You won’t change your predominant value system from quantitive to qualitative until you see the benefits of doing so.  But because the benefits in the two value systems are polar opposites, you won’t see the benefits of changing until you are already using the new value system.

In other words, it's not a matter of just weighing the benefits on both sides.  The precise benefits in one system (freedom from stuff, leading to joy) are measured the exact opposite way in the other value system (depriving oneself, leading to misery).  In order to even see them as benefits, you have to change your value system.  But you WON'T do that until you see the benefits of doing so.  And so it goes, round and round.

One very unfortunate theory is that the only way out of this conundrum is for the quantitative value system to fail so dramatically, on every possible scale, that its all-pervasive unquestioned precedence is finally rejected.

source: Andrew Welch

A variation on the effect of this conundrum is what has been called the Paradigmatic Trap: "What is ecologically and socially necessary for sustainability is politically infeasible, but the politically feasible is ecologically and socially ineffective, if not catastrophic."

source: Bill Rees