Why Getting It Feels Flat: 22 Lottery Winners

The drop after you get it

You got the thing you wanted. It didn’t land. Not for long, anyway — and you’ve already picked the next one. The promotion, the offer, the flat with the light in it. Now it’s furniture. This is Ancient Answers, where a complaint you’d actually say out loud goes to the old texts and to the research, and I report which of the two had something. Today’s complaint is yours, and it’s specific: you can’t enjoy what you worked for.

For this one I read an edition of Nāgārjuna, three excerpts from a volume of Upaniṣad commentary, and a stack of papers on income and wellbeing that argue with each other in public. One of those three gave me a usable sentence. One of them failed on me, and it failed in a way that is more interesting than a success would have been, so I’m going to show you the break. By the end you’ll have a sixty-second thing to do and a way to tell whether it told you anything.

I want to be clear about the stake, because it isn’t happiness in the abstract. It’s that you are spending real years of a real life waiting on objects, and the waiting is the part you’re actually living inside. If the arrival keeps not counting, then the arrival was never where you were. And nobody here is going to tell you to want less — I’ll get to why that instruction is unfollowable, and why the people who hand it out have usually never tried to follow it.

What it’s already called

There’s a name for the thing. In 1971 Brickman and Campbell called it the hedonic treadmill — you speed up, the belt speeds up, you end up standing where you started. The study everyone quotes came seven years later. Twenty-two people who had won major lottery prizes, twenty-two people who hadn’t, and twenty-nine people paralysed in accidents, all asked the same questions about how happy they were right now.

The winners weren’t measurably happier than the non-winners. And they rated ordinary pleasures — breakfast, a magazine, a friend calling — lower than the people who hadn’t won. That’s the finding. Here is its size: twenty-two winners, one sitting, one questionnaire, and no measurement of any of them from before they won. It’s a small, unblinded snapshot that has been carrying nearly fifty years of internet on its back. Hold both halves of that.

The reason, up front

Here’s the answer before I’ve earned it, because it’s what you came for. You didn’t spend those months enjoying that thing. You spent them wanting it — rehearsing it, checking on it, arranging your week around it, running the small film of having it. Getting it ends the object. It does not end the practice. The practice has nowhere to be, so it moves, and it finds somewhere within days. That relocation is the flatness you’ve been calling ingratitude.

So here’s the test, and it’s small on purpose. Sixty seconds, once a day, fourteen days, one notebook. Write one line: what am I currently waiting for, to feel different? Don’t edit it and don’t be noble about it — put down the promotion, the reply, the weekend, whatever is actually sitting there. On day fifteen you read the fourteen lines in one go. What you’re looking at then isn’t a mood. It’s a pattern, and a pattern can be read.

Where the grasping goes

Now where that came from, and the honest version of it. The one passage in my pile that actually says this sits in an edition of Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, and what I have in front of me is a translator’s rendering with commentary wrapped around it. So it’s a reading of the verse rather than the bare verse, and I’m going to treat it as one. It runs: moving from one form of grasping to another, there would be another becoming.

Read that slowly, because it isn’t the sentence you expect. It doesn’t say grasping is bad. It doesn’t say the object disappoints you. It says grasping moves — from one form to another — and that the moving is itself the next round of existing as somebody. Here’s my sketch of what that looks like across one year of your life, and it’s mine, not the text’s: you want, you get, the wanting relocates, and you become the person now waiting on the new one.

Now the book that failed me, and I want to be exact about how. I pulled three excerpts from a volume of Upaniṣad commentary, all from a single section, and every one of them breaks off at the precise moment it starts to explain. One reads: the reason is that work, especially if it is technical work, is the expression of — and my copy stops there, mid-sentence, mid-clause. Three fragments, three reasons offered, not one of them finished.

I could finish that sentence for you. It would sound right. You would have no way to check it, and every real citation in this video would be worth less afterwards, permanently. So I’m leaving it broken. What I’m holding is one usable reading, one book that didn’t deliver, and the research — and the research is where this gets genuinely uncomfortable, because it doesn’t say the thing you have been told it says.

In 2010 Kahneman and Deaton went through about four hundred and fifty thousand survey responses and found that day-to-day emotional wellbeing stopped climbing at around seventy-five thousand dollars a year. That number escaped into the world and never came home. Eleven years later Killingsworth sampled thirty-three thousand three hundred and ninety-one working adults in the moment, on their phones, and found no plateau at all. Wellbeing kept rising with income, the whole way up.

Where the two answers part

So in 2023 they did the rare, hard thing. Killingsworth and Kahneman sat down with Barbara Mellers and reanalysed it together, agreeing beforehand what result would settle it. Both were partly right. For most people, happiness does keep rising with income. For the least happy fifth, it flattens out above roughly a hundred thousand dollars. So money doesn’t buy happiness is not what the best evidence says. What it says is: it depends who you already are.

Which breaks the tidy version of this video, and it should. The modern story is a set point: your happiness returns to a level, so whatever you bought fades back to it. The Nāgārjuna reading is not making that claim at all. It says nothing about how much pleasure you feel or where it settles. It says where the holding-on goes next. Those are two different sentences about two different objects, and you would test them in completely different ways.

And here’s the part I like least. If the holding-on has to go somewhere, then want less is not an instruction anybody can follow — you can’t audit an appetite by deciding to. The tradition around that verse answers with a whole structure: a discipline, a teacher, years. I don’t have a passage in front of me that puts a number on any of it, so I’m not handing you a round number of days. And nobody has tested my notebook on anybody. It shows a pattern. It doesn’t fix one.

So the refined version, and it’s smaller than the one I gave you at the top. The notebook does not tell you to want less. The 2023 data says wanting and getting really does move most people, and the reading isn’t asking you to stop either. It answers exactly one question: are you enjoying anything, or only advancing? Sixty seconds a day for fourteen days is fourteen minutes in total, against the months you spent waiting on the last one.

Here’s the marker, so you can’t fudge it. On day fifteen, look at whether the fourteen lines name mostly different objects or mostly the same one. Mostly different, and the object was never the point — the practice was. Mostly the same, and it really is that one thing, which is a different problem with a different answer. And if the flatness is heavy and it doesn’t shift, that’s a doctor’s question rather than mine, and I mean that straight.

Ancient Answers

That was Ancient Answers, where a complaint you’d actually say out loud gets taken to the primary texts and to the papers, and I tell you which of the two had something — including the times the honest answer is neither, and including the page that broke off mid-sentence. If that’s the deal you want, subscribe.

That was Ancient Answers, where a complaint you’d actually say out loud gets taken to the primary texts and to the papers, and I tell you which of the two had something — including the times the honest answer is neither. If that’s the deal you want, subscribe.