Hedonic Treadmill Paradox

My family immigrated to America in 1983 from Bhopal, a city in India. I was thirteen. In India, I had my own transistor radio, a bicycle, a rotary phone, and a black and white television. Back then, time moved the way monsoons move. Things were inevitable, cyclical, and unhurried. I did not know then, that by coming to America, I was crossing not just an ocean, but a temporal fault line. Behind me was a world still largely analog, where change was measured in generations, and ahead of me was a country accelerating into a future it hadn’t yet named. I have spent the forty-three years since trying to reconcile those two clocks. And during the last 5 years, the clock itself may have changed shape. To most Americans today, the long hundred years between 1800 and 1900 now seem ancient at this point. During that span, humanity gave itself the railroad, the telegraph and telephone, electric light, photography, the phonograph, and the automobile. These were civilizational achievements, each requiring…