Comfort creep silently raises our threshold for what counts as a problem

Easter's foundational idea is that modern conveniences don't just remove hardship — they recalibrate perception, so that each new comfort becomes the new baseline, and anything below it starts registering as suffering. A slightly late package, a slow Wi-Fi connection, a mildly uncomfortable chair — none of these would have registered as problems to anyone a century ago, yet they now genuinely provoke frustration.

He traces this to how quickly humans adapt to improved circumstances: comfort that would have seemed miraculous within a single lifetime becomes invisible and expected within a few years, while its absence becomes intolerable. The mechanism means comfort is, in a real sense, self-erasing — you can never accumulate enough of it to feel comfortable, because your baseline keeps rising to meet it.

Easter's implication is unsettling: chasing more comfort as a strategy for well-being may be structurally incapable of working, since the target keeps moving.

Takeaway: more comfort doesn't produce more contentment — it just moves the goalposts.