The Richer You Get, The Easier It Is To Imagine Something Better

**Morgan Housel** (0:06)
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So I went on this kick, I don't know, four or five years ago, where I wanted to read as much and learn as much as I could about what I think is the coolest thing humans have ever done, which is walked on the moon in the 1960s. Hard to think of anything that the species has ever done ever, or maybe will ever do, that was more amazing than that. And part of what I really wanted to understand was what was it like for the astro, what was going through their heads as they're doing that, as they're walking on the moon doing the coolest thing ever. It must have been the coolest experience ever. And when you really dig into it, their accounts, their interviews, of what it was like doing it, it's almost disappointing about how little fun or excitement or awe they seem to experience. Part of this was because NASA selected astronauts who were intentionally by design unemotional about things. That was how you got an astronaut who was not going to panic when something went wrong. So part of it was the people that they selected. But there's some really interesting accounts. During the first trip to the moon on Apollo 11, as they were circling around the moon, Michael Collins, one of the astronauts on that mission, turned to Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. And he said, I want to read it to you here. He said, it's amazing how quickly you adapt. It doesn't seem weird at all to me to look out there and see the moon going by.
It was like, they go to the moon, he looks out, he's like, yeah, so what? There's the moon. You got used to it in three seconds. Three months later on Apollo 12, astronaut Al Bean walked on the moon, and he turned to his other fellow astronauts, he was Pete Conrad, and he said, it's kind of like the song. Is that all there is?
And the other astronaut, Pete Conrad, was relieved because he described his moonwalk himself as spectacular but not momentous. And so I think to me that's the ultimate reminder, maybe the starkest example that exists, that so much of the thrill of doing something comes from anticipation, but actually experiencing it first-hand tends to relatively fall flat from how much joy you got from thinking about the thing. And people have been talking about this, writing about this for a long time. For a lot of people, anticipating your vacation is more enjoyable than being on vacation. Because when you're anticipating it, you imagine a world where everything is perfect, where everything is going right, and you're just filled with joy. But when you're actually experiencing it, you're like, oh, I'm jet-lagged, I'm hungry, and there's sunscreen in my eyes, and that person meeks to me is being loud. Once you put all of that context together, it's not as great as you once thought it would be. And so there's two points I want to bring up here related to this topic. One is this irony, I think, that the better life becomes for you, the easier it is to imagine life being better. Like for someone who is in abject poverty, what they dream about is adequate food and shelter. That's the dream that they are anticipating. That's the goal that they want to get to. If someone is wealthy, what they dream about is an unbelievably extravagant lifestyle. Like the richer you get, the steeper the curve of your ambitions get. And that's true for a lot of fields. There's that famous saying, appetite comes from eating. Like once you taste really good food, you're like, oh, I didn't think I was hungry before, but I'll eat a lot of that. Appetite comes from eating. I think with wealth, ambition comes from success. It's this weird thing. And because of that, if we're fortunate enough to live in a world where most people listening to this are doing pretty well, at least better than most people in the world, your ambition can grow much faster than your income.