There is always a “next thing”.
The next promotion. The next trip. The next relationship milestone. The next purchase. The next win. The next version of our body, home, career or life.
We tell ourselves, often without realising it: Once I get there, I’ll be happy. And sometimes, we do get there.
For a while, it feels incredible. Then something strange happens. The new salary becomes our normal salary. The new iPhone becomes just our phone.
The holiday we spent months looking forward to becomes a collection of photos on our camera roll. And soon enough, there is another next thing until the other next thing.
Psychology has a term for this cycle: the hedonic treadmill. It describes our tendency to adapt to changes in our circumstances.
Things that once brought us enormous excitement eventually become familiar, and our expectations shift with them. So we keep running towards the next source of happiness, only to find ourselves adjusting to that too.
The treadmill is particularly difficult to recognise because running on it can look a lot like progress. Many of us have been sprinting for years without realising that we are not actually reaching a destination.
We reach one milestone only to replace it with another. We earn more, want more, achieve more, yet the place where we imagine happiness to be remains somewhere just ahead of us.
And so we run faster.
We are taught to want more from life. And today, we do not only see what we want; we are constantly shown what everyone else has.
Someone is always travelling somewhere better, earning more, getting engaged, buying a home, transforming their body, or seemingly living the life we are still working towards.
So how do we step off without giving up ambition altogether?
An ancient Hindu idea offers an answer. In Vedantic philosophy, Sat-Chit-Ananda is often translated as being, consciousness, and bliss.
Sat is being, that which truly is. Chit is consciousness or awareness, our ability to observe our thoughts and experiences. And Ananda is bliss.
However, the term “bliss” itself often elicits incorrect interpretations. Ananda is not the temporary high of getting what we want.
It points towards something quieter and steadier: a sense of completeness that is not entirely dependent on what we acquire, achieve, or become. That very distinction changes the conversation.
Sat-Chit-Ananda does not necessarily ask us to stop wanting things. We can build careers, make money, fall in love, travel, buy nice things, indulge in food we like, and work towards becoming better versions of ourselves.
It simply asks us not to confuse those things with the source of our wholeness. Because the problem is not desire itself. It is the distorted belief that happiness lives on the other side of desire.
The belief that once we fix this, achieve that, or become someone slightly different, we will finally arrive.
Yet some of life’s most joyful moments seem to suggest otherwise.
Sitting around a table long after dinner is finished. Laughing until your stomach hurts. Walking without checking your phone. Holding someone you love. Waking up with nowhere you immediately need to be.
Nothing has been achieved in those moments. Nothing has been acquired. But even so, something feels complete.
Maybe this is where Ananda becomes less of an ancient philosophical idea and more of a practice for modern life.
We do not have to stop running. We just have to notice when we are asking the next achievement, possession, or milestone to provide something it was never capable of providing permanently.
There will always be another goal. Another upgrade. Another place to reach. Perhaps stepping off the hedonic treadmill does not mean we stop moving forward, but that we stop believing happiness is always one step ahead of us.