Comment by techblueberry

I feel like in discussions about nostalgia, there can be this default presentish reaction which talks about all of the things that are better

But in the hedonic adaptation sense like - and comparisons are complicated - people aren’t by and large happier now (because of the hedonism this is sidestepping the argument of how well distributed it is, and I’m talking the past 50-100 years not compared to subsistence farming and the like early Industrial Revolution etc et al)

I do think a lot of the senses that things are better now are based on this adaptation, not thinking about would you be less happy if you didn’t know about some of the small things you were missing.