Off the hedonic treadmill (self-indulgent but maybe helpful links?)

Being pelted by snow and birdseed.
Ben Folds - Luckiest

A key point of TBTSNBN* is that natural selection has "designed" us to be unsatisfied. (Video explanation; article about escaping. That's the end of the useful links.)

[Insert funny transition here.]

On this day in 1993, we legally formalized our wedding commitment from four months earlier. 

We didn't "get the piece of paper" back in 1993, as it cost $.
Ordered this one last December to register our marriage in Ireland so I'm allowed to be with Irish citizen Anne.

Winning the billions-to-one lottery of meeting my soulmate (and that a soulmate even existed for someone as messed-up me) was, as I emphasize over and over, incredibly unlikely. 

Yet given human nature, it would seem inevitable that I would revert to my baseline happiness (i.e., more un- than happy). 

And if you didn't take my suggestion to stop reading TBTSNBN with the chapter "A Personal Request from Me to You," you know things haven't been all rainbows and unicorns in the decades since.

But for some reason – including many modern medicines, especially Effexor following the events of 2021 – I have spent most of the past 31+ years vastly happier than my 24 years Before Anne. And despite health problems, the time since April 2022 (when I started TBTSNBN) has been shockingly good.  

(This is the main thing I'm unhappy about with the book - the last half of it reads as net suffering. I should do a digest version of just the fun parts [although I do try to inject humor into the "bad" chapters when possible].) 

I'm not going to claim some mystical insight or enlightenment. I will simply offer the fact that for the vast, vast majority of days since Oct. 23, 1992 - and every single day lately - I have had many moments of immense gratitude for my overwhelming, unlikely, and unreasonable good fortune.

*“Every one of your ancestors was good enough to beat out all the competition for that particular mate at just the right time. And then the offspring was strong and resourceful enough to be able to repeat the cycle. Everything – and I mean everything – about your ancestors had to be increasingly refined and relentlessly optimized for reproductive success. Otherwise, that less-than-optimized individual would have been tossed from the gene pool. If just one of your ancestors had taken their eye off the ball for even a second, someone more single-minded would have gotten in on the action. And then, sadly, someone else would be enjoying this entertaining and insightful book. (But they wouldn’t be nearly as smart or good looking as you.)

...

“Natural selection has, of course, programmed us to want to accumulate. In the evolutionary past, those with the most reproduced the most. But the happiness you get from “things” fades – we acclimate to everything new. Then we want more. Then the cycle repeats – the hedonic treadmill. Get off the treadmill, get rid of stuff, and look to buy memories instead.”