Morgan Housel has a great phrase for one of the stranger developments of modern life: the inflation of expectations. The idea is pretty simple. We don’t judge what we have in isolation. We judge it against what everyone else seems to have—and suddenly a pretty good life can look surprisingly ordinary.
We have more money, bigger houses, better cars, safer workplaces, longer lives, insane entertainment options and access to conveniences our grandparents couldn't have imagined.
Yet somehow, it doesn't always feel like we're doing that well. Why? Because all know someone with more. But life is not a game of comparison. Unless you wanna be miserable. Housel argues that happiness isn't simply determined by what you have. It's determined by what you have compared to what you expect.
I first wrote about this below.
See, for most of history our expectations were a reaction to our environment, our proximity to others. You compared your house to your neighbor's house. Your Ford Pinto to your coworker's sweet AMC Pacer.
Your vacation to your brother-in-law’s trip to Dollywood. You don’t even know where Pigeon Forge is. (Hint: I think it’s in Tennessee.)
There were limits to how much envy you could manufacture because your world was pretty limited. If you were born in Peoria, you grew up in Peoria and likely married someone from Peoria and raised a family in Peoria. Maybe a vacation each year but, for the most part, you didn’t get out much.
Not so today. With the globalization, our world’s are only limited by the confines of earth-although it won’t be long until you can leave earth on a rocket.
See, every improvement eventually becomes the new baseline. Consider air travel. In 1960, flying across the country in a DC-3 was practically miraculous-even if you had to stop to refuel. As I write this I’m on an Airbus A330-300 flying home from Ireland non-stop. The wi-fi isn’t working.
I’m sure people on this flight are questioning the basic competence of the airline to keep this airplane in the air. Yet, we are traveling in a metal tube at 550 miles per hour, 36,100 feet above the Atlantic Ocean. The flight attendant just brought me an ice cream sundae and a warm cookie. I’m watching a movie on my own private screen (and even I’m a little irritated not to have WiFi.)
I suspect this explains some of the strange dissatisfaction in modern America. By almost every material measure, Americans—particularly those of us in middle age and beyond—live lives our grandparents would have considered astonishingly comfortable. But we don't experience our lives compared with 1950. We experience them compared with our expectations. And those expectations are constantly being repriced.
Today, new homes are more than twice that size they were in 1950. Even as households are considerably smaller. We have walk-in closets, toilets galore, and garages filled with so much stuff that we have to park our $60,000 SUV’s in the driveway. Yet many of us don't feel rich.
None of this means we should stop wanting better things. Wanting a better life for yourself and your children has driven enormous human progress. There's nothing noble about pretending indoor plumbing isn't an improvement because your great-grandfather survived without it. The problem comes when improvement becomes invisible the moment we achieve it. If every luxury immediately becomes a necessity, there's no level of prosperity capable of making us feel prosperous.
Think about the things in your life today that an earlier version of you desperately hoped for. We often spend so much time looking toward the next milestone that we rarely turn around and notice how many of the old ones are already behind us.
Maybe that's the real danger of the inflation of expectations. It isn't that we have too little. It's that our definition of enough keeps moving just beyond what we have. Every time our lives improve, expectations move the finish line another forty yards down the field.
Eventually, the problem isn't getting what you want. It's remembering that you once wanted what you already have.
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