Americans Forget How Good They Have It: New at Reason

Despite the political rhetoric, things are getting better. A. Barton Hinkle writes:

Today, less than $400 will get you a run-of-the-mill machine with a 2-gig processor, 8 gigs of RAM, and a terabyte of hard drive space in case you want to store movies on your PC. All of the movies.

Most people don’t, though, because they can live-stream everything in high-definition over connections so fast that the end of the movie arrives before the middle does. A few years ago people Googled “free wi-fi” a lot because there wasn’t much of it. Now 89 percent of the public thinks free wi-fi is listed in the Bill of Rights, and if the YouTube video of the kid falling off the swing buffers for more than a picosecond they’re never going to set foot in that McDonald’s again dammit, because what an outrage.

This is what psychologists call habituation—the tendency to get used to things, no matter how good or bad. You buy a new car and for the first few weeks you absolutely love it, but then one day you find the shine of it has worn off and it’s just a car. Or you lose your job and spend the first two weeks crying so hard you have mucus swinging from your nose, but by week four you’re genuinely curious about what Jerry Springer has in store this afternoon. Life goes on.

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