Our quote of the day comes from Alexis de Tocqueville:
“We so soon become used to the thought of want . . . that an evil which grows greater to the sufferer the longer it lasts becomes less to the observer by the very fact of its duration.”
Quoted in Henry George, Progress and Poverty.
Tocqueville is actually identifying something called “duration neglect”. In fact, even for the observer, we tend to make bad events into cognitive snapshots, forgetting how long they lasted.