The Art of the Reset

Once upon a time recently in London I was having a conversation with a Ukrainian lady. I had just flown in the day before and I was asking her how often she goes home and what the logistics of that entails. Turns out it involves a flight to Poland and then a bus ride into Ukraine but here’s the catch. Depending on the Russian missile forecast that day and what they’ve hit, there might not be power, and she said last time she went she spent 22 hours waiting at passport control. 22 hours I said in shock? Yup, totally normal she said. If you’re lucky it can be 2 hours or you can spend the night waiting.

This got me thinking. A day earlier I had just flown into Heathrow and used one of the best inventions since sliced bread, e-gates. Scan your passport, talk to no humans, answer no stupid questions and be on your merry way. This particular time my patience was tested because the guy in front of me couldn’t figure out how to scan his passport and it took him maybe 30 seconds longer than normal and I found myself getting frustrated at this 30 second inconvenience. Now putting that in perspective compared to a 22 hour wait, I look absolutely ridiculous for being stressed by that.

One might say oh well, it’s all relative. Your stress responses are based on your lived experiences and just because kids in Sudan are starving doesn’t mean I have to force feed myself what’s left on my plate even though I’m full. That being said, my lived experience involves growing up in a third world country and the list of ridiculousness you experience is enough for a series of books. So how did I, who spent the first two decades of my life dealing with intermittent electricity, regular riots with AK-47s doing what they do and an airport experience that involves people trying to scam you from start to finish, reach a point where an extra 30 seconds in line could bother me?

It goes to show how quickly humans can adapt and reset our norms. So much so that there is a name for it. Hedonic adaptation. They are everywhere. Matter of fact I’m in the middle of one again as I write this. I am 40,000 feet in the air on a trip back to New York and was getting repeatedly frustrated because I needed to log in to my account online to sync my writing and start this piece and the wifi was being choppy. Think about that for a second. Just 120 years ago, which equates to just two people ago, this would sound crazy. My grandparents’ first Atlantic crossing as kids was by boat. It took two weeks and I’m pretty sure they had no wifi. They probably got seasick, tired, ate some weird canned food and here their grandson is complaining because his 7hr trip in this magic tube is not optimal due to his lack of connectivity to all the world’s information. Now the flight is really turbulent and it’s making it hard to type, but I’m pretty sure Atlantic waves and weather for two weeks would be slightly worse.

Hedonic adaptation is fascinating. Psychologists sometimes call it the hedonic treadmill, and the name is apt. No matter where you start on the spectrum of comfort or hardship, you tend to walk yourself back to roughly the same emotional baseline over time. Win the lottery or survive a war, within a surprisingly short window your day to day sense of wellbeing re calibrates to something close to where it was before. It is one of our most impressive survival mechanisms and one of our most humbling flaws. Impressive because it means humans can endure almost anything and keep going. Humbling because it means nothing, not even genuine suffering, earns you a permanent exemption from being annoyed by a 30 second delay at an e-gate or spotty WiFi on a flight.

The research on it is fascinating. A 1978 study by Brickman, Coates and Janoff-Bulman compared lottery winners with people who had suffered paralyzing accidents and found that within a relatively short period both groups had returned to roughly the same level of life satisfaction as before. Which starts to explain how someone who spent their first two decades navigating riots, malaria twice a year and unreliable electricity can end up genuinely irritated by thirty extra seconds at an e-gate. Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel laureate who spent his career studying the gap between how we think we make decisions and how we actually make them, adds another dimension to this. His book Thinking Fast and Slow is worth reading in full, but the idea most relevant here is his distinction between the experiencing self, the one living through a moment in real time, and the remembering self, the one that constructs a story about it afterward. The two are often inconsistent. A difficult period can feel endless in the moment and compress into a footnote in hindsight. What this means is that even our reference points are unreliable. We don’t just adapt to circumstances, we adapt to an edited version of our memories of them, which is why intellectually knowing you have been through worse is rarely enough to make the present feel more bearable.

So are we doomed? Schopenhauer, who people love to quote, was a 19th century philosopher who argued that suffering is not an aberration, it is the default state of human existence. That life is essentially a cycle of desire, brief satisfaction and then desire again, the finish line always moving just ahead of us. He was paranoid, quarrelsome, ate alone to avoid conversation and had a famously terrible relationship with his mother, so I take what he says with a grain of salt. He was not wrong, but he was also not totally right. The research suggests we are not condemned to misery, we are condemned to neutrality, which in its own way is both more bearable and more absurd. The Ukrainian woman waiting twenty two hours at passport control will eventually, after a few days back in London, find herself irritated by something trivial. So will you. So will I. The question is not how to escape the treadmill, you cannot. The question is whether you can catch yourself every now and then, mid stride, and recognize it for what it is.

The Stoics have a way to use hedonic adaptation in your favor. Run it in reverse. Since the brain is going to reset your baseline regardless, you can occasionally engineer a deliberate downgrade to remind your nervous system what the floor actually feels like. Not in a performative way, but small and intentional. Take a cold shower, sit in economy when you could upgrade (this is very hard to do once you fly business once), take the stairs instead of the elevator. You get the gist. This gives your brain a new reference point to calibrate against, so that when you return to the comfortable baseline it reads as a genuine upgrade rather than just neutral. The Stoics called it negative visualization, less about pessimism than tricking your own adaptation mechanisms into working for you. The most content people are rarely those with the most, they are the ones most recently reminded of what less feels like.