As 2025 inches nearer, most of us will be tempted by New Year’s Resolutions: Save more money, lose more weight, and so on. Underneath all this is a desire to have more good things in life, which should lead to more lasting life satisfaction.

All of this is reminiscent of the famous “bucket list”—the list people often make of the things they want to achieve, do, and experience in life. I used to follow this practice, as a means to motivate me. On the bucket list I had at age 40, I resolved to write books and columns about serious subjects, teach at a top school, travel to give lectures and speeches; maybe even lead a university or think tank. I imagined that if I hit these goals, I would be satisfied.

I re-discovered that list when I was 50, and realized that I had achieved every item on it. But I wasn’t happier. Each accomplishment thrilled me for a day or a week—maybe a month, never more—and then I reached for the next rung on the ladder.

Why?

What the science says

The term homeostasis was introduced in 1926 by physiologist Walter B. Cannon, who showed in his book The Wisdom of the Body that we have built-in mechanisms to regulate our temperature, as well as levels of oxygen, water, salt, sugar, protein, fat, and calcium. More broadly, all living systems tend to maintain stable conditions to survive. Homeostasis keeps us alive and healthy.

It also explains why drugs and alcohol work as they do. That first dose of a recreational substance might bring great pleasure, but your brain quickly senses an assault on your body’s equilibrium and fights back, neutralizing the effect and making it impossible to feel the same “high” again. The result? You need to increase the dose to feel a similar high. As Bucknell University neuroscientist Judith Grisel explains in Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction, addiction is partly a by-product of homeostasis: The brain, when it becomes accustomed to continual drug-induced dopamine production, steeply curtails ordinary production, making another hit necessary just to feel normal.

The same principles apply to emotions. When you get an emotional shock—positive or negative—your brain re-equilibrates to its baseline over time. This is especially true for positive emotions. It’s why conventional success never feels like enough. If you base your satisfaction on outside success and accomplishments—money, power, prestige—you’ll run from victory to victory, first to keep feeling good, then to avoid feeling awful.

What I think

The unending race against the headwinds of homeostasis has a name: the “hedonic treadmill.” No matter how fast we run, we never arrive.

​Our natural state is dissatisfaction, punctuated by brief moments of satisfaction. You might not like the hedonic treadmill, but Mother Nature thinks it’s pretty great. She likes watching you strive to achieve an elusive goal, because strivers get the goods—even if they don’t enjoy them for long. More mates, better mates, better chances of survival for our children—these ancient mandates are responsible for our brains’ hard-wired sprint on the hedonic treadmill. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve found your soul mate and would never stray; the algorithms designed to get us more mates (or allow us to make an upgrade) continue whirring, which is why you still want to be attractive to strangers. Neurobiological instinct—which we experience as dissatisfaction—is what drives us forward.

We can manage this tendency, however, if we change our mental formula of having more to the following:

Satisfaction = what you have ÷ what you want

All of our evolutionary and biological imperatives focus us on increasing the numerator—our “haves.” But for happiness, the more significant action is in the denominator—our “wants.” The secret of satisfaction is to manage our wants. By managing what we want instead of what we have, we give ourselves a chance to lead more satisfied lives.

What you can do

Many self-help guides suggest making a bucket list on January 1 or your birthday, so as to reinforce your worldly aspirations. Making a list of the things you want is temporarily satisfying, because it stimulates dopamine. But it creates attachment, which in turn spurs dissatisfaction, as we just learned.

Consider instead making a “reverse bucket list.” This is what I now do each January 1 and again on my birthday, I list my wants and attachments—those that fit under Thomas Aquinas’s definition of worldly idols (money, power, pleasure, and honor). I try to be completely honest. I don’t list stuff I would actually hate and never choose, like a sailboat or a vacation house. Rather, I go to my weaknesses, most of which—I’m embarrassed to admit—involve the admiration of others for my work.

Then, I imagine myself in five years. I am happy and at peace, living a life of purpose and meaning. I make another list of the forces that would bring me this happiness: my faith, my family, my friendships, the work I am doing that is inherently satisfying and meaningful and that serves others.

Inevitably, these sources of happiness are “intrinsic”—they come from within and revolve around love, relationships, and deep purpose. They have little to do with the admiration of strangers. I contrast them with the things on the first list, which are generally “extrinsic”—the outside rewards associated with Aquinas’ list of idols.

As you prepare for 2025, I suggest you create your own Reverse Bucket List. Here is a template that can help you get started.

Arthur