One way you can look at it is from the Buddhist perspective. Once a desire is satisfied, a new one appears, or the fear of losing what was just gained. It's a bottomless pit.
Also, I base my assertion (partly) on what seems to be a universal human trait: We feel negative feelings much more intensely than we feel positive ones.
More on this subject: A 7 minute read from Psychology Today.
It's almost like this neg. utilitarian logic is commonplace, only we suspend it when it comes to things like having babies, and deciding whether eliminating all sentient life is ethical.
But... I never had this view of mine challenged properly, unfortunately.
I agree that the satisfaction of one desire is always followed by another one but I wouldn't use the analogy of a bottomless pit.
Yes, if you look at it from a reductive and simplicistic way you can say that we're basically pieces of meat costantly seeking the next stimulus that can activate the pleasure centers of our brain. It is not incorrect but it still isn't necessarly, pleasure-pain wise, a negative sum game.
Lets say you decide to fast for 8 hours, the lack of meeting the need for food is causing you some sort of pain (hunger) and then you eat, satysfying your need (pleasure). Of course after a few hours the cycle is gonna repeat itself but was it a negative or zero sum game? It may very well be that the pleasure that came from eating tasty food outweighted the suffering caused from hunger.
On the fact that we react more intensely to negative stimuli than positive ones... I'm aware of that. Suffering is the basic condition of conscious life after all. You need to do something to feel pleasure/happiness, to feel pain is extremely easy. Try not getting out of your bed for a month straight. You can't do that.
You'll eventually have to eat, drink, go to the bathroom etc.
The suffering will literally become unbereable and drive you to do stuff to avoid it.
And it is true that "good" stuff doesn't feel as good as we usually expect (hedonistic treadmill) but bad does. A clear example of this are winners of the lottery.
What I am saying is that altough all of this is true it doesn't imply that human life is a negative sum game. Most people consider their lives worth living (and not all of them can be delusional on this), we are an exception to the rule.
BTW if you're interested on the topic of the problem of suffering in conscious beings I'd suggest you to look into David Pearce's transhumanist philosophy and the abolitionist project.
It's still 100% hypothetical (as it is the efilist red button after all), but it's an interesting "optimistic alternative" to efilism. If both options were practical efilism wouldn't have reason to exist anymore IMHO.
