The reason abundance produces the feeling of scarcity

Storage capacity, catalogue size, income and choice have all expanded enormously, and the accompanying sense of not having enough has not fallen correspondingly. The obvious explanation — that people are ungrateful — is unnecessary. The comparison against which having enough is judged is recalculated from current conditions, so it rises alongside them.

What everyone sees

Persistent dissatisfaction in conditions of plenty is read as a moral failing or a cultural pathology. Framed that way it invites exhortation, which does not work. The finding it ignores is that evaluation is relative by construction, so a level that once counted as abundance is reclassified as ordinary once it is the level actually experienced.

What is actually happening

Brickman and Campbell described hedonic relativism: satisfaction is assessed against an adaptation level formed by recent experience, so improvements shift the baseline they are measured from and their effect on the assessment decays. Easterlin’s comparisons across time and countries found average reported wellbeing rising far less with national income than cross-sectional comparisons within a country would predict, consistent with relative rather than absolute evaluation. Neither result says gains are worthless; both say the gain is registered as a change and then absorbed into the new reference point, after which the sensation of insufficiency returns at the higher level.

Why it stays hidden

The mechanism hides because the reference point is not experienced as a comparison. The current level simply feels normal, and normal feels like nothing. Nobody has the sensation of having adapted; they have the sensation that things are as they are and that something is still missing, which is exactly what a moving baseline would produce.