Never enough
One corollary to the human negativity bias is that when we receive something real that would once have been considered too good to be true, we tend to discount it, integrate it into our everyday lives, and begin to think of it as part of the furniture of the universe we inhabit that has always been there, and will always be there. If such a thing is taken away, we’re more than just a little bit upset, but instead beside ourselves with indignation.
Such improvements can be large enough to encompass all of modern society. Examples include items like electrification, hot and cold running water, easy access to abundant food choices at any day of the year. At the smaller extreme are the mundane items, such as cell phone Bluetooth features that fail to connect correctly in the car or to our wireless headphones (“Hey Siri, can you see my hand gesture?”), or when the forecast leads us to expect a warm sunny day, but instead the day is cool and rainy. Give us an inch and we expect not just a mile, but infinite unobstructed roadway as far as our little legs will carry us.
When people switched to cars, they didn’t look back. Not everyone had a horse for transport prior to cars, mind you. Horses had a lot of costs of ownership that cars never had. But you can be sure that some early car owners griped about how horses didn’t come with mechanical problems you had to fix before you could go somewhere. They conveniently forgot that horses could also get sick, be injured, or—more commonly—be hard to deal with as large, hard-headed beasts with their own personalities. People gladly adopted cars en masse, and within a generation, hardly anyone spent time wondering why.
In a similar spirit, as time goes on it becomes harder and harder to imagine a time before smart phones, before Google searching, before the internet. And because it’s hard, we don’t bother doing it. So when one or the other of those fails, we become disproportionately upset. Our baseline expectations have risen to a height that our previous selves wouldn’t have been able to imagine.
The negativity bias of our mental and neurochemical constitution means that we’ll assume something good that happens to us was something we should expect as a just and appropriate reward for our own personal excellence. Our negativity bias tells us that anything short of these positive just desserts is unjust: an affront to our integrity and noble personhood. It’s personal when the power fails, when some device is on the blink. What once might have been a rare and precious miracle when viewed as future technology soon becomes a commonplace part of life’s basics. That it could break down or disappear is inconceivable. Reversion to our previous state of nature (in relative perceived terms) is actually felt as much, much worse than the previous status quo.
Similarly, we take our advances in stride, abandon older practices readily, and rarely look back except in fits of nostalgia. As we develop and grow as individuals, we abandon earlier practices, too. For instance, once we learn to walk, we stop practicing crawling, hardly continuing to develop that skill. At least one hopes.
Sometime tens of thousands of years ago, our ancestors stopped hunting and gathering in favor of the sedentary farming life. The agricultural revolution had extreme costs for our species: farmers were shorter in stature and had more physical ailments that show up in the fossil record, for instance. And sedentary life made our ancestors easy pickings for invading tribes on horseback—at least on the Eurasian supercontinent. But the benefits of farming and sedentary city life exceeded the costs in terms of technological and scientific advancements, surplus wealth and opulence, cultural and civilizational progress.
So—on this earliest of the year’s mattress-sale holidays—let us pause to reflect on what it was like for our forebears to sleep on smelly animal pelts in the dirt. Be thankful. And remember to keep an eye on the spiraling shape:
I see your Spiraling Shape, and raise you one “here comes the sun.”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zNTaVTMoNTk
Afternoon...
I am not feeling well today ( mostly arthritis pain, probably the low pressure outside, roomie is worse, can barely walk) and I slept 12 hours, so I took today off...( it's a federal holiday anyway...lol..)
Just saying Hi, and thank goodness for god mattresses...while I used to all the time, I can no longer sleep on the ground or in sleeping bags...and I th ink it is time to change my mattress come to th ink of it, because it may contribute to this arthritis, especially in my lower back.
I know I sometimes take things personally as far as things that are more frustrating than they used to be...like dealing with customer service reps on the phone, or ridiculous purely money grabbing fees from some banks and companies...and I can be nostalgic for things that were a lot simpler in the past...and some things I miss or won't give up, like real books, and writing by hand
At the same time, I am fairly tech savvy and love the internet and have become a big fan after resistance to streaming, I am looking into ways to dump my cable ( bill went up another $5 this month...sigh...it always goes up, I keep trying to negotiate better deals and the prices never stick) and still get the things I do enjoy and watch...