Already Normal
The hedonic treadmill doesn’t just dull wonder. It dissolves fear too.
I was driving down Lamar in Austin last week when I noticed the car ahead of me was a Waymo. All white, no driver, moving through traffic with the eerie confidence of something that doesn’t get distracted. Then I checked my mirror — another one behind me. A third passed in the left lane. Three autonomous vehicles within a hundred yards, their identical Stormtrooper aesthetic making the whole scene feel like a deleted shot from a film set ten years from now.
I didn’t reach for my phone. I didn’t text anyone. I just drove.
Later that evening, at a restaurant, a waist-high robot rolled out of the kitchen carrying two plates of food. It navigated between tables, paused for a woman pushing her chair back, and continued to the front. The couple next to me glanced at it the way you’d glance at a busser — briefly, without interest.
That same week, Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.7, and the internet was not impressed. “Legendarily bad,” developers called it within twenty-four hours. Reddit threads cataloged its sins: it hallucinated more, it argued back, it burned through tokens. “Worst release Anthropic has ever shipped,” read one headline. The backlash was loud enough to earn its own name — the “Claude-lash” — and fast enough that the takes were already hardening before most people had tried the model.
To be fair, some of the complaints were real. Anthropic’s own postmortem, published a week later, revealed three separate bugs stacked on top of each other — a reasoning setting silently downgraded weeks earlier, a caching bug that made the model forgetful, and a system prompt change that hobbled coding quality across all their models. The frustration wasn’t imaginary.
But zoom out for a second. The thing people were furious about was a machine that reasons, writes code, and argues with you — getting slightly worse at arguing with you. The floor of expectation is already so high that a dip feels like betrayal.
Psychologists have a name for this: the hedonic treadmill. In 1978, researchers studied lottery winners and found they weren’t significantly happier than a control group — the thrill of the windfall faded, and they returned to roughly where they started. The same mechanism works in reverse and in miniature: every technology that once astonished us becomes infrastructure, and infrastructure is invisible. We adapted to GPS in a few years, smartphones in less. The miracle becomes the baseline, and anything below baseline feels broken.
The AI cycle runs the same pattern at compressed speed. A model launches to amazement, and within weeks we’re cataloging its failures. Not because the failures don’t matter, but because the amazement has already been absorbed — priced in, like a stock that’s already moved.
Here’s the thing I keep coming back to. A few days after the Waymo drive, I was crossing the street — not at a crosswalk, just midblock the way you do when traffic is light. A Waymo was approaching. I stepped off the curb without hesitating.
It wasn’t until I was halfway across that I realized what had changed. I felt more confident crossing in front of the Waymo than I would have in front of a human driver. A year ago, the driverless car was the thing I’d have waited for. Now it was the human behind the wheel I didn’t trust.
My nervous system had updated without asking. Somewhere between the first Waymo I ever saw and that moment on the curb, the future became the thing I was relying on.
The hedonic treadmill doesn’t just dull wonder. It dissolves fear, too — quietly, below the threshold of noticing. Which leaves me with a question: what else has already changed in us that we haven’t caught up to yet?