Get in the situation. You arrive at the office thinking that it will be just another Wednesday in March when suddenly your boss tells you that the company has decided to promote you and (in the process) double your salary. Not only that. While you are sharing the news with your colleagues you notice that your cell phone vibrates in your pocket, you take it out and find that that girl you have been pining for for months has just invited you to dinner. Dopamine through the roof. Endorphin rush. You feel like the king of mambo and it’s logical, right? After all, if happiness exists, it must be something very similar to that.
From 17th century France François de La Rochefoucauldan aristocrat who liked to fill pages with his reflections, has a message for you: “We are never as happy or as unhappy as we believe.”
Why do we do what we do? A question similar to that was asked in 17th century France by François de La Rochefoucauld, politician, aristocrat, writer and a keen moralist with a sharp wit. Answering it took time and giving shape to a fascinating work, Maximsa collection of short reflections with which the author basically seeks “portray the heart of man”. It’s curious what he says. And it is also curious how he says it, resorting to a perceptive, irreverent (sometimes even stark) tone, but in which sincerity prevails above all.
To show a button. When La Rochefoucauld tries to clarify what friendship is, he comes to the following conclusion: “It is nothing more than a pact, a reciprocal respect of interests and an exchange of favors; in short, a relationship in which self-love always aims to gain something.” Hard? No more than when you observe, in the same workthat “old people like to give good advice to console themselves for no longer being in a position to give bad examples.”
Searching for happiness. If there is an idea that is frequently repeated in Maxims It is that of happiness. What is it? How to achieve it? How to act before it? In trying to answer these questions, the French philosopher leaves reflections like this: “Happiness lies in our pleasure and not in things. We are happy for possessing what we love and not for possessing what others consider desirable.” And in case it wasn’t clear enough, insist a few pages later: “When peace is not found within oneself, it is useless to look for it outside.”
There is however a ‘maxim’ by La Rochefoucauld that resonates with a special forcefulness in the midst of 2026: “We are never as happy or unhappy as we think.” In it, the philosopher reminds us that it does not matter if we feel overwhelmed with pleasure by a promotion, a raise in salary or the prospect of a date with our partner. crush. Not even if we have low spirits. In both cases, it is most likely that the brain ‘deceives’ us, adulterating reality.
And is that true? To answer it, it is good to go back to the example with which we started this article. Imagine that you have actually just been promoted and your salary has multiplied by two. Does that guarantee you eternal happiness? Isn’t it likely that as the weeks go by you will adjust to your new position and salary? Same with your date. If you start a relationship, won’t that romance end up being incorporated into your ‘normal’? We don’t even have to go to such extreme examples. Doesn’t the rush you feel when you buy a car end up evaporating?
A few months ago the coach Hailey Magee shared his own experience in Medium. All her life Magee had dreamed of publishing a book, a goal she had fantasized about as a child. The day she closed a contract with a New York publishing house she felt ecstatic, but that feeling was short-lived. Within a few days his brain was occupied by much less edifying questions: Would the book be successful? Was it good enough? What tasks remained before you finished the manuscript?
“As I reached each new goal, the promised land vanished beneath my feet,” ironizes. The joys were ephemeral. They did not disappear or break down. They simply gave way to new objectives and purposes.
The “hedonic treadmill”. Magee’s experience is hardly surprising. It responds to a human characteristic that experts have known for quite some time: “hedonic adaptation”the tendency that leads us to return again and again to a state of relative and stable happiness. It doesn’t matter if something great or a misfortune happens to you. The normal thing is that you end up returning to a base feeling. Just as if you were moving on a treadmill.
“Even our biggest successes become our new normal and we end up chasing the next milestone just to feel the same,” explains the coach. This capacity for adaptation in which desires are modeled drives us to progress, but also represents a gun for those who seek to exploit our capacity to habituate ourselves to pleasure and the search for gratification.
Lottery or accident? It may sound abstract, but it is better understood by reviewing the experiment carried out in the 70s by Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell. For their test they chose a group of people who had won the lottery and another group of people who had been left in a wheelchair due to an accident. They then investigated how their happiness levels evolved.
What did they discover? Had the lottery winners’ feeling of happiness permanently increased while the second-place winners (those who had suffered serious injuries) experienced the opposite feeling?
Answer: no. “They found that study participants adapted to both positive and negative changes and their overall happiness tended to stabilize over time,” remember Magee before clarifying that this ‘hedonistic adaptation’ is the result of a series of psychological processes, which includes the capacity for “habituation”, which reduces our emotional response to stimuli that we repeatedly face.
The theory has received some criticismbut it helps to understand what La Rochefoucauld was referring to when he warned us that we are neither so happy when we feel full nor so unhappy when we feel depressed.
Be careful with expectations. The Frenchman’s words not only connect with how we face the circumstances that arise along the way. It is also interesting for those that appear in the future and generate expectations for us.
On that topic warned in 2024 Emmanuel Ferrario: “We focus too much on what we think we are going to feel and we underestimate our ability to adapt. When we want to predict how an event is going to affect us, our tendency is to see it in isolation, like tunnel vision. The incredible thing is that it happens to us with both positive and negative experiences.”
La Rochefoucauld already said it: it doesn’t matter what has happened to you, whether you feel exultant or your morale is low: you are neither as happy as you think when you feel full nor as miserable as when you feel like the world is ending.
Image | Wikipedia
Via | Trends
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