This is, in fact the normal pattern for consumer goods: they deliver most of the satisfaction right up front. The moment you drive the car off the lot; the opening chase scene of the latest James Bond movie; the first bite of the Wendy’s Baconator — all are carefully designed to drive your satisfaction-o-meter right off the chart. Sustaining satisfaction, though, is not a high priority for the producers of consumer goods, for a simple reason. There is just one economic transaction that takes place: the initial purchase. After that transaction is over, it’s actually in the best interests of the producer that your satisfaction trail off, because the way consumers deal with declining satisfaction is to make another purchase:



In essence, life in a consumer society works this way: frequent experiences of up-front satisfaction, followed by fairly rapid fall-offs in satisfaction, which are compensated for by fresh purchases. Lather, rinse, repeat.



Now, as long as you have the money to keep making those purchases, this pattern works. You stay satisfied at a very high level, constantly enthralled by the newest and greatest. And you keep a bunch of companies in business. And indeed, there is something elemental about this pattern: it is, after all, the pattern of one of the most basic human experiences, hunger. We eat, are satisfied, grow hungry, and eat again. The genius of consumer culture is to extend this basic human experience to almost every corner of our lives: the cars we drive, the television we watch, the Web sites we visit. Call it the pattern of purchases. In a consumer economy, this is the template for more and more of our discretionary money and time: satisfaction sustained by frequent purchases. All it really requires of us is money.

But truth be told, rarely does a pattern of purchases deliver a consistently high level of satisfaction. Consider this:



In this pattern, which is obviously a close cousin of the previous one, there is the same frequently repeated series of purchases, but instead of satisfaction remaining at a consistently high level, it dips with each subsequent purchase, never getting back to the original level of satisfaction.

This, of course, is the pattern of addiction.

The addict, like the consumer, purchases some good that initially delivers tremendous satisfaction — in the case of the most impressive psychoactive drugs, a feeling of euphoria that is consistently described as the most extraordinary moment in the users’ lives. The effect, however, wears off relatively quickly. Eager to recapture that experience, the user makes another purchase. This time around, though, the effect is subtly not quite as powerful, and perhaps it wears off more quickly — prompting another purchase, which while still satisfying, is just a bit less so. And on it goes. Lather, rinse, repeat. But the worst addictions don’t just level off at a depressing (and expensive) steady state of minimal satisfaction. To depict them we have to extend our y-axis into negative territory:



In the long run, with the most addictive substances and behaviors, the satisfaction from each additional unit is actually negative — unsatisfying and destructive — yet the user is so entrenched in the pattern, still clinging to the memory of those first euphoric hits, that he or she is unable to escape. With the worst addictions, apart from the grace of God, the pattern always and only ends in the premature death of the user, caught in a downward spiral that began with beautiful bliss.

PRACTICES

There is, however, another path toward satisfaction that is different altogether from the reward curve of purchases and addictions, and some of us were fortunate to discover it early on. We can illustrate it with a very different kind of play: not playing a CD or an MP3, but playing a musical instrument — say, a violin.

What happens when we begin to play the violin, the first time we pick up that beautifully crafted instrument and draw the bow across the strings? Well, I have an eight-year-old daughter studying violin right now, and I can tell you that first moment of play definitely does not produce satisfaction. The instrument screeches. It’s horribly out of tune. Cats all over the neighborhood run for cover. When you start to play the violin, you start out deep in negative satisfaction.

And that’s where you stay for quite a while.

Day after day, month after month, every time you try to play the violin, it is work — hard, slow, unsatisfying work. For the first year or more, the satisfaction curve pretty much looks like this:



But, if you keep at it, practicing daily, enduring the screeches and squawks, the out-of-tune notes, the tired left hand and the sore right arm, eventually, one day, maybe a few years down the road, you pick up the violin and something satisfying happens.

You’re not Itzhak Perlman, not by a long shot, but you play something that sounds like, well, music — rich and lovely and alive.

And if you keep practicing, your satisfaction starts to gradually lift off from the very slight satisfactions of keeping notes in tune and occasionally coaxing a decent tone out of the instrument, to the satisfactions of being able to play whole pieces with something that approaches grace.

And here’s the really interesting thing about the satisfaction curve associated with learning to play the violin, so very different from playing an MP3. It keeps going up for a very long time. It may never go down. My wife Catherine played violin as a child, then set it aside as school and work and family took up her time. But when our daughter started studying violin, Catherine picked her own violin up again. She is enjoying it every bit as much as she did in high school — which is more than you can say for much of the popular music that was playing at her high school prom. That’s not so much because the music is different — the kind of play is different. It is almost a shame that we use the same word for both experiences. Playing the violin, after those initial years of work and frustration and very often tears, never stops being satisfying.

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