Mick Jagger’s been around seemingly forever, as well as the song he’ll be linked to for just as long: “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.”

But hey, hey, hey, that’s just what I say. If what you say is that there’s no place for material like this in a health and fitness column, I won’t tell you how white your shirts should be.

I’ll just tell you that you’re wrong — and what Harvard professor and bestselling author Arthur C. Brooks has said more than once about the refrain of that song. Brooks also hosts a weekly and well-followed podcast, “Office Hours with Arthur Brooks,” and in the episode titled, “3 Ways to Want Less and Be Happier,” he tells listeners something that should stop you from prancing about like a caffeinated chicken and shouting out that famous refrain.

It’s not that you can’t get no satisfaction, no, no, no.

It’s that you can’t keep it.

Brooks then explains the “neurobiological tendency” we all have that makes it so hard to continue feeling satisfied over the long term. The explanation is interesting, easy to follow, and, for me, a grist for the mill.

Or should I say treadmill?

For it helps me understand why people give up on exercise. It also makes me wonder if your exercise end goal is in error.

So his listeners better understand “the phenomenon of not being able to keep satisfaction,” Brooks tells a story of a caveman given the task of providing food for his clan. When his initial attempts prove unsuccessful, the caveman decides to go “over there,” a place he’s never been before.

He discovers a watering hole and a gazelle drinking from it. In response to finding potential food, his body secretes the feel-good chemical dopamine, which is the same thing that happens to you in an equivalent modern-day circumstance.

If the caveman makes the kill, he receives another hit of dopamine. If he later receives praise for feeding the clan, he gets a third.

Besides its feel-good function and among its many others, dopamine is also produced “so that we can learn new skills that are rewarding to us.” So the next time the clan’s in need of food, that caveman is sure to head back to the newly discovered watering hole.

On his way, the expectation of seeing a gazelle again will produce a “little spritz” of dopamine.

But if he sees no gazelle, his dopamine production and the feel-good feeling ends there. If he sees an entire herd, however, he’ll get a bigger hit than before and with that an “unbelievable sense of reward.”

Now the modern-day caveat to experiencing that is pretty explicit. The things available to us capable of creating such intense pleasure are also capable of creating an addiction.

But the modern-day conundrum is not as clear. Its equivalent occurs to the caveman when he goes to the watering hole a second time and sees a single gazelle.

While that’s what he’s expecting, expected situations don’t create a feel-good dopamine hit. In fact, our biological tendency is for it to produce the opposite.

It’s why a modern-day car dealer who’s selling as many vehicles as he was three years ago feels bad about it — and like a loser.

It’s also why Brooks so often mentions what Jagger should really be singing about is not that he can’t get no satisfaction but that he can’t keep it.

As well as why I say that regardless of your modern-day job, you need to see exercise as your side gig — as well as ask yourself the question that serves as the title of today’s article: “Is your exercise end goal in error?” All the while recognizing that what Brooks says about satisfaction is true about fitness, too.

It’s not that you can’t get it, it’s that all the elements of modern-day life conspire to make it really hard to keep.

Now the specifics of your exercise end goal are probably different from mine, so hey, hey hey, what I say keeps me fit may not work for you. But we both can learn a thing or two not from “Satisfaction’s” lyrics but what Brooks tells us what not to do if we want to keep feeling satisfied.

“You can’t be doing what you used to be doing. If you want satisfaction to stick around, you’ll have to start doing things that don’t feel natural,” which is “devilishly hard to do.”

But if you can do these seemingly unnatural things, “Life’s going to get better.”

The same goes for exercise. Train against your physiological grain, my friend (such as a long-distance runner doing sprints on the track), and along with a good hit of dopamine you’ll keep and possibly increase your fitness.

One final note: While you may find my use of the phrase “end goal” to be awkward, that’s the phrase Brooks uses in a LinkedIn post about an equally important matter: happiness. So it I find it apropos to not only use it, but also to conclude this article the way Brooks concludes that post.

“The right end goal is not happiness. The right end goal is getting happier.”