🌿 Our grass is just as green

Analyzing the why behind our tendency to want what others have

Why we think the grass is greener on the other side

Recently I had a conversation about our tendency (as human beings) to be complacent about our situations, and to complain about them and wish for a different situation. Greener grass and all. This is by no means a revelation, but it almost feels like a perpetual curse that befalls almost everyone. I may have a perfectly good functioning phone, if I see my friend donning the latest iPhone, there’s no doubt I’ll start having thoughts about buying a new phone. If I also happen to scratch my phone, no matter how small it is, I’m probably going to pay a disproportionate amount of attention to the scratch, forgetting that it’s still a well-functioning phone and it does everything it’s supposed to do. Similarly, we may live in a beautiful country with amazing health care and lots of other perks, but sometimes it feels easier to focus on all the things that are going south, as opposed to the positive things.

There are some psychological factors that can explain this phenomenon pretty well. But does this mean that we’re doomed to always think this way?

Negativity Bias

We tend to focus and mindlessly dwell on the negative, more than the positive. This means that one small bad thing can very easily ruin an otherwise good day (this cockroach analogy explains it really well). Because of this, it can be difficult to appreciate all the good things around us, and it becomes very tempting to think about what the ‘other side’ has to offer. Things always look much shinier when we can’t have them, especially when we perceive what we have to be inferior.

Hedonic Adaptation

The word ‘adaptation’ always reminds me of primary school, when I learned about how humans were so good at adapting to new situations and environments. Hedonic adaptation kind of has a similar flavor. It means that we tend to get used to positive or negative events and we return to our stable happiness levels relatively quickly. For example, right now your goal might be to get a raise. As soon as you get that raise, your expectations and desires will adjust around your new baseline. Maybe you’ll start wanting more expensive things and you’ll start to have a bigger goal. Because of this, your happiness level might not actually increase by much. In other words, we adapt to having nice things around us and it can make us take these things for granted.

We want what we can’t have

Known by the cool kids as FOMO, we essentially hate losing out on things. Academics call this Loss Aversion. Studies have shown that we feel the pain of losing things twice as much as the pleasure we feel when gaining something. These feelings are so powerful that our minds become so focused on doing what we can to avoid this pain. When exposed to something we seemingly can’t have, our desire to have that thing will only grow stronger.

These psychological factors do suggest that focusing on the negative rather than the positive is a somewhat common response, but it’s also helpful to think about these things once in a while to help us put things in perspective, and that what we think we want might not always make us the happiest 🧐

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