A lot of people think their life is terrible because of the hedonic treadmill. You get used to how great your life is. No one had a hot shower until 50 years ago.

So I try to do this thing. When you stand in a hot shower, just for a moment go, well, no one you admire from 100 years ago had this simple pleasure in life.

We are in the top percentile in terms of the luck that we’ve had. The lives we live, the calorific intake we just take for granted, the fact that our children don’t die in the first year, modern medicine, the entertainment we get. We’re living like kings.

And yet life has never been objectively better and subjectively worse, because the nature of humanity is that our desires are mimetic.

So we’ve got this thing where we sort of ask, how happy are you? Well, it’s your quality of life minus envy. That’s how happy you are. And it’s easy to look at everyone else and how they’re doing and not take pleasure in what you have.