You Have to Choose Not to Move the Goalpost

Imagine having a private chef who cooks Michelin-level meals every single day. It sounds like a dream. For the first week, probably the first month, every dinner is an event. Then something quiet happens. The food stops tasting like anything special. Not because the chef got worse. Because extraordinary became ordinary. The person sitting at that table hasn’t gained a private chef. They’ve lost the ability to enjoy a meal.

Morgan Housel calls this the hedonic treadmill. What was once a treat becomes a baseline. What was once a baseline becomes the minimum you need just to feel okay. The cruelest part is that it happens silently, and it happens precisely because things are going well for you.

I noticed it in hotel rooms. There was a time when a short stay at the Grand Hyatt felt like a genuine occasion. My wife and I would talk about it for days before. We’d take our time with the breakfast buffet, appreciate the lobby, sleep better than we had any right to. These days, I check into a similar room and feel nothing particular. The hotel didn’t change. My baseline did. I’d been spacing out the upgrades less carefully, letting the exceptional slowly become expected, and without realising it I’d spent down a reservoir of appreciation I can’t easily refill.

So now we are deliberate about it. The nice restaurant stays a once-in-a-while thing, not a habit. The room upgrade happens occasionally, not automatically. Not out of frugality. Out of self-preservation. Frequency is the enemy of appreciation.

The same logic shapes where we live and how we get around. We stay in a HDB flat in a neighbourhood near the MRT. We don’t own a car. My daughters think their friends’ family cars are the most exciting thing in the world, and they light up every time we visit someone with a condo pool. I watch them and I think: good. That delight is real. It’s untouched. The moment we buy them a pool, it becomes just another Tuesday. And the finances matter too. A condominium would stretch a single income further than is comfortable and push back the horizon of financial freedom by years. Keeping the lifestyle simple means keeping the goalpost where we planted it, instead of watching it drift forward on its own.

There’s a question Housel asks in the book that I keep returning to. Is it the house that makes you happy, or the people inside it? Is it the car, or is it arriving somewhere without having spent an hour in peak hour traffic, quietly resenting the commute? Is it the expensive holiday or the one where nobody checked their work email for four days and you all just existed together without an agenda? The money is real. But what you think you are buying and what you are actually buying are often two completely different things.

I am writing this partly for my daughters, Katherine and Leah, who will read this one day when they are old enough to think about money seriously. I want them to know that the person who needs a five-star room to feel anything on holiday is not richer than the person who feels genuine pleasure in a clean, quiet room with a nice view. One of them has more options. The other is trapped by their own expectations and doesn’t know it.

The person with the private chef eventually goes out alone to a regular restaurant. Orders something simple. Takes one bite. And finally, after years of abundance, tastes something again.

That is the whole lesson. And it cost nothing.