Dissatisfaction is the malady that makes us chase our worldly rewards to ever-greater heights. The futility of attaining satisfaction is one of the reasons that professional decline is so painful: Desperate to achieve enough to be satisfied, we find that instead we are going backward. We are slowly falling off the back of the hedonic treadmill. In our hearts, we know this, of course. But, even with this knowledge, the problem seems unsolvable. One astonishing proof of this is that the inventor of the term “hedonic treadmill,” Philip Brickman—the celebrated psychologist also responsible for
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