The first and the second noble truths delivered by the Buddha constitute the diagnosis of the human predicament. The first noble truth states that the suffering exists (dukka = suffering or no satisfaction). The second noble truth says that the cause of suffering is clinging and craving for things, which in other words means you keep trying to get satisfaction, but never can.
A rather old, but still very good study on monkeys and the dopamine levels in the brain (1) shows that pleasure is not everlasting. It also shows that the craving gives us pleasure than the actual thing we crave for. From our own experience, we know that if we want something very much and then we get it, we kind of see that the craving was something that gave us pleasure and not the thing itself. After we inquire the item, the pleasure soon starts wearing out. We start seeing flaws in our inquired item and start wanting something new very soon. We are not satisfied again.Such craving is explainable from the point of view of natural selection. Craving allowed us to reproduce and survive. If the pleasure lasts forever, we wouldn’t be looking for food or for a mate. Such everlasting pleasure and satisfaction would eventually lead to our extinction.
So are we ill-fated to keep craving forever? Buddhist third and fourth Nobel truths state that is not the case. There is a way out: a path to your own evolution without going extinct.
References
1. Schultz, W, Apicell, P. and Ljungbergb, T. 1993. Responses of Monkey Dopamine Neurons to Reward and Conditioned Stimuli during Successive Steps of Learning a Delayed Response Task. The Journal of Neuroscience, 13(3), 900-913.
