Winning changed almost nothing. Losing changed almost as little. Within a matter of months, both groups were back to roughly where they started.
The phrase describes a specific, tested claim, not a metaphor invented for self-help. Psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell laid the theoretical groundwork in “Hedonic Relativism and Planning the Good Society” (1971). They argued that people evaluate new experiences against an adaptation level set by past experience, so any gain, once it becomes the new normal, stops registering as a gain. Happiness, on this account, is not absolute. It is relative to a constantly resetting baseline, which is why chasing a fixed target of “enough” keeps failing to deliver lasting satisfaction.
Brickman returned to the question with Dan Coates and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman in “Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative?” (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1978). The study became the theory’s most cited empirical test. They compared 22 major lottery winners, 22 ordinary controls, and 29 paralyzed accident victims on a simple happiness scale. The winners rated their happiness at 4.00, barely and not significantly above the controls’ 3.82, and the accident victims came in only modestly lower at 2.96. Lottery winners also reported less pleasure from small everyday moments than controls did. The mechanism, the authors argued, was twofold: contrast with the peak experience of winning dulled ordinary pleasures, while habituation eroded the value of whatever the winnings had bought.
The practical implication is uncomfortable but precise: a system built on the belief that the next raise, purchase, or promotion will finally deliver lasting contentment is optimizing for a baseline that resets every time it is reached. This is what makes the treadmill image accurate rather than merely poetic: the effort compounds while the position stays the same.