In a way, your experience reminds me of “hedonic adaptation,” a more scientific explanation of a phenomenon evident in everyone’s life. Simply put, people quickly switch from desiring something to taking that something for granted once we have it. It’s all too common for positive changes to move from something appreciated to something forgotten!
Hedonic adaptation is the right name for it, though I'd argue with whether it's a defect.
If the change still felt like a sacrifice, I wouldn't have held it for years. Willpower is a poor load-bearing material. That it stopped registering as an improvement is precisely what made it durable. The forgetting isn't the price of the change, it's the mechanism.
What I haven't lost is the instrument. I am the instrument. Everything I know about being well reaches me from the inside, through the senses, and no printout changes that. The lab panel in the back of the book is there for readers who need something outside of me. I didn't run it to find out how I was doing. The seventy pounds is the only measured change in it, and the least interesting one, since it's the change everybody predicts.
And the same treadmill runs the other direction, at scale. The processed food supply is engineered against adaptation — more novelty, more intensity, nothing ever quite enough. That's the version that worries me, and it's a considerably larger problem than my own dull dinner!
I was having problems with minor acid reflux, and read an e-book called Why Stomach Acid is Good for You, by Jonathan V. Wright, a medical doctor. His premise is that most people are not producing enough stomach acid, so not triggering the esophageal valve to close. He would carefully wean his patients off of antacid drugs, to help their bodies relearn to properly digest their food. He had a few choice words for the antacid industry.
In a way, your experience reminds me of “hedonic adaptation,” a more scientific explanation of a phenomenon evident in everyone’s life. Simply put, people quickly switch from desiring something to taking that something for granted once we have it. It’s all too common for positive changes to move from something appreciated to something forgotten!
Hedonic adaptation is the right name for it, though I'd argue with whether it's a defect.
If the change still felt like a sacrifice, I wouldn't have held it for years. Willpower is a poor load-bearing material. That it stopped registering as an improvement is precisely what made it durable. The forgetting isn't the price of the change, it's the mechanism.
What I haven't lost is the instrument. I am the instrument. Everything I know about being well reaches me from the inside, through the senses, and no printout changes that. The lab panel in the back of the book is there for readers who need something outside of me. I didn't run it to find out how I was doing. The seventy pounds is the only measured change in it, and the least interesting one, since it's the change everybody predicts.
And the same treadmill runs the other direction, at scale. The processed food supply is engineered against adaptation — more novelty, more intensity, nothing ever quite enough. That's the version that worries me, and it's a considerably larger problem than my own dull dinner!
I was having problems with minor acid reflux, and read an e-book called Why Stomach Acid is Good for You, by Jonathan V. Wright, a medical doctor. His premise is that most people are not producing enough stomach acid, so not triggering the esophageal valve to close. He would carefully wean his patients off of antacid drugs, to help their bodies relearn to properly digest their food. He had a few choice words for the antacid industry.