Process
Status Items Highlights Done See section below Claims None Questions None Output None
Document Notes
Shifting Baselines.. a look at our extraordinary ability to adapt.
Highlights
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Humans often don’t remember what we’ve lost or demand that it be restored. Rather, we adjust to what we’ve got.
✏️ Supremely key psychological habit of humans. We adapt, for better and for damn worse. if tragedy unfolds slowly, too slowly, we accept and move on. We can’t hold it all in. 🔗 View Highlight
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shifting baselines
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Consider a species of fish that is fished to extinction in a region over, say, 100 years. A given generation of fishers becomes conscious of the fish at a particular level of abundance. When those fishers retire, the level is lower. To the generation that enters after them, that diminished level is the new normal, the new baseline. They rarely know the baseline used by the previous generation; it holds little emotional salience relative to their personal experience. And so it goes, each new generation shifting the baseline downward. By the end, the fishers are operating in a radically degraded ecosystem, but it does not seem that way to them, because their baselines were set at an already low level.
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no fisher experiences the full transition from abundance to desolation. No generation experiences the totality of the loss. It is doled out in portions, over time, no portion quite large enough to spur preventative action.
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“An animal that is very abundant, before it gets extinct, it becomes rare,” says Pauly in his TED talk on shifting baselines. “So you don’t lose abundant animals. You always lose rare animals. And therefore, they’re not perceived as a big loss.”
✏️ That’s the shift. Loss of something rare.. you’re already primed to expect it going away. 🔗 View Highlight
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It turns out that, over the course of their lives, individuals do just what generations do — periodically reset and readjust to new baselines.
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“Fear tends to diminish over time when a risk remains constant,” he says, “You can only respond for so long. After a while, it recedes to the background, seemingly no matter how bad it is.”
✏️ The dark side of our ever-powerful trait of being adaptive. 🔗 View Highlight
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an incredibly robust “psychological immune system.”
✏️ A fancy way of titling what i keep thinking of as being adaptive? 🔗 View Highlight
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It’s called “hedonic adaptation.”
✏️ There it is.. the thing before was more the overall.. but hedonic adaptation. Yup. 🔗 View Highlight
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looked at Native Hawaiian culture,” MacKinnon says. “They had individuals within communities who were assigned to have a social relationship with species that were never even given names in English.” North America’s indigenous cultures still carry an enormous amount of accumulated knowledge that can help reveal what’s been lost. That kind of historical consciousness — a day-to-day awareness of the obligations that come with being a good ancestor — has faded. And modern consumer capitalism might as well be designed to erase it, to lock everyone into an eternal present wherein satisfying the next material desire is the only horizon.
✏️ Putting on conspiracy hat as always for me, capitalism is designed to erase our historical consciousness.. our need to keep cultural and historical knowledge and be aware of what’s been lost. Instead, capitalism locks into the ever-present now.. and takes advantage of our adaptation the whole way through as it erases everything around us. (sounds like a nice and simple sci-fi premise honestly). 🔗 View Highlight
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here have been long-term victories, too — reductions in poverty, increases in the number of educated young girls, declines in air pollution, and so forth. These also happen incrementally, often beneath our notice. We adjust our baselines upward and do not register what, over time, can be substantial victories. Making those victories more visible can help show that decline is not inevitable.
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Negative changes “are normalized more quickly if you feel like there’s nothing you can do about it,”
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Our extraordinary ability to adapt, to get on with it, to not dwell in the past, was enormously useful in our evolutionary history. But it is making it difficult for us to keep our attention focused on how much is being lost — and thus difficult for us to rally around efforts to stem those losses.