Can You Even Feel Anything Anymore? Unpacking Our Endless Pursuit of Pleasure

Recently, a friend introduced me to the term “dopamine chasing”, and when I say introduced, what I really mean is, accused me of it.

She’s not wrong. In my search for… something—be that content to feed the ever-ravenous social media machine, or a sense of, if not meaning, then perhaps expansiveness—I have developed an insatiable appetite for experiences.

Sometimes it feels good, like I’m Mario jumping on toadstools to boost my reserves, except instead of toadstools, I’m collecting experiences. I imagine they’ll enhance my life; make me stronger, more interesting, better travelled, better experienced — whatever that means.

Lately, though, I’ve started feeling more like a lab rat, banging my paw against the reward lever even when it fails to spit out whatever got me onto this course in the first place.

I notice it on a micro level when I instinctively reach for my phone as a treat, and on a macro level when I plan trips of a lifetime. I’ve written before about treating travel as both an escape hatch from the ordinariness of life and a way of returning to that life as a better version of myself. It was on one such trip, which, though objectively extraordinary, somehow left me a little flat, that I started wondering what exactly I was after.

I’m hardly alone. Mastercard data shows that experiences now account for 23.3% of UK consumer spending, while 88% of Britons say they’re willing to cut back on “things” to afford more of them.

We’re a nation of truffle hunters, sniffing out the next thing that might make us feel something. From Arctic cruises and safaris to fully immersive brand worlds, we’re chasing bigger experiences, more intense emotions and increasingly elaborate ways to feel alive. But what does this relentless pursuit of pleasure tell us about the emotional state of modern life?

The obvious answer is that we’ve all fried our dopamine receptors. Dopamine has become cultural shorthand for almost every modern compulsion: why we scroll, shop, snack, swipe. We talk about dopamine hits, detoxes and addiction as though somewhere inside our brains laps a rapidly depleting reservoir of pleasure that we keep fecklessly draining.

“We often talk about pleasure as if it were one thing,” says Dr Eva Periche-Tomas, a clinical psychologist and senior researcher at the University of Oxford. In reality, she explains, reward involves several distinct processes: anticipating something, wanting or pursuing it, and actually enjoying it when it happens. Crucially, “these can come apart”. This goes some way to explaining the disconnect we can feel when we’ve spent months planning a holiday, wedding or night out, only to find the event doesn’t live up to our expectations.

Why Doesn’t Anything Hit Like It Used To?

There’s an even more inconvenient feature of the human brain that puts the kibosh on holding onto that post-holiday glow, or feeling satisfied for any length of time: humans are exceptionally good at getting used to things.

Psychologists call this hedonic adaptation. Professor Sonja Lyubomirsky, a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside, has spent decades studying it. She also has a really good example of how it showed up in her own life. Despite being almost blind for many years, within a fortnight of having laser eye surgery, she adapted to her new, almost perfect vision.

Apparently, whether it’s those shoes you’ve been saving for or the miracle of sight, no matter how new, shiny, thrilling or, in Lyubomirsky’s case, legitimately life-enhancing, the emotional impact tends to diminish as it becomes part of ordinary life. So we rats start chasing the next fix.

This seems like a cruel component of life, and I was quick to decry “late-stage capitalism!”, but Lyubomirsky explains that always looking for the next thing isn’t necessarily a design flaw.

From an evolutionary perspective, a species that stayed content every time it secured food, shelter or a mate might not have been particularly motivated to seek anything else. Adaptation keeps us moving. The problem is that the same machinery operates when the “next thing” is no longer survival, but another restaurant reservation, purchase, trip or scroll.

When Did a Nice Life Stop Being Enough?

Until recently, writer Phoebe Lovatt tells me, she was a “big experience seeker”, moving between cities and searching for the next “expansive life chapter”. Now, with a young child, her life has become smaller geographically: more local, more routine. But social media means other possible versions of it still feel within reach. “I’ve got my mate in Mexico, my mate in New York, my mate in LA,” she says. “It just constantly gives you the sense that you are failing at having a rich life.”

I can see parallels in my own insatiable appetite for experiences. Somewhere between my first ‘grown-up holiday’ (to Benidorm, I might add) and my recent trips, I stopped being content with a tan and a good time and started expecting to come home transformed. The same goes for the once-humble weekend: it’s no longer enough for it to pass pleasantly; I need to have done something with it.

We know by now the perils of having access to everyone else’s lives, but I think we overlook the impact of having a live feed of everything we could be wanting. Phoebe describes this as a constant “contrast experience”: you can be content, pick up your phone, see a friend on a beach in Malibu and suddenly your own life feels mundane.

And the bar hasn’t only risen for what we do. It’s risen for who we’re supposed to be. “We can’t just be normal,” Phoebe says. “We need to be exceptionally hot, exceptionally rich, exceptionally well-travelled.”

Somewhere between having a nice life and living your best life, just living—something to be thankful for in itself—stopped being enough. Social media lets us press our noses up against the windows of the world’s most beautiful hotels, see what strangers eat for breakfast in Copenhagen, where they swim in Sicily and which facial they booked before going. Leisure has become another arena to demonstrate taste, curiosity, self-knowledge and our own exceptionalism.

Phoebe offers a simple test: would you still want to do it if nobody knew you’d done it? If you couldn’t post it, write about it, Substack it or fold it into the story you tell about yourself, would you be quite so invested?

It’s an awkward question for me; someone who’s made a career out of turning experiences into stories. But aren’t we all doing the same thing, to varying degrees?

Are We Experiencing Our Lives...or Reviewing Them?

Then there’s that age-old issue of living in the present. As if that wasn’t already slippery enough, we’re now so programmed to view experiences through the lens of how we’ll package them for an audience later that we’re drifting further from anything resembling ‘the moment’.

Before it happens, we anticipate and plan it; while it’s happening, we evaluate it; afterwards, we turn it into something: a story, a reel, a pithy little anecdote. Often, we’re doing all three at once.

Kathryn Jezer-Morton, author of The Story of Your Life: How Social Media Shapes the Way We Experience Everything, argues that what she calls “influencer logic” has spread beyond influencers themselves. When everyday users treat their lives as potential content, she tells me, “it reduces our capacity both to experience subtle forms of pleasure, and to express subtle forms of emotion.”

She uses language as an analogy: a limited vocabulary restricts not only what we can express, but what we can identify. Social media, she argues, has its own narrow vocabulary of what looks interesting, desirable or worth sharing.

Perhaps we’re not actually feeling less then; we’ve just become used to only recognising the capital-F Feelings as proof that we’re feeling at all. Awe. Transformation. Euphoria. The best night ever. The trip of a lifetime. Core memories. A perfectly pleasant weekend can’t compete.

Another thing sending us on a wild goose chase when we’re in hot pursuit of happiness is the endless checking.

Did I enjoy that enough? Was it worth the money? Did we make the most of the weekend? Am I relaxed yet? Am I happy?

According to Lyubomirsky, that kind of emotional quality control can be self-defeating. Research suggests that becoming preoccupied with whether we’re happy can actually undermine happiness, partly because our attention becomes fixed on the outcome rather than the experience itself. “If you’re sort of constantly asking yourself, am I happy yet?” she tells me, “that’s gonna undermine your happiness.”

I thought back to my last massage. Partway through, I started wondering whether I was relaxed. If you want to dash your own relaxation, there’s surely no quicker way than checking whether it’s working. Suddenly, I was hyper-aware of every sensation and, crucially, how unrelaxed I felt. The more I noticed it, the less relaxed I became.

Dr Nick Earley, a clinical psychologist, sees a related problem in the language of optimisation. Under sustained stress, our attention is already trained towards whatever requires handling next. Add constant stimulation and the pressure to squeeze every last drop from our leisure time, he argues, and we can end up “scanning for the next thing rather than inhabiting the one we’re in”.

Focus too intently on pleasure — or, in my case, relaxation — as an end goal, and you risk monitoring your progress towards it instead of actually experiencing it.

Could Less Actually Feel Like More?

It’s not all doom, though. Professor Elizabeth Dunn tells me about a study in which participants were given chocolate, then asked either to abstain from it for a week or given a large supply to eat freely. When they returned to the lab, the abstainers enjoyed and savoured the chocolate more. “There is a pathway to getting more pleasure from less,” Dunn tells me.

This ‘less is more’ approach runs counter to our maxxxing culture, and an economy largely organised around convincing us that the opposite is true. It might also explain why, alongside our drive for bigger and better experiences, another apparently contradictory desire is gaining cultural currency: to switch everything off.

Emma Breschi, who spent much of her twenties working as a model, has experienced the glossy version of the extraordinary life from the inside. “I think a lot of what we’re calling a search for excitement might actually be a search for connection,” she tells me.

What if We’re Looking for Pleasure in the Wrong Places?

Phoebe describes what she sees around her as a “crisis of meaning”. Work feels precarious, the future difficult to picture, the news relentless. At the same time, culture offers an abundant menu of things to buy, book, watch and experience. “No wonder everyone’s just kind of numbing out,” she says.

It’s tempting, when the bigger structures of life feel uncertain, to adopt a last-days-of-Rome mentality. I may not know what the world will look like in five years, but I can book the restaurant, plan the trip, buy the ticket. Life might feel out of control, but I can make Friday night really, really good.

The problem comes when we expect those things to provide not only pleasure, but proof: that our lives are interesting, that we’re using our time properly, that we’re happy. Phoebe talks about the odd expectation that ordinary people should now live like “a socialite or like a trust fund baby or a celebrity”. Twenty years ago, she points out, most of us didn’t know what rich people’s houses looked like. “It’s created a level of aspiration that’s impossible to reach,” she says, “and even if you do reach it, what does it mean?”

Author Louise O’Neill knows a thing or two about arriving at the life you thought would make you happy. For years, she says, her happiness felt conditional: I’ll be happy when I find the right relationship, sell enough books, achieve the next marker of success. Eventually, on paper at least, she got there. “I had the man, the house, everything looked perfect,” she says. And yet she still found herself lying awake wondering: “Is this it?”

There is a difference, she realised, between “a life that looks presentable on social media” and actually feeling alive inside it.

Therein lies the danger of packing pleasure with so much existential weight. A holiday can be wonderful, a restaurant can be delicious, a party can be the best night you’ve had in ages. None of them can permanently satisfy us.

Searching for Ways to Feel Something

The more people I speak to, the less convinced I become that my original question — why doesn’t anything feel as good any more? — is the right one.

Millie Gooch, founder of Sober Girl Society and author of Hangxiety, thinks we have a tendency to confuse pleasure with immediate reward. Her work focuses mainly on alcohol, where the distinction is obvious: something can feel good now while leaving us feeling worse later. Her preferred measure of pleasure is less about the intensity of the immediate sensation than whether something leaves you feeling better overall. “Pleasure is a long game,” she says.

I like this idea, partly because it exposes how limited my own pleasure accounting has become. It also raises the possibility that in pursuing pleasure principally through intensity, I might’ve overlooked a much less glamorous source of it: frequency.

Professor Ciara McCabe, who directs the Neuroscience of Reward Group, studies anhedonia — the reduced ability to experience pleasure. One approach her lab recommends is deliberately scheduling small positive and social experiences, such as getting a coffee or going for a walk with a friend. The aim, she says, is to create “regular opportunities to experience joy”, rather than waiting for rarer, enormous milestones.

This feels counterintuitive in a culture that tells us to dream bigger, aim higher. Of the two posters I remember being pasted to my secondary school walls, one read: You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. The other said something about shooting for the moon because, if you miss, you’ll land among the stars. Neither seemed to be pointing me towards an adult life stuffed with more coffee dates.

And yet the science backs it up. Lyubomirsky studies savouring: deliberately directing our attention towards pleasurable experiences we might otherwise take for granted — the sun on your skin, the changing seasons, that coffee with a friend. The point isn’t to extract every last ounce of happiness from them, but simply to notice them.

In my own pursuit of expansiveness, I got the idea that the opposite of an ordinary life is an extraordinary one; when that felt flat, I started questioning my capacity to feel anything at all. But the more experts I speak to, the more I get the sneaking suspicion that a life that feels fuller isn’t necessarily one packed with more extraordinary things, but one in which I’m able to pay more attention to ordinary ones.

Dr Nick Earley put my original question on its head: “The question isn’t how to find more stimulation. It’s how to become more present for what’s already happening.” It’s easy to seek more stimulation; it’s harder to sit down and soak in what’s already there.

I still want the trips of a lifetime. I want the thrill of wheeling my suitcase through an unknown airport, dinners where the table heaves with people and chatter as much as it does food. I want adventures that make the world feel bigger and my place in it smaller. I don’t think I’ll ever be the kind of person who can fill her cup with a brew of ‘mindful’ tea.

Thankfully, none of the people I spoke to suggested I should. What I’m trying to do instead is dial down the pressure I put on those experiences. Travel and sensory pleasures can delight me, surprise me, challenge me, disappoint me or simply give me a cracking night out. They can’t make my life meaningful on command. And constantly checking whether they’re working is probably one of the surest ways to miss them.

I’m not going to stop chasing pleasure altogether, but I might try taking my paw off the lever long enough to notice what else is already there.