Our brain is very good at wanting things, and not so much at liking them. It is simply wired like that. Evolutionarily, I guess it's more dire to have ourselves want things than to like them once we already got them. The areas of our brain that 'want' are big and interconnected; feeling deep pleasure is more difficult, as several small isolated 'hotspots' must be active at the same time.
From Liking, Wanting and the Incentive-Sensitization Theory of Addiction:
Rewards are both ‘liked’ and ‘wanted’, and those two words seem almost interchangeable. However, the brain circuitry that mediates the psychological process of ‘wanting’ a particular reward is dissociable from circuitry that mediates the degree to which it is ‘liked’. Incentive salience or ‘wanting’, a form of motivation, is generated by large and robust neural systems that include mesolimbic dopamine. By comparison, ‘liking’, or the actual pleasurable impact of reward consumption, is mediated by smaller and fragile neural systems, and is not dependent on dopamine. The incentive-sensitization theory posits the essence of drug addiction to be excessive amplification specifically of psychological ‘wanting’, especially triggered by cues, without necessarily an amplification of ‘liking’.
This has been in the back of my mind for some time now. I've been coalescing and digesting this same concept as seen through the lens of productivity habit coaches, buddhist monks and Arahants, orgasm denial kink, neural network training and neuroscience papers.
I feel that having an intuitive understanding of this idea should be profoundly useful once one can get past the sadness or concern it might instill. I am still exploring it.
For now, I just feel like mentioning a silly daily life example from this week: I've been enjoying walking to the library, browsing, and picking the books I would take home as much as actually reading them.