My grandmother used to spend an entire day doing laundry. She’d haul water, heat it on the stove, scrub clothes by hand, wring them out, and hang everything to dry. Now I toss clothes in a machine, press a button, and complain if the cycle takes more than an hour.This small example illustrates a larger truth about human nature: as life becomes objectively easier, we don’t become proportionally more grateful. In fact, we often become less so.
Consider the remarkable progress of the past century. Diseases that once devastated entire populations are now preventable with a simple injection. Information that would have required weeks in a library is available instantly on the device in your pocket. Tasks that consumed hours of manual labor now happen automatically. By nearly every objective measure, life for most people in developed nations has become dramatically easier than it was for previous generations.
Yet when researchers study happiness and gratitude levels over time, they don’t find a corresponding surge. We adapt to our new baseline with remarkable speed. Psychologists call this “hedonic adaptation,” the tendency for humans to return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative changes in their lives.
The washing machine becomes ordinary. The smartphone becomes essential rather than miraculous. The heated home, the abundant food, the access to entertainment and knowledge—all of it fades into the background of daily life. What once would have seemed like magic becomes merely what we expect.
This isn’t simply ingratitude in the moral sense. It’s how our brains are wired. We’re comparison machines, constantly measuring our current situation against what we had yesterday and what others have today. When everyone has a washing machine, having one no longer feels like a blessing. It becomes the baseline, and we start noticing what we lack rather than appreciating what we have.There’s also the problem of invisible progress. We viscerally notice when things go wrong, but we rarely notice when things simply work. You remember the one time your flight was delayed, not the thirty times you safely traveled hundreds of miles through the air in a few hours. The hundreds of times clean water came out of your tap don’t register the way a single plumbing problem does.
Social media amplifies this tendency. We’re now constantly exposed to curated highlights of other people’s lives, creating an endless stream of upward comparisons. Someone always has something better, something more, something we don’t. This transforms genuine abundance into perceived scarcity.
Perhaps most importantly, easier lives don’t eliminate human suffering or struggle. The nature of our challenges changes, but challenges remain. Previous generations worried about basic survival; many of us now worry about purpose, meaning, and fulfillment. These psychological and existential struggles feel just as real and difficult as physical hardships, even if objectively they arise from a position of greater material comfort.
None of this means progress is bad or that we should romanticize the hardships of the past. Life being easier is genuinely good. But it does suggest that gratitude isn’t something that happens automatically when circumstances improve. It requires conscious cultivation.The antidote isn’t to artificially make our lives harder or to feel guilty about what we have. It’s to occasionally step back and truly see what surrounds us. To remember that the ordinary is only ordinary because it became common, not because it isn’t remarkable. To recognize that almost everything we take for granted would have seemed like an impossible luxury to someone a few generations ago.
My grandmother, if she could see my life now, would think I lived like royalty. And she’d be right. Maybe the question isn’t why we’re not more grateful as life gets easier, but whether we can learn to see our own lives the way someone from the past would see them—with wonder at how far we’ve come, rather than frustration at how far we still have to go.
