The quiet resetting that happens after every arrival

Satisfaction has a short half life, and the interesting question is what you do with that.

Get what you wanted, and within a surprisingly short interval the new situation becomes the baseline against which everything is measured. The improvement you fought for stops registering as an improvement and starts registering as normal, and from that new normal a fresh set of dissatisfactions becomes visible. The step up reveals a step above it that you could not see from below. This is often described in gloomy terms, as though a person were trapped on a moving walkway, but the gloom is optional and mostly comes from expecting the walkway to stop.

It is worth noticing that the same resetting works in your favour more often than not. It is why difficulty becomes bearable, why a hard first year at anything becomes an ordinary second year, why the things that once seemed impossible become the things you do before lunch. The mechanism that dulls your pleasure in good outcomes is the same mechanism that dulls your distress at bad ones. You cannot have one without the other, and on balance most people would not trade.

The reasonable response is not to fight the resetting but to work with it. Some people keep a rough sense of where they were five years ago, not as a gratitude exercise but simply as a corrective to a memory that quietly rewrites the past to match the present. Others just accept that the pleasure of getting something is front loaded and brief, and plan accordingly. Neither approach makes satisfaction permanent. Nothing does. But both make it easier to see clearly what you actually have.