Humanity was not born into abundance. For most of our history, living meant managing limits: uncertain food, physical effort, risks, little capacity to store, and far fewer choices than today. We should not idealise that past; extreme scarcity makes people ill, reduces freedom and shortens lives. But it is worth remembering that much of our disposition was formed in conditions very different from the present ones.
In many societies we now live surrounded by an availability that would have seemed extraordinary a few generations ago: highly accessible food, continuous entertainment, instant purchases, effortless travel, inexhaustible information, and stimuli that never end.
That is, in large part, good news. The problem appears when we confuse availability with need.
Hedonic adaptation helps explain part of it. We tend to get used to many improvements and pleasures; what at first seemed extraordinary ends up becoming normal. Then the next step appears easily: a little more, something new, once again.
We also know that wanting and enjoying are not exactly the same. The brain systems involved in motivation and seeking can push us towards a reward without guaranteeing that, once obtained, the satisfaction lasts very long. There is no need to turn dopamine into an explanation for everything to recognise the pattern: we can greatly increase desire without increasing well-being to the same degree.
The point is not to condemn abundance. That would be absurd. It is to ask what happens when almost all external limits disappear and we have to start building some internal ones.
There an old intuition reappears. Aristotle placed many virtues in a mean relative to us, avoiding both deficiency and excess. He was not proposing mediocrity or deprivation. He was proposing measure.
Perhaps one form of freedom consists precisely in that: being able to access something and, even so, deciding that we do not need it. Being able to enjoy without depending. Having without being governed by what we have.
We are, to a large extent, children of scarcity living in an age of abundance. The challenge is not to go back. It is to learn to handle better what barely existed before: too much.