Well if we want to talk about it in those terms, the “hedonic treadmill” suggests that if things haven’t just gotten much better or worse our levels of happines

Well if we want to talk about it in those terms, the “hedonic treadmill” suggests that if things haven’t just gotten much better or worse our levels of happiness should be pretty stable. If you were a hunter-gatherer or primitive farmer you wouldn’t have been thinking about how much better an American suburb thousands of years in the future would be than eating sandy bread.