More is a direction of travel, not a place you arrive

Wanting more is a perfectly ordinary impulse, but it cannot be satisfied by getting more, because it is not that kind of thing.

The word more describes a vector. It points, it does not locate. This is easy to state and surprisingly hard to hold onto, because in the moment more feels like a destination: if it were a bit larger, a bit better, a bit further along, then the wanting would resolve. It does not resolve, and everyone knows this from experience, and everyone forgets it again at the next opportunity, which suggests the forgetting is structural rather than foolish.

You can watch the mechanism work on small things, where the stakes are low enough to see clearly. A better version of some tool arrives and for a week it is a pleasure, and then it is simply the tool, and the comparison resets to whatever is next. The pleasure was real. It was also temporary by design, because it came from the change rather than from the state. Nothing has gone wrong here. The error is only in expecting the next change to behave differently.

The practical upshot is not to stop wanting things, which is neither possible nor desirable, but to stop treating the direction as though it were an address. If you want a resolution you have to name a location: this level, this state, this specific description of having arrived. A named place can be reached and recognised. A direction can only be travelled, and travelling forever in one direction is a decision, even when it was never made explicitly.