Sparked by a post from Linda Duffy on Typeshare.
She wrote:
Over time, we upgrade our lives without noticing. Luxuries become normal. Normal becomes essential.
I left a comment:
I have noticed that this seems to have happened to us a society - and on the surface it seems like a positive thing, but then I start to wonder if it is actually a detriment since we come to take the essentials for granted?
If normal becomes essential, what happens to the things that already were essential?
Do they just become…invisible?
That question has been rattling around in my head ever since, so here we are.
The Upgrade Cycle Nobody Asked You to Join
Think about what "basic" looked like a generation or two ago.
- A roof.
- Running water.
- Food that didn't make you sick.
- Heat in the winter.
- Electricity, so you could turn on some lights.
- A few items of clothes to get you through the week.
Those were the things people organized their survival around. The floor, aka the baseline. The stuff that, if you had it, you were doing okay.
Now scroll through any website, streaming service, or social media feed for thirty seconds and then count the number of things being sold to you as essential that would have been considered absurd luxuries twenty years ago. Heated car seats. Same-day delivery of anything (don’t get me started on this one again…already wrote a post about it). A toaster with a touchscreen. A refrigerator with ads. More clothes you don’t need.
We didn't notice the upgrade cycle happening….because it has been insidious, and now here we are, standing on a floor (or in front of the Red Door if you watched the movies) that used to be the ceiling, calling it the bare minimum.
I see this as a problem in what happens to our relationship with the things we actually can't live without once we stop noticing them.
The Bare Necessities, The Simple Bare Necessities Are Getting Buried
(anyone else have the Jungle Book earworm now???)
Clean water is not a guarantee.
I want to be very clear about that, because it seems like a lot of people have forgotten it.
Fresh food, affordable housing, reliable transportation, accessible healthcare → none of these things are promises. They are not contracts the universe signed with you at birth. They are imperfect, fragile, human-made systems. And they require attention, maintenance, and a level of collective care that is increasingly hard to muster when everyone is too busy being outraged that their DoorDash order arrived lukewarm and half-eaten by a starving delivery driver.
I watch people go to the internet to complain that their luxury wasn't perfectly executed, while the people who can't access the essentials don't get nearly the same airtime.
That's the danger hiding inside Linda's observation. We have upgraded without noticing, which has led to a recalibration of our outrage.
We stop standing guard at the door of what's actually important.
(Jim Rohn said to stand guard at the door of your mind. I think we also need to stand guard at the door of what we consider non-negotiable.)
Main Character Syndrome Has Entered the Chat
"Take full account of what excellencies you possess, and in gratitude remember how you would hanker after them, if you had them not" - Marcus Aurelius
A while back, I wrote about people treating others like NPCs (Non-Player Characters for you non-gamers). I've seen others call this Main Character Syndrome, and the name fits.
When you are the main character, everyone ends up being a disposable extra in your story:
- The barista who made the wrong drink.
- The driver who was two minutes late.
- The internet that buffered for four seconds..
What doesn't register for many is the humanity in each of these interactions:
- The fact that the barista showed up to work and is there to provide for their kids.
- That someone drove across town to bring you a thing you didn't want to get yourself just so they could pay their electric bill this month.
- That the internet exists at all and connects you to the sum of human knowledge and also seventeen hours of someone else's cat videos.
The more we normalize the luxury, the more we treat the humans delivering it like props, and the more invisible the actual, essential foundation becomes.
What Twelve Hours Without Electricity Taught Me
"Almost everything is noise, and a very few things are exceptionally valuable" - Greg McKeown
I've written about this before, too. (Book Brew 162) A storm knocked out the power at my mom's place for about twelve hours. No electricity, no internet, no TV, no distraction. Just oil lamps, a dinner we cooked by hand, a deck of cards, and the real human-to-human connection that makes your brain remember it still has thoughts of its own.
It was, genuinely, one of the most refreshing experiences I'd had in months.
The Question I Can't Answer (And Neither Can You, Probably)
Here's where I'm going to resist the urge to wrap this up neatly, because I genuinely don't think there is a neat answer.
Is the fact that luxuries become normal a sign of progress? Yes, probably. Comfort spreading further down the ladder is not inherently bad.
But the question becomes: what do we lose when we stop noticing what we already have?
When clean water goes from "miracle" to "obviously assumed," do we stop protecting it?
When human presence and connection get replaced by optimized digital convenience, do we lose the ability to recognize what we're missing?
When every inconvenience becomes a crisis and every luxury becomes a floor, do we lose our capacity for actual gratitude — the kind that keeps you from Karen-screaming at a stranger because your oat milk latte had the wrong ratio?
I don't know. I genuinely don't know.
What I do know is that those three lines from Linda Duffy made me stop and sit with this for 3 weeks. And that feels like the right response to a question that doesn't have a clean resolution → to let it brew, to not rush to the tidy lesson, and to keep asking it every time the upgrade cycle tries to run quietly in the background.
Ponder This
- When was the last time you felt genuinely grateful for something most people would consider basic?
- If you're the main character of your own story, who's responsible for the essentials that keep the story running, and are you treating them accordingly?
- Think about the last time you complained about something. Was it a luxury that didn't meet expectations, or an essential that actually failed you?
Books/Newsletters
- FI Accountant - Linda Duffy
- Essentialism - Greg McKeown
- Meditations - Marcus Aurelius
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