The Sweet Scent Fades

The goal is to be comfortable with any circumstance you find yourself in. Abundance or nothing at all.

Thank you for listening!

Take this reflection into the silence, and I'll see you next time.

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Transcript

My wife and I just got a Honda CR-V. Nothing fancy, we traded in my Toyota Tacoma because we're having a baby and the truck wasn't family-friendly.

Every time we hop in, we smell that sweet, fresh scent of a new car. It's nostalgic and feels great. But it's been a week now, and I am noticing that my brain is already normalizing it.

This happens with all material things. The dopamine starts flowing before you even buy anything. You're looking at options, thinking, "Oh my God, I'm going to get a new car, a new house, new clothes."

Then you make the purchase. The dopamine levels spike. You feel happy (or confuse it for happiness).

But then, within two or three weeks, boom. Your brain normalizes it. It becomes part of your daily routine. Not new anymore. And you drop back to your previous baseline.

This mind game fascinates me. Now, I pay attention to how my feelings evolve when buying stuff. Material possessions are ephemeral. The happiness they bring lasts only briefly. If you want to keep that high going, you need to keep buying more and more—what psychologists call the hedonic treadmill. You're running faster and faster but never actually getting anywhere.

Within just one week, the high is already fading away. The pattern is always the same with any material thing, maybe except bikes, bikes are fun.

And so, in times like this, I try to remind myself to be content regardless of the things I own or don't own. To try not to wish to own any more than I already have. To not depend upon “stuff” to feel joy and contentment. It reminds me of the words from Krishna to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita: "Free thyself from the pairs of opposites—the changeful things of finite life... Be free from worldly anxiety, and the fierce cravings for material possessions."

It takes real work to find contentment in just being. The goal is to be comfortable with any circumstance you find yourself in. Abundance or nothing at all.

The new car smell will eventually fade. But the contentment you find within yourself? That can last… if you truly free yourself from “the fierce cravings for material possessions.”