家和悲惨的幸福专家。

但她知道这对我来说并不都是理论。两年前，我们从马里兰州的贝塞斯达（Bethesda）--华盛顿特区的一个权力郊区--搬到了波士顿郊外的一个小镇。我辞去了首席执行官的职位，从事教学和写作，几乎放弃了与政治和商业精英的所有日常接触，而且很快被大多数人遗忘。我并没有隐瞒搬家的原因，我的家人也完全支持我。我正在采纳我自己的建议，即三年前在这些页面上发表的建议，以找到一种新的成功和更深的幸福。这个项目不仅仅是为了满足；它还涉及到认识到，在职业上，大多数人在生命中的高峰期比他们预期的要早，而且衰退得更快--抵制这种情况会适得其反，最终徒劳无益。但是，这需要摆脱享乐主义的跑步机--用短暂的职业刺激换取更持久的满足感，这种满足感可以持续到我生命的后半段。在大流行病期间，生活节奏不由自主地进一步放缓，我就有更多的时间来考虑如何实现这一过渡。

因此，我确实有一些实用的建议给我的女儿，让她知道如何战胜不满的诅咒--我为自己的生活养成的三个习惯，是以哲学和社会科学研究为基础的。

I. 从王子到圣人
有一位学者确实为生活中的问题提出了真正的解决方案，他就是托马斯-阿奎那。他不只是解释满足的难题；他提供了一个答案，并亲自实践。

托马斯是阿基诺的兰道夫伯爵最小的儿子，大约1225年出生在他家位于意大利中部的城堡。他被送到位于蒙特卡西诺的第一座本笃会修道院接受教育。作为一个贵族家庭的最小的儿子，他被期望有一天能成为修道院的院长，一个具有巨大社会声望的职位。

但托马斯对这种世俗的荣耀毫无兴趣。19岁左右，他加入了最近成立的多明我会，一个致力于贫困和巡回布道的修士团体。他觉得这才是他真正的身份。财富和特权的生活需要被削去才能找到它。

托马斯追求学者和教师的工作，写出了密集的哲学论文，这些论文在今天仍有深远的影响。他被称为他那个时代最伟大的哲学家。但这种遗产从来不是他的目标。相反，他认为他的工作不过是表达他对上帝的爱和帮助人类同胞的愿望。

佛陀以一种惊人的类似方式破解了满意度的密码。公元前六世纪左右，他出生在现在尼泊尔和印度交界的地区，是一位名叫释迦牟尼的王子。他的母亲在他出生后几天就去世了，他的父亲发誓要保护这个小王子免受生活的苦难，因此把他关在宫殿里，在那里他所有的世俗需求和欲望都会得到满足。

悉达多从来没有走出过宫殿，直到他29岁时，他被好奇心所驱使，要求一个战车司机带他参观外面的世界。在参观过程中，他遇到了一个老人，另一个被疾病缠身的人，以及一具腐烂的尸体。他被这些景象所困扰，他的车夫告诉他这些景象是我们凡人生活中不可避免的。然后他遇到了一个苦行者，他通过放弃世俗的东西，不是从疾病和死亡中解脱出来，而是从对它们的恐惧中解脱出来。

不久，释迦牟尼离开了他的王国，并放弃了所有的执着。坐在菩提树下，他成了佛。他用他的余生与越来越多的羊群分享他的智慧，今天的羊群人数已超过5亿人。

我不是圣托马斯，也不是佛主。而我目前在哈佛大学的职位也很难称得上是对世界的回报的否定。即便如此，我还是试图从他们的生活中吸取教训--满足感不在于获得高尚的地位并死死抓住不放，而在于帮助他人--包括分享我所获得的任何知识和智慧。这就是我从公众视野中的工作中退下来，专心写作和教学的原因之一。如果我在职业生涯中再担任领导角色，我的重点将是我想与他人分享的东西，而不是我想为自己积累的东西。

II. 制定一个反向的水桶清单
削减我们的欲望的一个实用方法是，简单地看看我们得到的那些把我们变成不满意的经济人的建议，然后做相反的事情。例如，许多自助指南建议在你的生日时制定一份遗愿清单，以便加强你对世界的渴望。把你想要的东西列成清单是暂时的满足，因为它刺激了多巴胺。但它会产生依恋，而这种依恋随着时间的推移又会产生不满足感。

相反，我已经开始编制一个 "反向水桶清单"，以使这篇文章中的想法在我的生活中可行。每年我生日的时候，我都会列出我的愿望和牵挂--符合托马斯-阿奎那的金钱、权力、快乐和荣誉类别的东西。我尽量做到完全诚实。我不会列出我实际上讨厌并且永远不会选择的东西，比如一艘帆船或一栋度假屋。相反，我去找我的弱点，其中大部分是我不好意思承认的，涉及到别人对我工作的钦佩。

然后我想象五年后的自己。我很快乐，很平静，过着有目的、有意义的生活。我又列出了能给我带来这种幸福的力量：我的信仰、我的家庭、我的友谊、我正在做的本质上令人满意和有意义的、为他人服务的工作。

不可避免的是，这些幸福的来源是 "内在的"--它们来自于内心，围绕着爱、关系和深刻的目的。它们与陌生人的赞美没有什么关系。我将它们与第一份清单上的东西进行对比，后者通常是 "外在的"--与托马斯的偶像清单相关的外部奖励。大多数研究表明，内在奖励导致的幸福远比外在奖励更持久。

这不仅仅是关于有更少的东西来压迫你。
我考虑外在的东西如何与我的幸福的内在基础竞争时间、注意力和资源。我想象自己为了获得陌生人的钦佩而牺牲自己的关系，以及我生活中的结果。考虑到这一点，我面对遗愿清单。我反思每一个项目，告诉自己，虽然某个特定的愿望并不邪恶，但它不会给我带来我所寻求的幸福和平安。最后，我回到能给我带来真正幸福的事情清单。我承诺要追求这些东西。

鉴于我对赞美的渴望，我已经做了一个点，试图少关注别人对我的看法，当这些想法出现时，我就把它们转走。我已经放走了许多真正只是为了职业发展的关系。我的工作比过去几年少了一些。我需要有意识地努力避免倒退--跑步机经常向我招手，小小的多巴胺诱惑着我回到我的老路上。但我在行为上的改变大多是永久性的，而且我也因此变得更加快乐。

我在这里并不是说，去你一直梦想的异国他乡看一看，或者跑一场马拉松，或者以其他方式推动你的能力去做一些困难的事情，不管是在职业上还是其他方面，都有什么问题。感觉更像任务的工作提供了目的；旅行可以是内在的价值和享受；学习技能或迎接挑战可以带来内在的满足感；与朋友或亲人一起追求有意义的活动可以加深关系。但是问问你自己，你的水桶清单项目的吸引力，无论是专业的还是经验的，是否主要来自于它们会让别人多么羡慕或嫉妒你。这些动机永远不会导致深刻的满足。

III. 变得更小
最近，关于极简主义的书籍大量涌现，它们都建议缩小你的生活规模，以获得更多的快乐--削去你生活中的垃圾。但是，这不仅仅是让你拥有更少的东西来压制你。事实上，当我们关注越来越小的东西时，我们可以找到巨大的充实感。佛教大师Thich Nhat Hanh在他的《正念的奇迹》一书中这样解释。"在洗碗的时候，人们应该只洗碗，这意味着在洗碗的时候，人们应该完全意识到自己正在洗碗的事实"。为什么？如果我们想的是过去或未来，"我们在洗碗的时候就没有活着"。

多年来，我有一个心爱的朋友，他比我大几十岁，我在整个20多岁的时候都和他一起工作。在他40多岁的时候，他被诊断出患有严重的癌症，并被给予六个月的生命。由于某种奇迹，他活过了这六个月，然后又活了六个月，然后又活了近三十年。

然而，他从未被 "治愈 "过。他的医生告诉他，癌症是门口的狼，在等待时机。狼迟早会溜进来，几年前它最终做到了这一点。但是，在这片乌云下的三十年并不是一种负担。恰恰相反，它们每天都在提醒他今天的礼物，因此，不要在大胆的、多年的生活目标中寻找他的满足感，而是在与他心爱的妻子和女儿的微小的、日常的美好时刻中寻找满足感。

几年前，几个亲密的朋友在他家，在他的花园里吃喝。当时正值黄昏，他让我们围着一株开着小型封闭花朵的植物。他指示说："看一朵花"。我们这样做了，大约10分钟，在沉默中。一下子，花儿弹开了，我们知道它们每天晚上都会这样。我们惊讶地喘息着。那是一个强烈满足的时刻。

但有一点我仍然无法忘怀。与我以前的遗愿清单上的大多数垃圾不同，这种满足感经久不衰。那段记忆仍然给我带来快乐--比我生命中许多尘世的 "成就 "更多--不是因为它是一个大目标的高潮，而是因为它是一个意外的礼物，一个小小的奇迹。

王子总是跳过生活中的小满足，为了金钱、权力或名望而放弃黄昏时分的一朵花。但圣人从不犯这种错误，我也尽量不犯。每一天，我的待办事项清单上都有一个项目，涉及到对一个普通事件的真实存在。这其中有很多是围绕着我作为天主教徒的宗教实践，包括每天与我妻子一起做弥撒和冥想祈祷。它还包括没有设备的散步，只听外面的世界。这些都是真正令人满意的事情。

我的女儿在我们谈论满意的科学的几个月后就去上大学了。在经历了COVID-19的隔离和封锁，以及她高三那年的悲惨玩笑之后，她跑到了边境，进入了西班牙的一所大学。我很失落。不过，我们每天都会给对方发几条信息。它们几乎从来不是关于工作或学校的。相反，我们分享一些小的时刻：一张下雨的街道的照片，一个愚蠢的笑话，她刚刚做了多少个俯卧撑。

我不知道这是否给了她一个将自己从不满的悖论中解脱出来的先机，但这对我来说就像药物。每条信息都像花的傍晚--也许是对天堂美景的短暂一瞥--带来了安静的满足。

我们每个人都可以驾驭依恋和冲动的浪潮，徒劳地希望有一天，以某种方式，我们会得到并保持我们渴望的那种满足。或者，我们可以在自由意志和自我管理上一搏。这是一场与我们内心穴居人的终生战斗。通常，他赢了。但只要有决心和实践，我们就能从那种长期的不满中找到喘息的机会，并体验到真正的人类自由所带来的快乐。


这篇文章改编自阿瑟-C-布鲁克斯的新书《从强到强》。在人生的后半段寻找成功、幸福和深刻的目标。它出现在2022年3月的印刷版上，标题是 "满足的陷阱"。

当你使用本页面的链接购买书籍时，我们会收到佣金。谢谢你对《大西洋》的支持。

阿瑟-C-布鲁克斯是《大西洋月刊》的特约撰稿人，哈佛大学肯尼迪学院威廉-亨利-彭博公共领导力实践教授，以及哈佛大学商学院管理实践教授。他是播客系列节目《如何打造幸福生活》的主持人，也是《从强到强》的作者。在人生的后半段寻找成功、幸福和深刻的目标。