From Wonder to Wiping: The Psychology of Taking Progress for Granted
Imagine travelling back nearly 2,000 years and meeting one of the pioneers of Chinese papermaking.
You explain that their invention will eventually transform civilisation. It will carry scientific discoveries, preserve literature, spread revolutionary ideas, and help humanity communicate across continents.
Naturally, they're delighted.
Then you take them to Tesco and show them a 24-pack of quilted, three-ply toilet roll.
It's difficult to know whether they'd be impressed or deeply offended.
Paper emerged in ancient China well before the traditionally credited innovations of Cai Lun around 105 CE (Hotson, 2019). Over the centuries, it helped reshape human civilisation.
And today, we use enormous quantities of it to wipe our bottoms.
But perhaps the strangest part isn't what happened to paper.
It's how completely normal we find it.
Yesterday's Miracle, Today's Minor Inconvenience
There was a time when downloading a single photograph from the internet could take several minutes.
You'd click a link, make a cup of tea, return to find half a forehead, and consider yourself fortunate to be living in the future.
Today, if a photograph takes two seconds to load, we begin questioning our internet provider's competence.
Nothing particularly terrible has happened. In fact, everything has improved almost beyond recognition.
Yet somehow, our patience has deteriorated in direct proportion to our convenience.
Psychology has a name for part of this phenomenon: hedonic adaptation.
The basic idea is that people become accustomed to improvements in their circumstances. What initially produces excitement or satisfaction gradually becomes familiar, and its emotional impact fades.
Diener et al. (2006) explain that adaptation plays an important role in subjective well-being, although people differ considerably in how much and how quickly they adapt.
Yesterday's extraordinary luxury becomes today's perfectly ordinary expectation.
Then, eventually, something to complain about.
The Goalposts Have Wheels
Psychologist Harry Helson's (1948) adaptation-level theory offers another piece of the puzzle.
We don't judge experiences against some permanent, objective standard. Our perceptions are influenced by what we've grown accustomed to.
A warm house is miraculous if you've spent the winter freezing.
It's deeply disappointing if the thermostat reads 19°C instead of 21°C.
The house hasn't become objectively terrible. Our reference point has moved.
And the same process plays out across generations.
Running water, refrigeration, central heating, antibiotics, instant communication. Achievements that would have seemed fantastical to previous generations are now so thoroughly embedded in ordinary life that we barely notice them.
Until they stop working.
Consider how quickly a power cut transforms us from sophisticated twenty-first-century citizens into confused Victorian peasants.
Within fifteen minutes, we're standing in the kitchen, repeatedly flicking a light switch, apparently hoping electricity will reconsider.
The Curious Tragedy of Getting What We Want
Perhaps the most interesting part is that adaptation doesn't merely reduce our excitement. It can also increase our expectations.
Sheldon and Lyubomirsky (2012) found support for a model in which the happiness associated with positive changes fades partly because positive emotions diminish and partly because aspirations increase.
In other words, we get something wonderful, become accustomed to it, and start wanting something better.
It's an extraordinarily effective engine for progress.
It's also a rather questionable recipe for contentment.
But this isn't simply evidence of human ingratitude. Adaptation serves a useful psychological purpose. If every familiar comfort continued to demand our full attention, we'd struggle to notice anything new.
We cannot spend every morning marvelling at the toilet flushing. Eventually, we have to go to work.
The problem arises when our ability to appreciate progress falls behind our ability to expect it.
We become surrounded by achievements that would astonish our ancestors, while increasingly defining satisfaction by the small inconveniences that remain.
Simply Put
Perhaps our ancient papermaker wouldn't be offended by toilet roll after all.
Perhaps they'd recognise something rather beautiful in it.
Their invention had become so useful, so accessible, and so thoroughly woven into everyday life that people could afford to use it once and throw it away.
That's a peculiar kind of triumph.
Of course, they'd probably be less impressed to discover that we argue about which brand is softest.
But there's a lesson somewhere between the printing press and the bathroom.
Progress doesn't necessarily make us permanently happier. Often, it simply changes what we're capable of being unhappy about.
And perhaps that's worth remembering the next time an image takes three seconds to load, the shower isn't quite hot enough, or the Wi-Fi briefly abandons us.
We live in a world filled with yesterday's impossibilities.
The extraordinary thing isn't that we've stopped noticing them. It's how quickly we've started demanding better.
And somewhere, an ancient papermaker is staring at a toilet roll, wondering whether humanity has completely lost the plot.
References
Diener, E., Lucas, R. E., & Scollon, C. N. (2006). Beyond the hedonic treadmill: Revising the adaptation theory of well-being. American Psychologist, 61(4), 305–314. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.61.4.305
Helson, H. (1948). Adaptation-level as a basis for a quantitative theory of frames of reference. Psychological Review, 55(6), 297–313. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0056721
Hotson, H. (2019). Origins of paper. Cabinet, University of Oxford. https://www.cabinet.ox.ac.uk/origins-paper
Sheldon, K. M., & Lyubomirsky, S. (2012). The challenge of staying happier: Testing the hedonic adaptation prevention model. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38(5), 670–680. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167212436400
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