American writer 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 fathom. Yet somehow, it doesn’t always feel like we’re doing that well. We all know someone with more. But comparison is the fastest path to misery. Unfortunately happiness isn’t simply determined by what you have. It’s determined by what you have compared to what you expect.
Imagine making $75,000 a year but you expected to make $50,000. You probably feel like a total baller. Now imagine making $50,000 while expecting to make $75,000. Suddenly you feel like the last kid chosen for dodgeball. Same income. Same person. Completely different expectations. The problem isn’t that your circumstances got worse. It’s that your expectations are on a three-day bender of Red Bull, Vodka and Zyns.
For most of recent 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 GMC Gremlin. Your vacation to your brother-in-law’s trip to the Maldives. You don’t even know where the Maldives are. (Hint: I think they’re in Arkansas.) There were limits to how much envy you could generate because your world was pretty limited. Not so today. Everyone seems to have a better house, better body, better vacation, and a kitchen roughly the size of Rhode Island. The expectation game went global.
We compare our career to our best friend from high school who works in NYC. Our house to our college roommate’s crib in Newport Beach. Of course, we’re not comparing ourselves to one person. We’re comparing ourselves to the best parts of thousands of people. Nobody can win that game. Even a guy on a yacht in Portofino, Italy is probably looking at other people’s larger and fancier yachts on Instagram. Now he wants a helicopter and a bigger tender for shore excursions. That’s where the inflation of expectations gets interesting. Sometimes progress itself can make satisfaction more elusive. And suddenly your yacht seems old and tired. Can you even imagine thinking such a thing? (Delete “yacht” and insert “car” and maybe it’ll make more sense.) Every improvement eventually becomes the new baseline. Consider air travel. In 1960, flying across the country was practically miraculous. 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 planes 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 I’m still a little irritated not to have Wi-Fi.
Money makes this especially obvious. There was probably a point in your life when you thought a certain income would make you rich. Then perhaps you reached it and something strange happened: the number moved. Your income went up, but so did the price of feeling successful. In 1950, the American dream was roughly 1,000 square feet. Families were larger, closets were smaller and children routinely shared bedrooms. Somehow civilization survived. Today, new homes are more than twice that size while 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 out in the rain. 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 family has driven enormous human progress. 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. A career. A spouse. Children. A house. Financial security. Friends. Maybe simply reaching this age with people you love still sitting around the table.
It isn’t that we have too little. It’s that our definition of enough keeps moving just beyond whatever we have.
Eventually, the problem isn’t getting what you want. It’s remembering that you once wanted what you already have.
I’m just a normal guy sitting in a booth at Waffle House pecking on a keyboard. Ask me anything at [email protected]. I promise you’ll hear back from me.
