Tali Sharot

A great analogy is the AC going in the background, so the noise of the air conditioner is there, but you really don't notice how annoying it is until someone turns it off, and then you're suddenly, oh, I'm so glad.

We think social media is a little bit like that.

Thanks, Michael.

I'm glad to be on it.

Sure, it's kind of a puzzle that people have these wonderful things in their life.

Perhaps it's a great job, a loving family, a comfortable house, but those things often have a limited impact on our daily happiness.

And so why is that?

And at the same time, there's terrible things around us like sexism and racism, cracks in our personal relationships and efficiencies at the workplace.

And

Those also seem to go unnoticed if they're there, if they've been there for a long time.

And so that's kind of the puzzle that we start off with, right?

Why are those wonderful things in our lives don't keep us happy and don't bring us joy for a long time?

And what about those terrible things?

How is it that we kind of overlook them and can't really see them?

Yeah, absolutely.

So on the one hand, so okay, let's name this process that we're talking about.

It's called habituation, okay?

And habituation is basically our tendency to respond less and less and less to things that are constant, that are always there.

So a really like intuitive example is you walk into a room full of smoke and at the beginning, the smoke is really overwhelming, right?

The smell is salient.