Discontent in Heaven
I like to imagine that if you handed an American colonist from the mid-1700s a Cool Ranch Dorito, his head would explode. If someone from the 1600s could pull on an athleisure shirt woven from cotton, polyester, and spandex, they would struggle to comprehend the smooth hug of that sensuous fabric — bewildering compared to the rough, common clothes they wore every day. Think of the gulf between a mattress stuffed with hay and one built from layers of gel and foam, offering sculpted comfort, heat dissipation, and a total absence of vermin.
And yet: when was the last time a Dorito amazed you?
This is hedonic adaptation. What was once amazing becomes great, then good, then okay, then merely adequate. There is no experience so phenomenal that repeated exposure will not attenuate our response to it. This is human nature — but it is also a kind of blindness, and mindfulness, reflection, and gratitude can help us fight it.
The comparisons pile up everywhere you look. A modern home with central heating and air, against a log cabin with drafty windows and a fireplace that could never keep the whole interior at a comfortable, consistent temperature. Crossing the sea on a sailboat with little more than hardtack for sustenance, against the same journey compressed from weeks into single-digit hours — while you watch a movie and are served a warm meal.
I look around and conclude that the modern world is good evidence that people could be discontent in heaven. In many ways, the world modern man inhabits approaches what former ages would have imagined as a heavenly abode:
- Fresh fruit in the winter.
- Warm beds layered with soft fabrics.
- Cheap medication to resolve a headache, and antibiotics to cure otherwise deadly illness.
- Artificial light at night for pennies per hour — without the disgusting animal smell of a tallow candle or the soot it gathers on all the walls.
At the grocery store, you fill a literal container with vegetables, fruit, prepared treats and meals, juices, milk, meats, and cheeses — and you walk out having given up only a small fraction of the value you accrue from working.
Then there is the freedom to choose what we study and the work we pursue. For so many millennia there were no options, or astonishingly few: farm, adopt a trade, learn a skill like making barrels, fletching arrows, or navigating a ship. Today the menu of possible lives is nearly endless, and we treat that, too, as unremarkable.
We move around the world in a fraction of a day — set against the months such journeys once took, it is less like transportation and more like apparating. We speak with family, friends, and loved ones through a minuscule pane of glass kept in a pocket, and through that same pane retrieve information more detailed and vast than any library or encyclopedia of the past, instantaneously. Where our ancestors waited for a traveling minstrel or a production in a church, we carry an infinite playlist — a quasi-infinite selection of genres, eras, and artists, available at any moment, at our own discretion.
Our scientific instruments peer across the observable universe — millions of galaxies, trillions of stars — and down to the bacterium and the virus, today almost to the atomic level. We can alter DNA. We purify sand and arrange its atoms in arrays so particular that the rocks, in effect, think. We split other rocks to produce abundant, cheap power. We no longer send ships across the world to scrape bat guano off islands; we pull nitrogen from the air itself to make synthetic fertilizer that feeds billions of people.
And almost none of it induces astonishment, because we have adapted to view it as the status quo. As common.
To be fair, this discontent serves a purpose. It is the engine that pushes the frontiers of our abilities — our technologies, goods, and services — ever outward. A civilization of the perfectly satisfied would never have built the vaccine, the jetliner, or the thinking sand. So I don’t think the goal is to extinguish discontent; ambition and gratitude are not enemies. The goal is to hold both at once: to keep wanting better while still seeing clearly what we already have. The psychologists who study the “hedonic treadmill” — the ones who found that lottery winners drift back toward their old baseline of happiness within a year or two — have also found that gratitude is one of the few practices that reliably interrupts the drift. Amazement, it turns out, is a muscle.
So I like to pause and take stock of the simple things I find immensely gratifying. A modern pair of jeans is amazingly comfortable. A T-shirt made with synthetic fibers is soft, smooth, and stretchy. Giant apples, bred to be enormous, crisp, and sweet. I hate being cold, and I almost never have to be — unless I choose to. A warm shower, hot water on demand, every single day. Or, if you’re feeling extra luxurious, twice in a single day.
Hedonic adaptation and lifestyle inflation are very real things. But through conscious exercise of that muscle of gratitude, one can remain in a state of awe at commonplace things — things that, though common today, would have been considered a miracle beyond a miracle just a few generations back, and certainly to our progenitors from millennia ago.