What it does to the treat

Everything so far has been about what the daily does to you. This chapter is about what it does to the treat, because the treat is the thing you're trying to protect, and the daily is the worst thing that can happen to it.

Leif Nelson and Tom Meyvis ran six studies in which people had pleasant experiences, music, a massage chair, with and without breaks. The breaks made the pleasant experiences more enjoyable, because they interrupted the wearing-down that happens when a pleasure continues, and people avoided the breaks anyway, because a break in a nice thing feels like a loss. An earlier book in this series, You didn't want it yesterday, uses this for possessions, and I'm using it for the daily. The daily is a pleasure with no breaks in it. It's the same glass, every day, for a year, and the wearing-down has had a year to work.

Kennon Sheldon and Sonja Lyubomirsky, following 481 students for three months after a positive change, found that the good feeling from a change is eroded by two things, the fading of the positive emotion and a rise in what people then aspire to, and is slowed by two others, continued appreciation of the thing and continued variety in how it's experienced. What did you expect it to fix, earlier in this series, uses this for big life changes. For the daily, it says something simple. A treat that's appreciated and varied keeps its pleasure. A treat that's routine and identical loses it.

So the daily has been eating the treat. The glass is less nice than it was because it's been every day. The episode is less gripping because it's the fourth tonight. The order is less exciting because the app knows what you want before you do. And the way to get the treat back isn't to give it up. It's to give it breaks, which is what Quoidbach's chocolate-free week did in chapter 7, and to make it something you can notice, which is what chapter 20 is about.

This is the argument I'd most like you to take from the book, because it isn't a sacrifice. A treat that comes three times a month is better than the same treat thirty times a month, not just in total, but each time. The Friday glass after a dry week is a different drink from the Friday glass after six others. Same bottle. Different evening. The daily doesn't give you more of the treat. It gives you less of it, more often, until the pleasure is gone and only the routine and the earning are left. Taking the treat back from the daily is the most pro-pleasure thing in this book.