I think it's all spike-and-decay.

You go, I don't know, on a shift working on a fishing boat in the North Pacific in the winter -- that should set your misery point pretty low -- and a month after that an office job where you sit in a warm dry office all day is pure heaven. A few months after, that office job is OK. A year or two and that same office job is boring and unsatisfying. So you go and work for a bit in a deep mine where it's always 100 degrees, 100% humidity, and you can only breath through a respirator -- and get another spike. You switch to an office job and it's heaven again... :-)

You resume would look weird, though :-D