Why You Miss Things Harder When You Have Them

The thing I keep noticing about my friend Tara is that she has what I would describe, if I were being clinical about it, as a very accurate memory for dissatisfaction. Not in a pathological way. She's cheerful, fundamentally. But if you ask her whether she remembers being happy in her apartment before she bought her house, she'll pause and say yes, but then almost immediately add something about the water pressure in the second bathroom, which was, genuinely, terrible. And then she'll be in the house, which has excellent water pressure across all three bathrooms, and she'll notice that the neighbor's yard gets more afternoon light, and that the kitchen feels cramped when someone else is in there, and that she's always thought the layout of the living room didn't quite work. This is not complaining, exactly. It's more like a continuous recalibration. The dissatisfaction moves like a gas. It expands to fill whatever space is available.1

I've been around long enough to know I do the same thing, in different domains, which I suppose is the point.

There was a period in 2021 when I was working from home, for what felt like the twelve-thousandth consecutive day, and I remember the texture of wanting to be around colleagues with the specific sharpness of a real physical craving. Not just "it would be nice to see people." More like: the presence of other people in a shared space felt like a thing my body was missing, some vitamin I'd run out of. The office had always struck me as, at best, a tolerable necessity, a place where the fluorescent lighting flickered every afternoon and the conference room was perpetually ten degrees too cold (or too hot) and someone had put a print on the wall with nothing but colors, for reasons nobody could explain. I'd never once walked into that building thinking: this is exactly where I want to be. And yet by about month fourteen of remote work, I would have driven eighty miles to sit in that conference room under those lights, next to the colors, just to feel the barely perceptible social pressure of other humans occupying adjacent space.2

The sociologist W.G. Runciman spent the 1960s trying to understand why people feel deprived not in absolute terms but relative ones, why soldiers in units with high promotion rates felt more aggrieved about their own lack of promotion than soldiers in units where almost nobody advanced.3 His finding, which has since been formalized and studied from about forty different angles, was that we don't evaluate our circumstances against any fixed standard. We evaluate them against what other people have, against what we recently had, against what we expected to have. The unhappiness is a comparison, not a condition. Which sounds comforting but isn't, because the implication is that you can improve someone's actual situation while making them feel worse, simply by raising the reference point.

The military example is almost too perfect. More promotions, more resentment. The men who watched their colleagues advance felt the gap between where they were and where they might be with a sharpness that the men in stagnant units never developed. The abundance itself was the irritant. Or not the abundance exactly, but the visibility of it, which created a new frame, a new reference class, a new set of expectations that the previous situation had never generated. You cannot miss what you have never imagined having. But once you can see it, once you can see that it exists and is available and is being distributed, the absence of it is no longer neutral. It becomes a kind of active subtraction.

What I find genuinely strange is how poorly this understanding of deprivation survives contact with our actual behavior. We know it, intellectually. We have known it in some form since at least the Roman Stoics, who built entire philosophical systems around the idea that attachment to outcomes is the mechanism by which life makes you miserable.4 We know it in the folk version, which is every grandmother who has ever said "you don't know what you have until it's gone." We know it from our own experience, from the hundred small examples where we got the thing we wanted and discovered the wanting was the interesting part.

And yet.

In 1978, two psychologists named Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell published research that should have settled the question. They'd been studying lottery winners and people who'd recently become paraplegic, comparing both groups' happiness levels to a control group. The finding was, put simply, that neither group ended up where you'd expect.5 The lottery winners weren't significantly happier. The paraplegics weren't significantly less happy. Both groups had, over time, recalibrated. Their emotional thermostat, if you want to use a metaphor that is correct in spirit even if somewhat reductive, had reset. Brickman and Campbell called this phenomenon the hedonic treadmill. The idea being that we keep walking, keep striving, keep acquiring or losing, and the subjective experience of happiness moves back toward some baseline that seems, frustratingly, to be largely independent of our objective circumstances.

The treadmill metaphor is useful partly because it captures the energy expenditure without the progress. You're working. You're genuinely working. But you're not getting anywhere, in terms of lasting satisfaction, because the reference point keeps updating. The raise that felt life-changing in February becomes the new floor by June. The relationship that made you feel, for the first time in years, like a real person, becomes the container in which new dissatisfactions develop. Not because anything went wrong. Just because the brain is not built to sustain states. It's built to detect changes, and once a change stops being a change, the signal fades.6

I want to be careful, because this is the point where a certain type of essay turns into a kind of pessimistic shrug. "We're all on the treadmill, isn't life bleak, the end." Which is not what I actually think. What I think is more specific, and maybe more useful, though I want to hold that word lightly because "useful" is the kind of thing you say right before you slip into advice-giving, which I'm actively trying to avoid.

What I actually think is this: the treadmill is real, but it's not the whole story. Or rather, there's a second phenomenon that operates alongside it, that Brickman and Campbell didn't quite nail down, which was identified more precisely a few years later by a behavioral psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania named Richard Solomon. Solomon was studying addiction, primarily, but he noticed something that seemed to apply far beyond the pharmacological. He called it opponent-process theory. The idea is that every strong emotional state, positive or negative, triggers a counteracting state that runs in the opposite direction. The high produces a latent low. The pain produces a latent relief. And here's the crucial part: with repetition, the primary state weakens and the opponent state strengthens. Which is why heroin users need more to get the same high, but it's also why parachute jumpers, terrified their first time, eventually come to experience the jump itself as something closer to euphoria. The opponent process has strengthened until it dominates.7

What this means, in practice, and in the ordinary geography of daily life, is something most of us have experienced without having the vocabulary for it. It means that abundance doesn't just fail to satisfy. It actively generates the experience of its opposite. Not immediately, and not inevitably, but the mechanism is real and it runs in both directions. The person who finally gets time alone, after years of feeling starved for solitude, will eventually find the solitude generating a kind of restlessness. The person who finally gets the relationship, after years of loneliness, will eventually find the relationship generating an appetite for certain kinds of freedom.

I want to resist the version of this observation that becomes unbearably grim, the one that concludes: nothing you want will make you happy, nothing you fear will be as bad as you think, the whole project of wanting is an elaborate trap. Because that conclusion, while possibly accurate at the level of pure phenomenology, isn't where the interesting part is. The interesting part is in what happens between the wanting and the adapting. And in what the wanting itself produces, independent of whether the wanted thing is ever obtained.8

What I notice about the people in my life who seem least afflicted by the treadmill, the ones who appear to have found some way to keep the machinery from running at full speed, is that they share something that I'm going to describe carefully because I don't want it to sound like a virtue I'm urging on you. What they share is a practice of noticing the scarcity while it's happening. Not in a gratitude-journaling way, not in a "pause and appreciate" way, which has always struck me as slightly forced, a kind of performance of appreciation that the brain sees through immediately.9 More in the way that you notice weather. Not with any particular agenda. Just: this is what's happening right now. The quiet in the house is here right now. The fact of having colleagues in adjacent rooms is happening right now. This is the texture of this particular arrangement of circumstances, and it will shift.

There's a composer named Pauline Oliveros who spent the second half of her life developing what she called deep listening, a practice of attending to sound in a way that most people reserve only for exceptional circumstances. Not just hearing, which is passive. Listening, which is an act.10 Her argument was that we move through our sound environments mostly on autopilot, filtering out everything that doesn't require attention, and in doing so we lose something, some quality of presence that doesn't have a clean scientific name but that most people recognize when they accidentally access it, usually in a forest or on the beach or in a cathedral, and for a few minutes feel extraordinarily, inexplicably alive.

I'm not sure she was right about all of it. But I think she was onto something about the relationship between attention and value, about how things stop registering as present, stop generating the sensation of being here, the moment they become background. The colleague becomes wallpaper. The quiet becomes an expectation. The relationship becomes the context rather than the content. And that flattening isn't pathology. It's efficiency. The brain that didn't do this would be exhausted by noon, overwhelmed by the sheer sensory weight of things it already knows.11 But efficiency has costs, and one of them is the particular kind of disappearance that happens to the good things when the brain decides it already knows them.

And this is where the scarcity becomes, in a strange way, a kind of service. The thing that feels like deprivation, the ache of not having, is also the mechanism by which the brain assigns significance. Scarcity is essentially a perceptual signal that says: this matters. This is worth attending to. This is worth the cost of actually being here rather than processing on autopilot. Which means the moment you have it, the signal weakens, and the attention drifts, because the brain no longer needs to point you toward the thing. The task is complete. The object has been obtained. There's nothing left to do but let it become background.

I've been thinking about this in relation to a friend of mine who spent about three years in a very difficult relationship and then got out of it and spent the following two years single in a way that she described as sometimes wonderful and sometimes so isolating she could feel it as a physical sensation, like pressure behind the eyes. And then she met someone, and the early part of that relationship had a quality she described to me as almost embarrassing in its intensity, like she'd been given a drug. And then, about eight months in, the drug did what drugs do.12 And she came to me slightly distressed, because she knew this was irrational, but she kept finding herself missing the particular quality of aliveness she'd had when she was alone and wanting, and she didn't know what to do with that, because she hadn't wanted to be alone, she'd been miserable, and yet.

I told her something that I'm not sure was helpful but that I believed, which was that what she was missing wasn't actually the loneliness. It was the sharpness of perception that the loneliness had provided. The scarcity had made her attend. And the attending, not the absence itself, was the thing that felt like being alive.

The problem, and I want to be honest about this being a genuine problem rather than a tidy paradox to be resolved, is that you cannot manufacture scarcity. You cannot simulate the absence of something you have. Or rather, you can try, but the brain, which is doing the processing here, knows the difference between actual and performed. The Stoics understood this; some of them practiced what has since been called negative visualization, deliberately imagining the loss of things they had, as a way of recovering the perception that abundance had flattened.13 It sort of works. But only sort of, and only some of the time, and it requires a discipline that is easy to recommend and hard to sustain. Ask me how I know.

What might work better, or at least what I have noticed seems to work, is the somewhat less tractable practice of paying attention to the scarcity you're currently in. Not the scarcity you've resolved. The one that's active. Because everyone, at any given moment, is in some scarcity somewhere. You're in the relationship and missing the freedom. You're in the freedom and missing the connection. You're swamped with work and dreaming of open afternoons. You're in the open afternoon and feeling a low-grade anxiety that you can't immediately name, which is the anxiety of not being needed, of the day having no shape.

The dissatisfaction, in other words, is not a failure of your circumstances. It's the perceptual signal that something is currently mattering to you. And the things that are currently mattering to you are the things you're currently attending to. Which means the treadmill, even as it frustrates, is also, in a sense, pointing at something real. It's showing you where your attention is still alive.14

Tara, with her accurate memory for dissatisfaction, is, in this reading, someone with a highly calibrated perceptual system. She notices what she doesn't have. She notices it precisely and specifically. And yes, this means she is rarely purely content, and yes, this means I sometimes find myself reassuring her about water pressure when I would rather be doing almost anything else. But it also means she notices things. She is, in some sense, awake in a way that requires something to push against. The dissatisfaction is the evidence of attention.15

I think about this sometimes when I'm driving back from somewhere, and the house is visible at the end of the street, and for just a second, maybe half a second, before I pull into the driveway and become a person who lives here and has lived here and will be here tomorrow, I have a flash of something that might be called recognition. This is the place. Not in a sentimental way. More in the way you feel a coin in your pocket and briefly remember it's money. It has weight. It's specific. It will be spent.

The dogs will be at the door before I've punched in my code. I know this already, because they are always there, because this is what they do, and I have already adapted to it so thoroughly that most days it barely registers. But every now and then, usually when I've been traveling and the absence has had time to accumulate, I feel it. The fact of them. The specific, particular, non-generalizable fact that these two animals are waiting, have been waiting, will keep waiting until the deadbolt unlocks.

The scarcity will come back. It always does. But right now, this evening, it hasn't arrived yet. The dogs don't know that. They just know the door.

1. The gas metaphor is Aldous Huxley's, more or less, repurposed here. He wrote, in a line that's been quoted so many times it's become wallpaper, that habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities. Which is more elegant than "dissatisfaction expands to fill available space," but points at the same phenomenon. I've used the less elegant version because I think the gas metaphor is slightly more accurate about the directionality: it's not just that the good things become ordinary. It's that the space where dissatisfaction can live also grows proportionally. ↩︎
2. The colors referenced the Insights Discovery Model. Nobody ever explained who had chosen it or why. It became, over time, a kind of organizational Rorschach test: your relationship to the print said something about your relationship to the company. I mostly ignored it, which probably said something too. ↩︎
3. The original research came from Samuel Stouffer's landmark 1949 study The American Soldier, which Runciman built on in his 1966 book Relative Deprivation and Social Justice. The paradox: promotion opportunities increase rather than decrease resentment among those not promoted, has since been replicated in corporate settings, academic departments, sports teams, and probably every other human institution where some people advance and others don't. The basic finding has proved remarkably durable. ↩︎
4. Epictetus, writing in the first century, put this more directly than almost anyone since: the things within our power are our opinions, motivations, desires, aversions. The things outside our power include our bodies, reputations, and positions. The project of Stoic philosophy was, roughly, to stop confusing the two categories. The project was not entirely successful, either for the Stoics or for any of the rest of us, but the diagnosis was accurate. ↩︎
5. The paper was "Hedonic Relativism and Planning the Good Society," published in 1971 by Brickman and Campbell, though the lottery/paraplegic study came in Brickman's 1978 follow-up work. The paraplegic finding is the one that tends to arrest people, because the asymmetry they expect: "this terrible thing happened to them and they should be much less happy" doesn't materialize. The lottery finding surprises people less, which is itself interesting. We expected that money couldn't buy happiness. We did not expect that catastrophic injury couldn't buy misery. ↩︎
6. This is, incidentally, why the advice "learn to appreciate what you have" is technically correct and functionally useless. The brain's adaptation system is not consulting your preferences about whether to adapt. It's running on its own schedule, responding to inputs you can't fully control. The solution, if there is one, is not to fight the adaptation but to understand its timing and work within it, which is different from pretending it isn't happening. ↩︎
7. Solomon published his full theory in a 1980 paper in American Psychologist titled "The Opponent-Process Theory of Acquired Motivation." The range of phenomena he applied it to was remarkable: love, exercise, parachute jumping, grief, sauna use, duckling attachment behavior. The underlying mechanism in all cases was the same: the opponent state is acquired, strengthens with repetition, and eventually dominates the primary state. What begins as terror becomes excitement. What begins as warmth eventually requires the presence of the person just to feel normal. ↩︎
8. I'm aware this is a somewhat optimistic framing of what could also be described as "the wanting makes you miserable and then the having makes you merely less miserable and then the absence of the having makes you miserable again." Both framings are accurate. I prefer the optimistic one partly because it's more interesting and partly because I have to live inside my own head and that particular loop would be unpleasant to narrate continuously. ↩︎
9. This is not a knock on gratitude practices as such. The research on gratitude interventions is reasonably solid. But there's a difference between genuine noticing, which is somewhat rare and cannot be forced, and the performed version, which is writing down three things before bed in a way that starts to feel like checking a box. The brain is remarkably good at distinguishing between the two. The genuine version produces something that feels like being touched. The performed version produces something that feels like having done your homework. ↩︎
10. Oliveros, who died in 2016 at 84, was a composer and accordionist who spent decades pushing the boundaries of experimental music. The deep listening practice she developed asked practitioners to pay simultaneous attention to the sounds of the immediate environment, memory, and imagination, which she saw as three distinct but overlapping sonic streams. It is a difficult description to make operational, which I think was intentional. Things that can be made fully operational tend to get routinized and lose their vitality. ↩︎
11. Helson's adaptation-level theory, developed in the 1960s, formalized something most of us know intuitively: perception is always relative to a reference level, not absolute. You don't experience light as bright or dim in any fixed sense. You experience it as brighter or dimmer than the average level your visual system has adapted to. The same principle applies, Helson argued, to most sensory and perceptual domains. And Brickman and Campbell extended this logic to emotional life: we experience our circumstances as better or worse relative to an adaptation level set by our previous experiences. ↩︎
12. Solomon would say the opponent process had fully acquired. The drug metaphor is his, not mine: he explicitly described romantic attachment using the same model he used for heroin dependence, with the caveat that what this means for love is not that love is pathological but that the mechanism of dependence is biological and doesn't care about the moral valence of the object. ↩︎
13. The specific Stoic technique has been described in detail by William Irvine in A Guide to the Good Life, which is probably the most accessible entry point into Stoic practice for contemporary readers. The technique involves periodically and deliberately imagining the loss of things you value: your health, your relationships, your work, your home. The goal is not to become morbid but to interrupt the adaptation process, to briefly reactivate the response to contrast that the brain has otherwise muted. It works, imperfectly, temporarily, in the same way that leaving a room and coming back in sometimes makes you notice what you'd stopped seeing. ↩︎
14. There is something almost fractal about this observation, in that it applies recursively. The fact that you're currently dissatisfied with something means you're currently attending to it, which means it currently matters to you, which means you have, in some sense, not yet lost the relationship with it that makes it worth having. The person who is frustrated with their work still cares about their work. The person who is vaguely discontented with their relationship still has a relationship that generates strong enough signals to produce discontent. The version to worry about isn't the dissatisfaction. It's the flat, affectless nothing, when a thing has become so thoroughly background that it no longer generates any signal at all. ↩︎
15. There's a version of this observation that can tip into romanticizing unhappiness, which would be a mistake. I don't think chronic dissatisfaction is a sign of superior attentiveness. It can be exactly what it appears to be: a habit of mind that developed for reasons that no longer apply, or an anxiety response that masquerades as perception. The difference between someone who's learned to notice their circumstances with genuine accuracy and someone who's simply trained their attention to rest on what's missing is real, and it matters. I don't have a clean test for which category any particular person falls into. I'm not sure one exists. ↩︎