In 1978, psychologist Philip Brickman published a study that forever changed happiness research. His team interviewed lottery winners and asked them to rate the pleasure they found in everyday activities-like having coffee or a conversation.
The winners rated these simple pleasures significantly lower than a control group.
The research also included a group who had recently been paralyzed in accidents. The startling finding: accident victims rated their morning coffee higher than the millionaires did.
Brickman identified two key mechanisms. First, contrast: a massive win makes ordinary good things seem insignificant by comparison. Second, adaptation: our nervous systems normalize new circumstances. This concept became known as the hedonic treadmill.
Interviews revealed winners lost friends, faced family requests for loans, and struggled with newfound purposelessness. One noted that after the win, every subsequent good thing-a spouse's raise, a child's report card-felt diminished.
Later research confirmed that big wins do increase life satisfaction, but Brickman's core insight endures: sudden wealth shifts the reference point from which daily pleasures are judged. The trap isn't that money causes unhappiness, but that it dims the very joys people imagine it will unlock.
In a final, haunting detail, the control group-eating the same ordinary breakfast-gave it a higher pleasure rating. Nobody had promised them anything, and the toast was, apparently, better.