Using the protocol, anesthesia dreams were common, pleasant, and linked to a better patient experience.Kids who can hold it together until the final bell may be primed for more academic success in life
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If you had to summarise Seneca’s most uncomfortable observation in a single sentence, it would be this: most of what you are spending your life trying to acquire is not actually going to satisfy you when you get it. Lucius Annaeus Seneca, the Roman Stoic philosopher who served as tutor and later adviser to the Emperor Nero, wrote 124 surviving letters to a younger Roman official named Lucilius across the final years of his life — letters that have remained in continuous circulation for nearly 2,000 years and that contain some of the more concentrated observations of human psychology produced in the ancient world. Among the recurring themes in these letters is the curious gap between what people pursue and what actually makes them content. Seneca’s specific claim was that the pursuit of more — more wealth, more possessions, more recognition, more of essentially anything one could accumulate — does not converge on satisfaction. As the supply increases, the demand increases with it, and the gap between the two never closes.
According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s reference on Seneca, his writings repeatedly addressed this question across multiple letters and essays. “It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor,” he wrote in his second letter to Lucilius. “Contented poverty,” he added, quoting his philosophical opponent Epicurus approvingly, “is an honourable estate.” In another letter, again quoting Epicurus: “Whoever does not regard what he has as most ample wealth, is unhappy, though he be master of the whole world.” Contentment, in Seneca’s account, is not a function of how much one has but of how little one needs. People who have learned to need less can be content with very little. People who have not can fail to be content with essentially anything.
For most of the period between Seneca’s death and the late twentieth century, his observations existed as philosophical claims — defensible by argument, supported by example, but unverifiable by anything resembling modern empirical methodology. This changed in 1971, when the psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell introduced into the social-science literature the concept of the “hedonic treadmill” — a model in which positive events produce short-term elevations in subjective well-being that fade over time as people adjust their expectations upward to match their new circumstances. The model predicted that lottery winners, despite their substantial good fortune, should not end up much happier than they were before winning, because their reference point would shift upward and their new wealth would come to feel normal rather than exceptional.
Per the Wikipedia reference on the hedonic treadmill and its empirical foundations, Brickman and his colleagues Dan Coates and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman tested this prediction directly in a now-famous 1978 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The research team compared 22 major lottery winners with 22 demographically matched controls and 29 individuals who had been paralysed in accidents. The results were striking. Lottery winners were not significantly happier than controls. They reported finding less pleasure in ordinary daily activities than non-winners did, suggesting that the peak experience of winning had contaminated their capacity for mundane satisfaction. The paralysed accident victims, while clearly less happy than controls, were closer to controls than would have been predicted by the magnitude of their loss. The basic Stoic claim — that the relationship between external circumstances and inner contentment is much weaker than ordinary intuition suggests — was, in its broad outlines, empirically confirmed.
The mechanism Brickman and Campbell identified, which Seneca had described in different language, is that humans adjust their internal reference point as their external circumstances improve. The first car you own provides substantial improvement over having no car. By the time you have reached the tenth car in a lifetime of progressively improving vehicles, each new one barely registers, even though every one of them would have seemed luxurious to the person you were before you owned any. The same pattern applies to houses, salaries, food, clothing, professional recognition, and essentially every other category of acquirable good.
The economist Richard Easterlin documented the same pattern at the level of whole societies in 1974, in what has come to be called the Easterlin Paradox. Within any given country at any given moment, richer people report being happier than poorer ones. But as an entire country grows richer over decades — as per-capita income doubles, then triples, then quadruples — average happiness barely moves. The collective acquisition of more does not produce collective contentment. The individual aspiration level rises in parallel with collective wealth, and the gap between aspiration and achievement remains essentially constant.
The honest account of Seneca’s argument requires noting an awkward complication. Seneca himself was extraordinarily wealthy. He served as a senior adviser to Emperor Nero and accumulated, over the course of his career, a personal fortune estimated by Roman historians at approximately 300 million sesterces — making him one of the richer private citizens in the Roman Empire. He owned multiple villas, substantial estates, and significant financial holdings, including loans to provincial elites that some historians believe may have helped trigger the Boudican revolt in Britain. The contrast between his philosophical writings on the worthlessness of wealth and his actual accumulation of substantial personal fortune has been the subject of debate since his own lifetime, when the Roman senator Publius Suillius Rufus publicly attacked him on this point in 58 CE.
Seneca’s response, articulated in his essay On the Happy Life, was that the wise person does not need wealth but is also not required to refuse it when it comes — that what matters is one’s relationship to one’s possessions, not the bare quantity of them. The defence is contested. Some readers find it self-serving. Others find it consistent with the broader Stoic framework, which emphasised the cultivation of an inner attitude rather than the renunciation of external goods. The biographical inconvenience does not, in any case, invalidate the underlying psychological claim. The clinical observation that the pursuit of more does not produce satisfaction can be empirically true even if the person making the observation happens to be wealthy. The Brickman and Easterlin data confirm Seneca’s claim regardless of how the philosopher himself lived.
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The marshmallow test is one of the most repeated stories in popular psychology. A small child is left alone with a treat and told that waiting will earn a second one. The children who held out, the familiar version goes, grew into teenagers and adults who scored higher, coped better, and generally did well, as if a single act of willpower at four had set the course of a life.
A 2018 study tested that promise against a much larger and more varied group of children, and the promise mostly did not hold. Concentrating on children whose mothers had not completed college, the researchers found that an extra minute of waiting at age four predicted only about a tenth of a standard deviation more achievement at age fifteen. That link was roughly half the size reported in the original work, and it shrank by about two-thirds once the researchers accounted for the child’s family background, early cognitive ability, and home environment.
The original results came from a study by Shoda, Mischel, and Peake in 1990, which reported strong correlations between a preschooler’s ability to delay gratification and both achievement and behaviour in adolescence. The sample was small and highly selective, drawn from children in the Stanford University community.
The 2018 team, led by Tyler Watts with Greg Duncan and Haonan Quan, ran what they called a conceptual replication. Rather than re-stage the exact experiment, they drew on the long-running NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, which had measured children’s delay of gratification at 54 months and then followed them for years. Their analysis sample included 918 children, and the subgroup they focused on, children whose mothers had not finished college, numbered 552, about ten times the size of the original 1990 study.
That difference in scale matters. A larger and more economically mixed sample makes it possible to ask whether an apparent effect of willpower is really an effect of the circumstances that shape willpower in the first place.
The choice to focus on children of less-educated mothers was deliberate, and it cuts against the suspicion that the researchers were stacking the deck. The full study sample skewed toward advantaged families. The subgroup of children whose mothers had not completed college was, by the authors’ account, more comparable with a nationally representative sample of American children. In other words, the group where the marshmallow effect looked weakest was also the group that looked most like the country as a whole.
Part of what made the marshmallow test so sticky is how clean it looks. A child, a treat, a timer, and a single number: seconds waited. From that one number flowed a tidy moral that fit decades of advice about character and success, the idea that the capacity to wait is a stable trait, visible early, that quietly shapes the rest of a life.
A finding that simple is easy to repeat and hard to qualify. The original correlations were real, but they came from a small and unusual group of children, and a strong correlation in a narrow sample can look very different once a wider, more varied population is measured. That is the gap the 2018 study set out to probe, and it is why the size and makeup of the new sample do so much of the work.
It would overstate the findings to say the marshmallow test was debunked outright. Among children of less-educated mothers, waiting longer at age four was still associated with somewhat better achievement at fifteen. The point is how much of that association survived scrutiny.
Before controls, the correlation was already only half the size of the original studies’ headline numbers. After the researchers adjusted for family background, early cognitive skills, and the home environment, roughly two-thirds of even that smaller link disappeared. What remained was a faint association rather than the strong, life-shaping signal of the popular telling.
The team also noticed that most of the predictive value sat at the very start of the waiting period. Most of the variation in adolescent achievement came from whether a child could wait at least 20 seconds, not from the heroic minutes of resistance that make the test memorable. A child who could hold out briefly looked much like a child who held out for the full delay.
The behavioural promise fared worst of all. The original story implied that early self-control predicted not just test scores but a calmer, better-adjusted adolescence. In the replication, associations between delay time and measures of behaviour at age fifteen were much smaller and rarely reached statistical significance.
In other words, the strand of the marshmallow legend most often repeated by parents, that a patient four-year-old becomes a well-behaved teenager, is the strand the larger study supported least.
This is a single conceptual replication, and it should be read as one. Because it used a different sample and a different delay-of-gratification measure than the 1990 study, it is not a perfect like-for-like rerun, and the authors are careful to frame it as a replication and extension rather than a verdict. A follow-up analysis by other researchers later argued that the two studies’ results, read carefully, are less far apart than the headlines suggested.
The findings are also correlational. The study can show that early delay of gratification predicts later outcomes more weakly once background is accounted for; it cannot prove that teaching a child to wait would, or would not, change that child’s future. Self-control may still matter. What the data undercut is the specific, tidy claim that a few minutes of waiting at four reveals a trait that determines how the next decade goes.
And the controls themselves carry the real message. The reason the link thinned so much is that delay of gratification is bound up with the resources around a child: a parent’s education, the cognitive skills already in place by age four, the stability of the home. A test that looks like it measures character may be measuring circumstance.
The marshmallow test endures because it offers a clean moral: wait, and you will be rewarded. The larger study does not erase that idea so much as complicate it. A child’s patience at four still says something, but much of what it says is about the world that child was already living in.
That is a less quotable finding, and a harder one to put on a poster. It asks whether we have been admiring willpower when we were looking, much of the time, at advantage.
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For one or two days each spring, the wind pattern at the top of Mount Everest shifts just enough to allow human beings, for a brief and dangerous window, to reach the summit. They climb in convoy, in oxygen masks, along ropes anchored years ago by previous expeditions. They pass landmarks that have become unofficially named over the decades — the Hillary Step, the South Summit, Rainbow Valley, Green Boots Cave. Some of these landmarks are geological features. Others are dead human beings. “Green Boots” is the name climbers have given to a body believed to be that of the Indian climber Tsewang Paljor, who died in the 1996 Everest disaster and whose corpse — still wearing the green plastic mountaineering boots that gave him the nickname — lies in a small limestone alcove near the standard route to the summit. For nearly thirty years, climbers passing by Green Boots have used him as a navigation marker. He is one of approximately 200 corpses still on the mountain. Some of them have been there for decades. Until recently, most of them were buried in ice. They are not, in 2026, buried as deeply as they used to be.
According to CBS News’s coverage of the 2024 Nepali army clean-up operation, climate change has been thinning the snow and ice on Everest’s upper slopes at a rate that is now beginning to reveal bodies and equipment that had been entombed for years or decades. Aditya Karki, the major in Nepal’s army who led the 2024 clean-up team, described the phenomenon directly: “Because of the effects of global warming, (the bodies and trash) are becoming more visible as the snow cover thins.” His team of 12 military personnel and 18 supporting climbers spent 45 days at altitudes above Everest base camp, working their way through the higher camps and into the death zone itself, chipping at the ice with axes and occasionally using boiling water to free objects from the grip of decades of accumulated freeze. They recovered five bodies — four full corpses and one skeleton — and brought back approximately 11 tonnes of refuse, in what was the largest single clean-up operation in the history of high-altitude mountaineering.
The reason there are still 200 corpses on Mount Everest, and the reason it took a 45-day operation by Nepali army professionals to recover only five of them, is the brutal physics of the altitudes at which the bodies sit. The death zone — the formal mountaineering term for the region above 8,000 metres (approximately 26,247 feet) — was named in 1953 by the Swiss physician Édouard Wyss-Dunant, who recognised that this altitude band represented the upper limit beyond which the human body could no longer acclimatise to the available oxygen. At 8,000 metres and above, the atmospheric pressure drops to approximately one-third of sea level. Each breath delivers approximately one-third the oxygen molecules that the same breath would deliver at the coast. The body’s cells begin dying of hypoxia within minutes of unsupplemented exposure. Even with bottled oxygen, climbers in the death zone can survive only 16 to 20 hours before their bodies begin to fail systemically.
Most climbers who die on Everest die in the death zone, either on the way up or, more frequently, on the descent — when they have used up their oxygen reserves, their physical resources, and their cognitive capacity, and the remaining strength to make it back to lower altitudes simply runs out. The bodies left behind freeze almost immediately. The death zone’s temperatures hover well below freezing year-round, the air is dry enough that decomposition is essentially suspended, and the bodies are typically partially or fully covered with windblown snow within hours of death. They do not decay. They preserve. A climber who died on Everest in 1996, like Tsewang Paljor, can look in 2026 essentially the way they looked the day after they died, complete with clothing, equipment, and even facial features. The mountain has become, accidentally, an enormous cryogenic preservation facility for human remains.
As reported in CNN Travel’s coverage of the Mountain Cleanup Campaign, the Nepali army’s 2024 operation was the latest iteration of a programme that began in 2019 in partnership with the consumer-products company Unilever. Between 2019 and 2023, the campaign had collected approximately 110 tonnes of waste from Everest and the surrounding peaks. The 2024 effort added another 11 tonnes to that running total, alongside the recovery of the five bodies. The total budget for the 2024 campaign exceeded $600,000, employed 171 Nepali guides and porters in addition to the army personnel and climbers, and ran from mid-April through late May, timed to coincide with the brief annual climbing window when high-altitude work on Everest is feasible at all.
The work was, by any measure, extraordinarily dangerous. The team operated for extended periods in the same death zone where the bodies they were recovering had died. Each member of the army team had to climb above 8,000 metres carrying equipment to extract frozen corpses from ice that had encased them for years or decades. The bodies, once freed, had to be carried back down the mountain on the same rope-and-ladder system used by ordinary climbers — except that an ordinary climber descending Everest is making themselves lighter by burning oxygen and water, while the army team was descending with the additional weight of a frozen adult human body. Per the AFP report carried by Phys.org’s coverage of the operation, the recovered bodies were transported to Kathmandu, where they were examined for identification. Those that could not be identified — and most could not, because their documents had long since deteriorated — were eventually cremated according to Nepali tradition.
The 11 tonnes of rubbish removed by the Nepali army in 2024 was only part of a larger waste-collection effort that season. As reported by The Himalayan Times’s coverage of the Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee’s 2024 base camp operations, the SPCC — the local body responsible for waste management in the Everest region — collected an additional 77,191 kilograms (approximately 85 tonnes) of waste from Everest Base Camp during the same spring 2024 season. Of that total, approximately 27,533 kilograms — nearly 28 tonnes — was human waste, with the remainder consisting of burnable rubbish (27,990 kg), kitchen waste (14,150 kg), and recyclable materials (7,518 kg). The human and kitchen waste was transported to a disposal site near Gorakshep. The burnable and recyclable waste was carried down to Namche for further processing, with the recyclables eventually transported to Kathmandu for recycling. The combined SPCC and Nepali army operations in spring 2024 removed approximately 96 tonnes of accumulated waste from the Everest region — a single-season total greater than the cumulative output of every previous year of large-scale clean-up efforts combined.
The decomposition problem at high altitude is what makes the figures so striking. Per Smithsonian Magazine’s coverage of the broader Everest pollution issue, the sub-zero temperatures of the upper camps essentially halt biological breakdown. Faeces left at Camp IV in 1953 by the original Hillary expedition would still be present in essentially preserved form today if it had not been disturbed by subsequent climbers. The same applies to the food packaging, the oxygen bottles, the discarded climbing equipment, and the colourful synthetic-fibre tents that have accumulated over seven decades of mountaineering. The mountain does not recycle. It accumulates.
The 2024 Mountain Cleanup Campaign was significant not only for the 11 tonnes and five bodies it brought back, but for what it documented about the broader trajectory of the Everest ecosystem. The melting that exposed the bodies was visible. The discoloured ice that now contained microplastics from generations of climbers was measurable. The exposed equipment from expeditions decades old — gas canisters from the 1960s, oxygen apparatus from the 1970s, climbing ropes from the 1980s — provided a stratigraphic record of how long the world’s tallest mountain had been accumulating human refuse, and at what depth that refuse had been preserved before climate change began bringing it back to the surface.
The 2024 campaign also raised a question that has no clear answer: who is responsible for cleaning up the historic mess. The Nepali government has implemented progressively stricter rules requiring 2026-era climbers to bring their own waste back down with them, and these rules appear to be reducing the rate at which new waste accumulates. But the existing 30 to 50 tonnes of legacy trash, and the approximately 195 corpses still on the mountain, were left behind by climbers who in many cases are now themselves dead, by expeditions that were dissolved decades ago, by governments that have changed hands several times since. Major Karki, the leader of the 2024 operation, framed the dilemma directly: “This year’s trash might be brought back by the mountaineers. But who will bring the old ones?” The answer, for the moment, appears to be Nepali army personnel and Sherpa climbers, working at altitudes that kill people who underestimate them, removing — at a rate of approximately 11 tonnes per year — the cumulative residue of seventy years of human ambition. The melt that is making the work newly possible is also making it newly necessary. The mountain that buried these things is no longer cold enough, on its upper slopes, to keep burying them.
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Most people who are quietly miserable do not know it. That, in essence, is what a Danish philosopher named Søren Kierkegaard tried to tell the readers of nineteenth-century Copenhagen in 1849, and what the empirical psychology of regret has been confirming, in laboratory studies and museum surveys, for the past three decades. When most people use the word “despair,” they mean acute unhappiness — the kind of low mood that follows a loss, a failure, or a difficult life event. Despair in this ordinary sense is something a person is aware of. They can name it, describe it, and (with luck) move through it. Kierkegaard, writing under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, used the word in a substantially different way. The despair he described was not an emotion. It was a structural condition of the self, present in the great majority of human beings, generally unnoticed by the people who carried it, and most acute precisely in those who did not know they had it. Kierkegaard’s book on the subject, The Sickness Unto Death, is one of the founding texts of existentialist philosophy.
According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on Kierkegaard, the framework rests on a specific definition of what the self is. For Kierkegaard, the self is not a thing or a substance. It is “a relation that relates itself to itself” — a dynamic process by which a human being takes up the various contradictory features of being human (finite and infinite, possible and necessary, free and determined) and synthesises them into a coherent personality. The self is not given at birth; it is something a person has to become. And despair, in Kierkegaard’s account, is the misrelation that occurs when this becoming fails — when the synthesis goes wrong, when the person fails to take on the self they were capable of being.
Kierkegaard identified three primary configurations the failure can take. The first and most common is the despair of ignorance — being in despair without knowing it. A person in this state has not yet noticed any gap between the life they are living and the life they were capable of living. Their attention is consumed by the routine surfaces of daily existence: work, possessions, social position, the consumption of entertainment. The deeper question of what kind of person they are, in any meaningful sense, has never been seriously posed. Kierkegaard considered this unconscious form to be the dominant pattern in modern society — most people, in his view, were in despair without realising it, because the structures of their lives had insulated them from ever asking the question.
The second form is the despair of weakness — knowing what self one is meant to be and not being willing to be it. The person in this state has had some glimpse of their own possibilities and has, for whatever combination of fear, comfort, social pressure, or fatigue, declined to pursue them. The third form is the despair of defiance — willing to be a self other than the one one is, refusing the actual configuration of one’s life in favour of an imaginary or constructed alternative. The defiant form, Kierkegaard thought, was the most acute but also the rarest. As one frequently-cited line from the book puts it: “The greatest hazard of all, losing the self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss — an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. — is sure to be noticed.”
Kierkegaard was writing in 1849, in a theological framework, with no empirical methodology beyond his own observation of the people around him in nineteenth-century Copenhagen. His specific claims about despair as a sickness of the spirit cannot be tested in the same way an empirical hypothesis can be tested. What can be tested is whether the basic phenomenon he described — that the failures most haunting to people across a life are the failures to become the self one was capable of being — shows up in modern psychological data on regret. The answer is that it does. Per a 2023 replication in Royal Society Open Science of the foundational research by Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Medvec at Cornell University, the empirical psychology of regret converges on a striking temporal pattern: in the short term, people’s most acute regrets tend to be about things they did and wish they had not done. In the long term, the pattern reverses. The regrets that haunt people across years and decades, and that dominate when people look back on their lives as a whole, are overwhelmingly about things they did not do — chances not taken, paths not pursued, selves not allowed to emerge.
Gilovich and Medvec’s original 1994 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found this pattern across multiple population groups, including a sample of nursing-home residents reflecting on their entire lives. The 2023 replication, conducted at a Chicago museum of psychological science with a large public sample, reproduced the temporal interaction even though the specific magnitudes differed. The pattern is now considered one of the more robust findings in the empirical literature on regret. Its philosophical implication aligns closely with Kierkegaard’s framework, even though the researchers involved generally do not cite him.
The most disconcerting feature of Kierkegaard’s account is his insistence that this despair is, in its most common form, undetectable to the person carrying it. Unlike acute sadness, which announces itself, the unconscious form of despair tends to be hidden by the very busyness of life that produces it. A person fully occupied with work, family obligations, consumption of news and entertainment, social media, the small daily tasks of contemporary existence, is unlikely to encounter the question of whether they are actually becoming the self they were meant to be. The question requires solitude, reflection, and a degree of confrontation with one’s own choices that ordinary life does not generally provide. As reported in D. Anthony Storm’s commentary on The Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard described despair as a “misrelation in the relation of a synthesis that relates itself to itself” — a sickness that, unlike most diseases, the patient is largely responsible for and from which the patient cannot escape simply by avoiding awareness of it. The avoidance, in Kierkegaard’s framework, is itself part of the despair.
Intellectual honesty requires noting what Kierkegaard’s account does not establish. It is not a recipe for happiness. It does not specify what self any given person was meant to become, or how to identify that self, or how to pursue it once identified. Kierkegaard’s own answer to the question of how despair is overcome was specifically Christian — through a particular relation to God that he called faith — and many modern readers find that the theological framing limits the framework’s applicability. The diagnostic side of his work, however, has had broad influence well beyond the specifically Christian context, including on the existentialist philosophers of the twentieth century, on the founders of existential psychotherapy, on Erik Erikson’s developmental concept of “integrity versus despair” in late life, and on the broader twentieth-century literature on authenticity and self-realisation. What the framework provides is a vocabulary for naming a condition that often goes unnamed — the slow recognition, late in a life, that the person one has been is not quite the person one started out hoping to be. Kierkegaard called this the breaking through of despair into consciousness, and he thought it was, paradoxically, a kind of progress. The unconscious form, in his account, was worse than the conscious form, because it left no opening for change.
The post Søren Kierkegaard suggested that the deepest form of despair is not unhappiness but the failure to become the self you were quietly meant to be — a despair so subtle that most people who carry it never notice they are carrying it — and the difficulty of late-life regret is the slow recognition that the person you have been is not quite the person you started out hoping to be appeared first on Space Daily.
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