How Did We Reach the Point Where It Takes So Much to Make Us Happy?
How Did We Reach the Point Where It Takes So Much to Make Us Happy?
How Did We Reach the Point Where It Takes So Much to Make Us Happy?
Once, a child received a bicycle and remained excited about it for months. Today we can watch a child open a gift that was anticipated for weeks, become excited for ten minutes, and then ask what else there is. But this is not a problem limited to children. A person waits years to replace a car, and after a month it is simply “the car.” A family takes an expensive vacation, and within two days begins checking where to travel next time. We are surrounded by more choices, more screens, more restaurants, more entertainment, and more stimulation than ever, yet sometimes it seems harder to become excited. How did it happen that the more ways we have to enjoy ourselves, the more we need in order to feel that we enjoyed anything?
Against this reality stands an almost unbelievable description by the sages: “One who has not seen the rejoicing at the place of the water-drawing has never seen rejoicing in his life” (Babylonian Talmud, Sukkah 51a). The Mishnah describes an enormous celebration in the Temple: tall golden candelabra, light illuminating the courtyards of Jerusalem, pious people and men of good deeds dancing with torches, Levites playing harps, lyres, cymbals, and many musical instruments (Mishnah, Sukkah 5:1-4). And what stood at the center of all this joy? Not gold, not rare wine, and not luxurious food. Water.
The sages connect this celebration to drawing water for the water libation on Sukkot. Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi expounds the verse, “You shall draw water with joy from the springs of salvation” (Isaiah 12:3), and from here comes the name of the celebration (Jerusalem Talmud, Sukkah 5:1). The Gemara describes the water libation upon the altar and the details of the mitzvah (Babylonian Talmud, Sukkah 48b). On the festival when the world is judged concerning water, as the Mishnah teaches, “And on the Festival they are judged concerning water” (Mishnah, Rosh Hashanah 1:2), Israel knows how to transform the drawing of the most ordinary substance into the center of a joy for which the sages find no parallel.
This is striking because water is precisely the kind of thing that is difficult to become excited about when it is abundant. A person does not wake up in the morning and marvel, “There is water in the faucet.” The faucet is simply opened. No one reports to the family in the evening that six glasses of water were successfully consumed that day. The things we encounter every day become transparent. Yet if a person spends hours without water, that same glass that no one would photograph becomes the thing desired more than anything else.
Moses warns of this mechanism when describing the Land of Israel: “For the Lord your God is bringing you to a good land, a land of streams of water, springs and depths coming forth in valley and mountain” (Deuteronomy 8:7). Immediately after the description of abundance comes the warning: “lest you eat and be satisfied... and your heart become proud and you forget” (Deuteronomy 8:12-14). The Torah is not concerned only with scarcity. It is concerned also with what abundance can do to our ability to see abundance. Once a good thing becomes constant, we may stop experiencing it as good.
Psychology calls this phenomenon hedonic adaptation. When a positive change occurs in life, pleasure may rise, but over time we become accustomed to part of the change and the new experience becomes more ordinary. Research by Philip Brickman and colleagues was among the early work that drew attention to the power of human adaptation, and later studies by Sonja Lyubomirsky, Kennon Sheldon, and others examined how adaptation to positive experiences can gradually reduce their emotional impact.
This matters because we tend to misinterpret the decline in excitement. I buy something I wanted greatly, become accustomed to it, and conclude that I need the next thing. I take a good vacation, the experience ends, and I begin searching for a larger vacation. My salary is raised, after a few months the new amount becomes normal, and I am convinced that another raise will solve the feeling. A race develops in which we repeatedly increase the intensity of the stimulus instead of restoring our ability to feel.
King Solomon already described this trap: “One who loves money will not be satisfied with money, and one who loves abundance will not be satisfied with increase” (Ecclesiastes 5:9). The problem is not necessarily that the person does not have enough. Sometimes the mechanism itself does not know how to say “enough.” Every addition briefly shifts the reference point, and after a short while it becomes the new floor from which the next addition is requested.
The sages offer a different measure: “Who is rich? One who rejoices in his portion” (Pirkei Avot 4:1). This does not mean that a person should settle for little because of a lack of ambition. A person may develop, earn, and enjoy the world. The question is whether the ability to rejoice depends on something new appearing every time. One who can enjoy only what has not yet been acquired condemns himself to a state in which every achievement loses value the moment it becomes his.
Research on savoring points to another possibility. We can increase our awareness of a positive experience already occurring, linger over it, and give it space in consciousness rather than immediately moving to the next thing. Fred Bryant and Joseph Veroff described savoring as the ability to direct attention toward positive experiences and intensify the way they are processed. This sounds simple, but in modern life it is almost a countercultural skill. We photograph a meal before tasting it, check messages during a walk, and begin planning the next vacation before the current one has ended.
The blessing “Shehakol nihyah bidvaro” over a glass of water is a small example of a different world. Halachically, the blessing is not a psychological exercise but a blessing over enjoyment, and the sages established that a person may not enjoy this world without a blessing (Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 35a). Yet the human effect of the blessing is interesting: before the most automatic action, the person pauses for a second and acknowledges that something is happening here. The water did not change. Attention changed.
This is true far beyond water. A person can live for years with a good spouse and stop seeing the goodness because it has become familiar. A parent can hear the children come home every evening without understanding that one day that noise will be deeply missed. A person can wake up on two functioning legs, breathe without pain, go to work, and speak with a friend, and all of it can pass beneath the radar because none of it is new. Sometimes happiness is not absent. It has simply become too familiar for us to notice.
This is not a call to manufacture artificial excitement over every glass of water. Joy a person forces himself to feel is not necessarily joy. The question is different: have we built a life in which only the exceptional can penetrate our awareness? If an ordinary meal is no longer enjoyable without a restaurant, a conversation is not interesting without a screen in the background, a trip is not exciting without an extraordinary destination, and a festival is not a festival without a production, perhaps the world has not become poorer. Perhaps our stimulation threshold has simply risen.
This may be one reason the rejoicing at the place of the water-drawing can speak so powerfully to a generation that possesses so much. The sages describe immense joy centered on the simple act of drawing water for a mitzvah. They did not need water to be rare in order for it to be precious. They knew how to see meaning in something the entire world uses every day.
Perhaps this year, before asking what else we lack in order to be happy, we should make the opposite kind of list for a moment: what has been present in our lives for so long that we have stopped feeling it? Who is the person whose presence we now take for granted? Which health, friendship, family, livelihood, or ability has become background scenery? Not in order to persuade ourselves that everything is perfect, but so that we do not lose what is good simply because it stopped being new.
A poor person sometimes needs more. A truly rich person also needs the ability to feel what is already present. The rejoicing at the water-drawing reminds us that a person can stand before simple water and experience immense joy. Perhaps not because they had more than we have, but because they still knew how to see water.