Why do we feel empty?
“What was an unexpected pleasure yesterday is what we feel entitled to today, and what won’t be enough tomorrow” — Robert Sapolsky
We live in a world where there is a wide range of reward sources, constantly feeding our need for pleasure. We are so used to being stimulated with strong explosions of experience and sensation that we’re not used to being unstimulated.
To explain this, I’ll demonstrate with a study by Wolfram Schultz of Cambridge University. A monkey is expected to gain one raisin when he presses a lever ten times. Now — surprise! — the monkey presses the lever 10 times and gets two raisins. The delighted monkey now presses the lever 10 more times but is rewarded with only a single raisin.
What do you think will happen to the monkey?
This is called habituation, where nothing is ever as good as that first time.
Let me introduce you to dopamine, a reward system in our brain. What happened to the monkey was his brain released ten units of dopamine when the first reward arrived. When he received the second reward, his brain released twenty units of dopamine — two times more than the first one. However, when the reward went back like it used to, rather than releasing ten units of dopamine, the dopamine level declines.
An emptiness comes from this combination of habituation and constant stimulation. We thought if we consumed more, we’d desire less. But unfortunately, the more we consume, the hungrier we get.
When I served my obligatory social service in a rural area far from town, I noticed the population that inhabits the area is delighted with simpler things: whether the sun is shining brighter so their laundry dries completely or it’s harvest season and there are plenty of fruits and vegetables to eat. They’re happy and seem content with what they have.
Once we had lives that offered numerous amount of subtle, yet hard-won pleasures. Now with knowledge and technology, we have access to gain those pleasures easier. It makes me wonder about the cost of knowledge itself, can we ever be satisfied?
Source:
Behave, The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert Sapolsky (2017)
