Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers: The Acclaimed Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping

by Robert M. Sapolsky

Peter Sterling, of allostasis fame, has written brilliantly about how our sources of pleasure have become so narrowed and artificially strong. His thinking centers around the fact that our anticipatory pleasure pathway is stimulated by many different things. For this to work, the pathway must rapidly habituate, must desensitize to any given source that has stimulated it, so that it is prepared to respond to the next stimulant. But unnaturally strong explosions of synthetic experience and sensation and pleasure evoke unnaturally strong degrees of habituation. This has two consequences. As the first, soon we hardly notice anymore the fleeting whispers of pleasure caused by leaves in autumn, or by the lingering glance of the right person, or by the promise of reward that will come after a long, difficult, and worthy task. The other consequence is that, after awhile, we even habituate to those artificial deluges of intensity and moment-ness. If we were nothing but machines of local homeostatic regulation, as we consume more, we would desire less. But instead, our tragedy is that we just become hungrier. More and faster and stronger. “Now” isn’t as good as it used to be, and won’t suffice tomorrow.