Perhaps our influx of more of everything we evolved to crave paired with our industrial happiness complex—obsessing about and pushing happiness—is making us feel as if any day that isn’t pure bliss were problematic and leading us to chase the wrong things. The U.K. neuroscientists write, “Pretending that any degree of [dissatisfaction] is abnormal or pathological will only foster feelings of inadequacy and frustration.” Given our wiring, they write, “dissatisfaction is not a personal failure. Far from it. [It is] what makes you human.”
