Why We Buy a New iPhone and Stop Feeling the Joy After Just a Week
You’ve surely noticed how quickly the “wow” fades.
You get the new gadget — for a week you’re walking on air. You finally land the dream job — the first few months are pure euphoria. You meet someone who feels like “the one” — and six months later you’re already annoyed by how they place their cup in the sink.
It’s not that you’ve turned into a spoiled brat. Your brain is simply doing exactly what it evolved to do for tens of thousands of years.
The Effect Every Marketer Knows (But Few Psychologists Explain in Plain Language)
In 1971, psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell coined the concept of hedonic adaptation. In simple terms: we get used to everything good and stop noticing it.
Together with colleagues (Brickman, Coates, and Janoff-Bulman), they published a legendary 1978 study that shook the foundation of how we understand satisfaction. They interviewed people who had won between $50,000 and $1 million in the lottery (huge money at the time) and compared them to people who had become paralyzed after devastating accidents.
The results were shocking:
- Lottery winners, one year later, were not significantly happier than the average person. The "high" had completely worn off.
- People with paralysis adapted remarkably well, returning to a level of happiness much closer to their pre-tragedy baseline than anyone predicted.
In other words, the brain very quickly “resets” both cosmic highs and devastating lows. It’s a biological protective mechanism: if our ancestors stayed in a state of bliss every time they ate a piece of mammoth, they’d have been eaten by saber-toothed tigers while distracted. And if every loss plunged us into permanent, unrecoverable depression, the species would have died out long ago.
The Hedonic Treadmill
Psychologists often refer to this phenomenon as the hedonic treadmill. The metaphor is perfect: You run faster to get better things, and the treadmill speeds up to match you. You stop running, and it still keeps going, making you feel like you’re falling behind. Even Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the father of “flow,” noted that without active engagement, our default state often drifts toward dissatisfaction.
Modern research confirms just how slippery this slope is.
In 2010, Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert (author of Stumbling on Happiness) published a landmark study in the journal Science. They tracked the real-time mood of thousands of people via a phone app. Their conclusion was startling: we spend almost 47% of our waking hours thinking not about what we’re doing right now, but about “what’s next,” “what happened yesterday,” or “why it’s not how I wanted it to be.”
They discovered that a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. These wandering thoughts are the strongest predictor of a bad mood, regardless of what you are actually doing.
So What Actually Works?
If the brain naturally adapts to the "good life," how do we hack the system? Here is where the science gets really interesting.
Experiences, Not Stuff
Research by Van Boven and Gilovich (2003) shows that money spent on experiences (travel, concerts, courses, dinner with friends) brings significantly longer-lasting happiness than money spent on material things. Why? Objects deteriorate and invite comparison (“the neighbor got a better TV”), whereas memories tend to get brighter and warmer over time. We retrospectively edit our experiences to make them part of our identity.
Gratitude Isn’t New-Age Nonsense — It’s Neurochemistry
In 2003, Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough ran a simple but profound experiment. One group wrote down five things they were grateful for each week. Another group wrote down five hassles or complaints. A third just listed neutral events.
After 10 weeks, the gratitude group was 25% happier, slept significantly better, and even reported fewer physical symptoms of illness. Why does this work? When you deliberately look for reasons to say “thank you,” the brain physically cannot stay focused on “I don’t have enough” at the same time. You are forcing the reticular activating system (RAS) to scan for positives.
Small Novelties Instead of Huge Goals
When we achieve a massive goal, the brain dumps a huge load of dopamine — and then adapts instantly. But when novelty comes in small, consistent doses, we stay in a state of mild excitement much longer. That’s why people who try something new every day (taking a different route home, listening to a new genre of music, cooking a new dish) score higher on life satisfaction than those passively waiting for the “big breakthrough.”
Meaning Beats Pleasure
Viktor Frankl understood this better than anyone in a concentration camp. Modern studies (e.g., Steger and Kashdan) back him up: when people feel their life has meaning beyond just “feeling good,” depression levels drop even in objectively tough circumstances. Pursuing "eudaimonia" (meaningful well-being) is more robust than pursuing "hedonia" (fleeting pleasure).
What to Do Tonight (Takes 7 Minutes)
You don’t need to meditate for an hour or write 108 gratitude points to see a change.
Just try one tiny experiment:
- Grab your phone or a physical notebook.
- Write down three things you have right now that you’re genuinely grateful for. Crucial rule: Do not write generic things like “health and family.” Be hyper-specific. Write: “the smell of the dark roast coffee this morning,” “the hilarious meme my friend sent at 2 PM,” or “the fact my legs were strong enough to carry me home today.”
- Then, write one thing you did slightly differently today (smiled at a stranger, listened to a song you hadn’t heard in 10 years, took a different street).
That’s it.
You just stepped off the hedonic treadmill for five minutes — and your brain noticed.
Because happiness isn’t a destination you’ll reach when “everything finally falls into place.” It’s a skill of noticing what’s already here — while it’s still here.
The more often you practice it, the less you’ll need the next iPhone to feel that life is actually a pretty damn cool thing.