"Over the next thousand years or so, the biological substrates
    of suffering will be eradicated completely. 'Physical' and
    'mental' pain alike are destined to disappear into 
    evolutionary history. The biochemistry of everyday 
    discontents will be genetically phased out too. Instead, 
    matter and energy will be sculpted into perpetually life-
    loving super-beings."

   "We convince ourselves that all manner of things would
    potentially make us happy. All these peripheral routes are
    not merely vastly circuitous and inefficient. In the main, 
    they just don't, and can't, durably work.... If the 
    mind/brain's emotional thermostat, as it were, is not
    genetically and pharmacologically reset, then even the
    greatest triumphs and successes turn to ashes.... Even 
    those of us who tend to lead a relatively happy day-to-day
    existence will, in the course of a lifetime, undergo spells
    of wretched unhappiness and disappointment."

   "To escape from the hedonic treadmill we must first sabotage
    a small but vicious set of negative feedback mechanisms.
    These are genetically coded into the mind/brain. 
    Recreational drugs of abuse do not transcend or subvert 
    such mechanisms. On the contrary, they actually bring them
    into play with a vengeance. Today's quick-and-dirty 
    euphoriants are nonetheless instructive. They give us 
    a tantalising glimpse of what humanity's natural state of
    consciousness could become if several ugly metabolic
    pathways were inhibited or eliminated."

   "We want to feel that we are happy for good reasons -- 
    genetically self-serving as they may so often be."

   "How, and why, should emotion be encephalised in an era
    when intentionality is no longer tied to furthering the
    inclusive fitness of self-replicating DNA? What's worth
    being happy 'about'?"

    - David Pierce, The Hedonistic Imperative

The full text of David Pierce's The Hedonistic Imperative is
available on the Web at: http://hedweb.com/hedethic/hedonist.htm

The Hedonistic Imperative Abstract: http://hedweb.com/hedab.htm

Different Pierce:

   "Most of us...are naturally more sanguine and hopeful than logic
    would justify. We seem to be so constituted that in the absence
    of any facts to go upon we are happy and self-satisfied; so 
    that the effect of experience is continually to contract our 
    hopes and aspirations."

   "The truth is, that common-sense, or thought as it first emerges
    above the level of the narrowly practical, is deeply imbued 
    with that bad logical quality to which the epithet metaphysical 
    is commonly applied; and nothing can clear it up but a severe 
    course of logic."

   "The object of reasoning is to find out, from the consideration 
    of what we already know, something else which we do not know. 
    Consequently, reasoning is good if it be such as to give a 
    true conclusion from true premisses, and not otherwise. Thus, 
    the question of validity is purely one of fact and not of 
    thinking."

    -Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914), The Fixation of Belief (1877)