“And even though the princess defeated the dragon and married the prince at the end of the story, the truth is that the hedonic treadmill and the 7-year itch eventually caught up to them and they were not able to ‘live happily ever after’.
“Thankfully, the princess got really interested in philosophy of mind and worked really hard on developing a theory of valence in order to ‘sabotage the mill’ of affective ups and downs, so to speak. After 10 years of hard work, three book-length series of blog posts, a well founded team of 17 rational psychonauts, and hundreds of experiments involving psychedelics and brain computer interfaces, at last the princess was able to create a portable device capable of measuring what amounts to a reasonable proxy for valence at an individual level in sub-second timescales, which over time enabled people to have reliable and sustainable control over the temporal dynamics of valence and arousal.
“Later on the prince developed a Moloch-aware and Singleton-proof economy of information about the state-space of consciousness, and thus kick-started the era of ethical wireheads; the world became a true fariy tale… a wondrous universe of enigmatic -but always blissful- varieties of ineffable qualia. After this came to pass, one could truly and sincerely say that the prince and the princess both became (functionally and phenomenally) happily ever after. The End.”
You are searching for the way out of the hedonic treadmill. It has always existed, and is called enlightenment. The problem is, eternal satisfaction is for the soul, not the ego. To get there, you have to lose the ego. And that – is absolutely terrifying. It is death, and ressurection in and as the paramatman.
You are into psychedelics, no? Get yourself some 5-MeO-DMT. I, for one, am so happy for the hedonic treadmill. The alternative is alpha & omega. Not much happening relatively for you in that state except eternal love and liberation. I cannot die yet.