But while I do think appreciating what you have is part of how to avoid the hedonic treadmill, I don't think it's a matter of learning to be happy with a routine.
I've found it possible to make a conscious effort to avoid hedonic adapation, and enjoy novel things without allowing them to become a new baseline. If you can maintain your expectations at the same level, while improving your actual circumstances noticeably above that level, you can maintain a higher level of enjoyment of your life.
Single, full-time working people, especially in tech, start to unlock the ability to travel abroad, maybe even one of those big two-three week Life Changing things to somewhere exotic, but only once in a lifetime or once every few years.
Middle / upper-middle class incomes eventually get to a point of wealth and freedom where they can take vacations abroad multiple times a year.
And I think you need to be even above that level, where you don't have to worry about your base income or mortgages or whatever, where you can have this lifestyle where you can have novel things and experiences all the time. And even then there's a risk people get used to it.
In general, these are just different goals in life. If you want a house and kids more than you want the freedom to travel, that's cool and pretty normal. There's no stone tablet handed down from the skies that says that has to be the way it is, though.
When I was 23 I saved a few grand up and went hitchhiking around Europe on a budget of something like < 500 eur a month.
I didn't care about my base income and still don't. I think most people accidentally structure their life so that the 9-5 becomes necessary (e.g. if you rent a room in an expensive city, or a flat or house, now you need to pay for that).
The income is a means to achieve the things that you want. If you can't X because Y, and you want to X, then give up Y, not X, find a different way to do X.
I have a mortgage now, but I didn't bother with it for the longest time for precisely the reason you'd described. It locks you down. I waited until I was sure that it _wouldn't_ lock me down because I could really afford it (i.e. it's not 50% of my income from a full time job).
If I'm being charitable, I had the advantage that I could move my belongings etc in to my parents' house if I wanted to. They're pretty poor, probably in the bottom 20% in the UK, so that's not some fantastic privilege.
If you have fuckup parents (not just poor but failed in some way), then yeah, this becomes a lot harder, and I'm sorry about that.
Just to clarify, this suggests that your parents earn total around 16000 a year, pre-tax [0]. Perhaps your guess was accurate, and they really do - but I also find that the average person is normally wildly off in their estimates of the UK wealth distribution. A few thousands more a year would already place them in the top 50%.
[0]: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/percentile-points-f...
My parents are seperated, both lived in social housing at that time.
In 2022 they earn approximately 16k between them. Think minimum wage 20 hours a week, that's the ballpark.
I looked at the table of individual taxpayers income. For the relevant years, my mother's income was actually probably closer to the bottom 10% :)
There is a skew here in that you need to pay tax to be included in the table at all, though, hence 2018-19 having 1% set at 12,100 because that's the income tax threshold.
The percentage doesn't really matter though, basically what I'm saying is that like, it's useful to have a place to dump your belongings. That can be a parent, friend, whatever. It's a social capital thing more than it is a monetary thing unless you own tons of stuff and are unwilling to part with it.