Because you are "more" today than you were yesterday, your capacity to experience the world has expanded. You can see nuances in a conversation you would have missed a year ago. You can appreciate a sunset with a depth of gratitude that your younger self hadn't yet earned. The day is more incredible because you are more capable of perceiving its brilliance. Breaking the "Hedonic Treadmill"
However, if you wake up with the radical assumption that today must hold something more profound than yesterday, your reticular activating system (the brain's filter) goes to work. It hunts for the "incredible." It finds the serendipitous meeting, the new idea, or the moment of peace that makes today stand out. The Choice of Narrative
Psychologists often speak of the "hedonic treadmill"—the tendency for humans to return to a baseline level of happiness despite major positive changes. To make every day better than the last, we have to jump off the treadmill and onto a spiral.
This happens through . When we stop looking for "the big win" and start looking for the "micro-miracles"—the perfect crema on a morning coffee, the way the light hits a brick wall, a breakthrough in a difficult project—we train our brains to find beauty in higher frequencies. The Power of Expectation
