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The Person and the Inner World

The Grass Is Always Greener

Picture this: you get home, scarf down a bowl of pasta, flop onto your favorite couch, and prepare for some blissful, mindless binge-watching. Life is good!

Andrey Zarinsh · Maria Evilkut20 min readI-11-X01
Article contents

Introduction: The Evening Your Couch Suddenly Became a Loser

Picture this: you get home, scarf down a bowl of pasta, flop onto your favorite couch, and prepare for some blissful, mindless binge-watching. Life is good! But then an idle thumb scrolls through social media: a former classmate just bought a villa with a terrace, a colleague relocated to Bali to code beneath the palms, and your second cousin has just launched her third startup.

And just like that, it's over. Within twenty minutes, your comfy couch turns into a monument to your own inadequacy, your apartment feels like an undersized dog crate, and your paycheck looks like an insult. The funniest part? Absolutely nothing happened to your couch during those twenty minutes. It didn't break, your square footage didn't shrink, and nobody slashed your salary. The only thing that changed is the fairytale you began telling yourself inside your own head.

Welcome to the social comparison trap. Analogous to "focalism"—the narrowing of attention onto a single focal event when predicting future feelings, as studied by Timothy Wilson and colleagues—you fixate on someone else's curated highlight reel (a tiny, polished showroom of an entire life) and mentally paint endless, unbounded bliss across the canvas behind it. Meanwhile, you know your own life in full, glorious, unfiltered detail: dirty dishes, lower back aches, and grueling deadlines. Yet you imagine their life as if buying a house magically banished leaky faucets, hangovers, and sleep deprivation forever. Spoiler: it didn't.

Chapter 1. Satiation, Adaptation, and Shifting Baselines: Not the Same Animal

Suppose you actually bought that house with the terrace. For the first few weeks, you sip coffee at dawn like royalty, feeling entirely on top of the world. A season later, the terrace is still right there, but the ceremonial awe has vanished: now it’s just wooden planks under your feet as you trudge along with a mop. Right on cue, your brain serves up an inspired deduction: "Something must be wrong with this house; I need to find another one."

Hit the brakes. At this precise junction, people routinely dump three fundamentally distinct processes into a single bucket:

  • Satiation: the straightforward drop in pleasure that comes from repeating the exact same sensory experience. You can play a hit song until you're sick of it, and your favorite dessert stops feeling like a divine revelation by the tenth bite (though it doesn't necessarily have to reach physical nausea). Notably, in experiments by Jeff Galak and colleagues, simply reminding participants of the variety of experiences they had previously enjoyed helped them rekindle their enjoyment of the repeated activity. The difference lay in how they mentally categorized their consumption history, not in some fatal breakdown of their taste buds.
  • Hedonic Adaptation: the emotional storm sparked by new life circumstances simply losing its punch over time. This isn’t an immutable iron law mandating an inevitable rebound to a single, universal "happiness baseline" for everyone; it merely reflects a general muting of that initial, intense reaction.
  • Aspiration Creep: an entirely separate circus where the goalposts of what counts as "enough" quietly shift. Yesterday, a dry roof overhead was plenty; today, that same corner without floor-to-ceiling panoramic windows feels like a personal tragedy.

These processes can easily overlap, but none automatically triggers the others. Yes, Kennon Sheldon and Sonja Lyubomirsky tested a model of emotional dampening and rising aspirations over a three-month study tracking 476 students and found supporting evidence. But that represents support for a specific model within a student cohort, not an inescapable verdict condemning every improvement in your life to futility.

The emotional intensity of an experience is not equivalent to the objective value of the upgrade.

Just because you no longer squeal with delight every time you enter your quiet bedroom doesn't mean you need to scramble for a palace mortgage. The bedroom still lets you get a good night's sleep. And a steadfast partner doesn’t lose value just because the honeymoon phase gave way to peeling potatoes together.

Chapter 2. Wanting ≠ Liking: A Neurobiological Bait-and-Switch

Perhaps our most seductive self-deception is: "If I crave this so desperately, I'll be in pure seventh heaven once it's finally mine."

In their seminal review of the neurobiology of addiction and reward, Kent Berridge and Terry Robinson laid it out plainly: within the brain, the "wanting" system and the "liking" system are driven by distinct mechanisms operating on partially separable neural circuitry. (There is no need to diagnose casual shoppers with clinical addiction based on this paper; the review discussed broader reward mechanisms, including addiction, but the core distinction is deeply revealing).

The human brain is fully capable of obsessively lusting after an object, keeping you up until 3 AM reading teardown reviews of luxury mechanical watches. You purchase one, unbox it… and within three days, it's just telling the time. You expected the timepiece to transform you into an effortlessly charismatic dynamo; instead, it simply ticks. A tool can perform its function flawlessly without guaranteeing a repair to your self-esteem.

Chapter 3. The Other Side of the Fence and the Itch That Follows

If you believe boredom has been conclusively proven to be nature's grand evolutionary whip designed to push humanity toward greatness, slow down: Bench and Lench offered a coherent theoretical model through a literature review, not an empirical truth etched in stone. We commit a similar stretch when drafting Leon Festinger into our consumer therapy: the man was writing about how we evaluate our opinions and abilities under conditions of uncertainty, not explaining why you desperately need the exact same high-end hair dryer an influencer waved at the camera.

Thorstein Veblen deserves a fairer shake, too. Conspicuous consumption and social signaling can comfortably coexist with a winter coat's plain utilitarian warmth rather than obliterating it—a garment can easily serve as a status piece while still keeping you warm in a blizzard. And finally, Luttmer and his neighbors: his work documented a statistical association in observational data while controlling for household income, rather than unveiling a universal law that a wealthy neighbor inevitably makes every human on Earth miserable. Sometimes, a sleek sports car parked next door is just someone else's car, not a personal existential insult.

Ask yourself frankly: if absolutely no one could ever know you bought this, would you still want it? If the answer is "no, I need it to be seen," don't rush to dump ashes on your head in self-flagellation. The desire for recognition is entirely human. Just weigh the actual price tag: are you genuinely prepared to grind for two full years just to purchase five seconds of an acquaintance's nodding approval?

Chapter 4. Targeting, Microtargeting, and the Myth of Hypnosis

Marketers would love nothing more than for us to believe in their supernatural powers, but let's leave telepathy out of it. Sandra Matz’s field studies (three distinct trials evaluated on real-world clicks) demonstrated psychological targeting effects that were tightly bounded by specific conditions, not some master remote control for the human psyche. In 2021, Lorenz-Spreen and colleagues assessed how well people could detect advertising targeted at them—they were measuring discernment and awareness, not documenting universal consumer helplessness or stripped retail shelves.

More recently, a 2025 paper by Carrella and colleagues zeroed in on political advertising and subjective perceptions of persuasiveness: while microtargeting retained an edge even when participants were explicitly informed that the messaging was personalized, this is hardly proof that ordinary passersby can be puppet-mastered into voting or panic-buying flat irons on command. Persuasion can be transparent, above-board, and legitimate; algorithms sometimes simply point you toward something you genuinely needed; and casting oneself as the helpless victim of a sinister mastermind is undeniably convenient, but scientifically unwarranted.

Crucially: influence is not automatically predatory manipulation. When an architect asks detailed questions about your morning routine to design a practical kitchen, or when a lecturer delivers ironclad arguments, that is healthy communication and persuasion. Manipulation begins when someone leverages artificial urgency, manufactured shame, and strikes at your sense of worth: "If you don't buy this discounted course right this second, you will forever remain a timid failure who's too terrified to change their life." That isn't selling education; it's holding your dignity hostage.

Interlude: Homemade Fulfillment Without a Recipe Book

Before throwing your wallet out the window in the name of ascetic purity, look to Edward Deci and Richard Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory. Their concept of "autonomy" doesn’t denote the sullen isolation of a hermit in the wilderness; it describes a felt internal endorsement of what you are doing and why. It operates alongside competence and relatedness, but these elements constitute a psychological needs model, not a certified checklist of "spiritually pure" purchases. The content of a life goal and the underlying motivation driving it are fundamentally different things. Kasser and Ryan found an association between lower well-being and placing financial success at the very center of one's aspirations. That is not proof that earning a healthy income will inherently damage you—breathe easy, money has not yet been classified as toxic waste.

Chapter 5. What the Beards of Antiquity Actually Thought

When attempting to escape consumerism, people often swing toward extreme simplifications. Let’s disentangle the ancients instead of mashing them into a generic blend:

  • Epicurus never advocated starving inside a barrel. He simply suggested using your head to distinguish between natural desires and hollow, vain ones. His aim wasn't perpetual bliss, but aponia (the absence of bodily pain) and ataraxia (freedom from mental turmoil). He urged looking at the fallout: if a single night of revelry results in a week of migraines and debt, what on earth was the point?
  • Seneca and the Stoics reminded us that fleeing to Rome or a seaside resort means dragging your restless mind along for the ride ("You need a change of soul, not a change of climate"). But Stoicism represents an ethical discipline for re-evaluating our relationship with external circumstances, not an empirically proven claim that changing your environment never helps anyone under any circumstance.
  • Buddhism (for example, the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta) speaks of craving (taṇhā) flitting from object to object and generating distress (dukkha). But collapsing the Buddhist framework of the Four Noble Truths and liberation into the pedestrian tip to "browse fewer clearance sales" strips the tradition of its profound philosophical and religious substance.

Chapter 6. Change the Scenery, but Keep Your Head

Comprehensive 2023 data on income and subjective well-being across a large US sample revealed a complex, non-uniform picture: the relationship between income growth and well-being varies across distinct subsets, including the presence of an emotional plateau for certain groups. These are correlations, offering no ironclad contractual guarantee of happiness at the checkout register. Yet pretending that physical reality doesn't matter is just as silly: altering your material surroundings can genuinely make life easier. That doesn't justify a blanket prescription to simultaneously strike it rich, quit your job, flee to the coastline, and ostentatiously set your meditation cushion on fire. A new home in a convenient neighborhood really can save two hours of bumper-to-bumper traffic and hand you back your sleep, even if nobody can promise perpetual euphoria or boundless vitality to every buyer. Nor is your social media feed an uninhabitable wasteland: its impact differs wildly from person to person, and discovering genuine inspiration or a useful insight there remains entirely possible.

And practicing gratitude for past experiences does not obligate you to stay stuck in a bad situation.

Finale: Four Questions and a Clear-Headed Postscript

Whenever the restless itch for novelty flares up, run it through four filters without the mystic fanfare:

  • What precisely will change about your average Tuesday: your time, your rest, your relationships, your workload? Would you still want this if there were nobody looking in the mirror to impress?
  • Have you accounted for the full price tag—maintenance, the anxiety of getting a scratch, the learning curve, lost hours, the trade-offs, and the inevitable headaches?
  • What are the realistic alternatives: could you rent, borrow, or test-drive it first? Does this solve an actual problem, or is it merely putting a temporary band-aid on a vague ache for an idealized life?
  • Can you hit pause—not bound to arbitrary rules like "exactly fourteen days," but just long enough for the initial burst of excitement to settle?

If the urge persists after cooling off, that is useful information, but it is still neither a guarantee of brilliant judgment nor an order from above demanding you swipe your card. Conversely, an urge that evaporates into thin air doesn't prove you were puppet-mastered by shadow algorithms. Every decision—whether you plunge into sweeping change or sensibly leave things untouched—can only be tested by actual conditions and long-term results. The familiar sequence of "compare, buy, adapt, and slump" is merely one possible script among many, and its links can break at any point. The grass being greener on the other side can have more than one cause. Recognizing these cognitive snares won't transform us into bulletproof sages or automatically preserve our sanity—but at the very least, it lets us smile at our own predictability before we click "Place Order" once again.

Archival translation note. Research descriptions and statements about source checks below belong to the accepted Russian archive. They are preserved as the original article’s record, not as claims of fresh verification for this English package. Quotations are translated from that Russian text; their wording has not been newly checked against the named English editions.

“You need a change of soul, not of climate.”

Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius, Letter 28, §1. Translated for the original article from Richard M. Gummere’s English translation [1].

“Not every pleasure should be chosen.”

Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus, §129. Translated for the original article from Robert Drew Hicks’s translation [17].

Connections Between Traditions and Research

This map shows comparable questions. Similarity of questions does not mean identity of teachings or experimental confirmation of a philosophical position.

Question Research line Philosophical comparison and boundary
Why does joy fade? Adaptation in Sheldon and Lyubomirsky; satiation in Galak and colleagues. Buddhist craving describes a different, religious level of the problem and cannot be equated with adaptation.
How does a standard of sufficiency arise? Festinger’s social comparison; Luttmer’s relative income. Veblen analyzes the social meaning of consumption and status. This is social theory, not the neurobiology of desire.
Does desire guarantee satisfaction? Berridge and Robinson’s wanting/liking distinction. Epicurus proposes evaluating consequences. An ethical argument is not an early version of neuroscience.
What changes after moving? Focalism in affective forecasting. Seneca’s Letter 28 asks about the traveler’s own condition; it does not deny the importance of living conditions.
What makes a goal fit a person? Self-determination; goal content and motives for achievement. Epicurean measure in desire raises the question of enough, but is not identical to the psychological needs model.
Where is the boundary of influence? Personalized persuasion; recognition of microtargeting. Retaining the ability to consider and reject an offer is used here as an authorial criterion of respect for choice.

Primary Texts and Research

Each work is listed with its role and the level of checking available in the original archive. “Abstract” means only claims available in the authors’ abstract were used; details of methods and effect sizes from the full text are not claimed. These are inherited archive records, not newly performed checks.

  1. Seneca. Moral Letters to Lucilius, Letter 28, §§1–4. English translation by Richard M. Gummere, 1917. Text. Epigraph and discussion of moving; the relevant passage was checked in the original article.
  2. Wilson T. D., Wheatley T., Meyers J. M., Gilbert D. T., Axsom D. Focalism: A Source of Durability Bias in Affective Forecasting. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2000. Abstract. Errors in predicting emotional duration.
  3. Sheldon K. M., Lyubomirsky S. The Challenge of Staying Happier: Testing the Hedonic Adaptation Prevention Model. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2012. Author manuscript. Archive check: abstract and relevant model passages; adaptation, aspirations, variety.
  4. Galak J., Redden J. P., Kruger J. Variety Amnesia: Recalling Past Variety Can Accelerate Recovery from Satiation. Journal of Consumer Research, 2009. Text. Archive check: result description and relevant passages; memory of variety and satiation.
  5. Bench S. W., Lench H. C. On the Function of Boredom. Behavioral Sciences, 2013. Article. Archive check: available portions of the theoretical review; boredom and searching for alternatives.
  6. Festinger L. A Theory of Social Comparison Processes. Human Relations, 1954. Publication. Classic theory of evaluating opinions and abilities through comparison; archive bibliography and basic-premise checks.
  7. Luttmer E. F. P. Neighbors as Negatives: Relative Earnings and Well-Being. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2005; working paper 2004. Author abstract at NBER. Relative position and well-being; observational data.
  8. Veblen T. The Theory of the Leisure Class, 1899, chapters II and IV. Primary text. English original; chapters on pecuniary emulation and conspicuous consumption.
  9. Berridge K. C., Robinson T. E. Liking, Wanting, and the Incentive-Sensitization Theory of Addiction. American Psychologist, 2016. Author manuscript. Archive check: abstract and available passages; motivation/pleasure distinction, qualified by the addiction context.
  10. Matz S. C., Kosinski M., Nave G., Stillwell D. J. Psychological Targeting as an Effective Approach to Digital Mass Persuasion. PNAS, 2017. Publication. Archive check: abstract and available passages. Advertising personalization without generalization to universal control of behavior.
  11. Salganik M. J., Dodds P. S., Watts D. J. Experimental Study of Inequality and Unpredictability in an Artificial Cultural Market. Science, 2006. Abstract. Experiment on the influence of information about others’ music choices.
  12. Lorenz-Spreen P. et al. Boosting People’s Ability to Detect Microtargeted Advertising. Scientific Reports, 2021. Article. Archive check: available result description and limitations; recognizing personalized advertising does not equal resistance to persuasion.
  13. Carrella F., Simchon A., Edwards M., Lewandowsky S. Warning People That They Are Being Microtargeted Fails to Eliminate Persuasive Advantage. Communications Psychology, 2025. Article. Archive check: available result description and discussion; limits of warning effects.
  14. Meier A., Johnson B. K. Social Comparison and Envy on Social Media: A Critical Review. Current Opinion in Psychology, 2022. Abstract and main propositions. Heterogeneous findings and context; the review is not counted as a separate experiment.
  15. Kasser T., Ryan R. M. A Dark Side of the American Dream: Correlates of Financial Success as a Central Life Aspiration. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1993. Abstract. Centrality of financial success among goals; values distinguished from actual income.
  16. Ryan R. M., Deci E. L. Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-Being. American Psychologist, 2000. Author PDF. Archive check: relevant sections on needs and autonomous motivation.
  17. Epicurus. Letter to Menoeceus, §§127–132. English translation by Robert Drew Hicks. Primary text. Distinguishing desires and consequences; the Russian quotation was translated for the original article.
  18. Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, Saṃyutta Nikāya 56.11. English translation by Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu. Text. Archive check: craving within the Four Noble Truths; a religious primary text.
  19. Killingsworth M. A., Kahneman D., Mellers B. Income and Emotional Well-Being: A Conflict Resolved. PNAS, 2023. Abstract. Heterogeneous income–emotional well-being association; against a universal saturation threshold.
  20. Van Boven L., Gilovich T. To Do or to Have? That Is the Question. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2003. Abstract. Experiential versus material purchases; average results do not prescribe individual choices.
  21. Sheldon K. M., Ryan R. M., Deci E. L., Kasser T. The Independent Effects of Goal Contents and Motives on Well-Being: It’s Both What You Pursue and Why You Pursue It. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2004. Abstract. Goal content distinguished from reasons for pursuing it.

Tags

Desire, needs, social comparison, envy, inspiration, novelty, boredom, satiation, hedonic adaptation, aspirations, satisfaction, affective forecasting, focalism, pleasure, motivation, advertising, marketing, microtargeting, influence, manipulation, autonomy, attention, status, conspicuous consumption, material conditions, self-determination, Epicurus, Seneca, Buddhism, everyday life.

About the Authors

Andrey Zarinsh is the author and founder of United Wisdom. He explores inner transformation, the unity of traditions, intercultural dialogue, and contemporary spiritual discipline.

Instagram: @andrey.zarinsh

Maria Evilkut is a coauthor of United Wisdom. Alongside research, she seeks to test these ideas in practice and observe how principles of unity and mutual understanding work in real life between people and cultures.

Instagram: @ilkutki

References Inherited from the Archive

These links accompanied the archived original and have not been newly verified.