Baseline Drift

Earlier this month I was sweating through my suit at a wedding in northern Maine, making small talk with somebody's aunt.

"By this time in October, we used to have frost," she said, gesturing at the cloudless sky. It was 74 degrees in mid-October and everyone was in sundresses, jackets off.

"We used to have snow by Halloween."

She wasn't angry or scared. She delivered it the same way you'd mention that Netflix isn't as good as it used to be. Just... noting it.

The dominant emotion in that field wasn't alarm, it was relief. Perfect conditions! We got lucky with the weather.

That feeling (strange, but anyways…) may be the defining sentiment of our time. It may also be our undoing.

The average temperature in the U.S. has increased 2°F over the past 50 years. Winters start two weeks later than the 1980s and end two weeks earlier. Nine of the ten warmest years on record occurred in the past twenty years.

But 2°F over 50 years means 0.04 degrees per year.

We cannot feel 0.04 degrees. Our nervous system evolved to detect discrete events (the predator in the grass, the branch snapping behind you) not statistical trends. By the time we notice something's different, the baseline has already shifted underneath us.

Psychologists call this perceptual adaptation. Put your hand in cold water for sixty seconds and at first, it screams. After a minute, it feels fine. The water temperature didn't change, just our perception of it.

That mechanism kept our ancestors alive. The ones who could adapt to new conditions survived. When change compounds slower than a season, our brain doesn't flag it as threat. It just updates our baseline for "normal" and moves on.

The first car alarm makes us flinch. The hundredth doesn't register. The first 75-degree November feels eerie, but the fifth feels like patio season.

I track almost everything. I optimize my calendar down to fifteen-minute blocks. I measure my coffee, my screen time, my sleep cycles.

And I can't remember when October in New England stopped feeling like October.

That gives me pause, because the same evolutionary mechanism that kept me calm during that 74-degree wedding is keeping everyone calm through everything else.

Democratic norms eroded identically. Each broken precedent felt shocking in isolation. But over a decade, the baseline shifted. What felt authoritarian in 2015 feels routine in 2025. Not because anyone agreed with it. Because brains update faster than principles. The language used to describe political opponents, the acceptance of once-unthinkable supreme court decisions, the normalization of questioning election results… each instance shocking at first, each becoming part of the noisy background. The outrage-to-acceptance cycle shortens until the baseline for acceptable civic behavior has eroded beneath our feet.

Media consumption rewired the same way. I used to read a dozen books a year! Lately, it feels like I struggle to finish articles. My brain expects information in bite-sized chunks, delivered via a feed. I didn't decide to rewire my attention span. It adapted, one scroll at a time. We traded depth for dopamine hits so gradually that "kids these days can't focus" became the complaint instead of "we systematically destroyed everyone's capacity for sustained attention."

School violence followed the same arc. Sandy Hook felt like a breaking point. Then Parkland. Then Uvalde. Each one generated weeks of coverage, national debate, collective grief. Now they happen and we scroll past. We still care, but our baseline for acceptable child mortality has shifted. Twenty years ago, a school shooting would have dominated news cycles for months. Now it competes with celebrity gossip for screen time. We adapted to the unacceptable until it became background noise.

Income inequality, work-life boundaries, healthcare costs, housing affordability, privacy erosion. Each transformed incrementally enough that we never felt the moment of choice. We just woke up one day in a different world and couldn't remember crossing a threshold.

NOAA's latest climate "normals" (baseline temperatures calculated from thirty years of data) were released in 2021. They are the warmest in recorded history.

Which means an entire generation now considers temperatures that would have been called "unseasonably warm" fifty years ago to be... normal.

That's not a metaphor. That's literally how we define normal: by averaging recent conditions. As conditions change, our definition of normal changes with them. We're measuring ourselves against a moving target we can't see is moving.

The technical term is shifting baseline syndrome. Each generation accepts the conditions they're born into as normal, even as those conditions change. Your reference point isn't historical data. It's personal experience.

The aunt at the wedding remembers snow by Halloween because she lived it. I don't because I didn’t. For me, 70-degree Octobers will soon just be... October.

The same applies to everything else. Kids growing up now will think mass shootings are just part of school. That politicians rejecting election outcomes is normal governance. That reading requires effort because sustained attention is unnatural.

Each generation inherits a new baseline and calls it normal. This is how democracies collapse, cultures fragment, and species die.

Slowly, then all at once.

Adaptation isn’t the problem; adaptation is survival. The problem is what adaptation costs when change is permanent and accelerating.

What we're losing is calibration: the ability to register that conditions have shifted beyond acceptable thresholds before it's too late to respond.

The boiling frog stays in the pot because its nervous system recalibrates to rising temperature, updating its baseline for "normal" until normal becomes lethal.

We're the frog. And the water is rising across every system we depend on.

Climate scientists now talk about "tipping points", or thresholds beyond which change becomes irreversible. Democracy has them too. So does social cohesion. So does mental health, media literacy, and institutional trust.

We will never suddenly wake up in crisis. More likely, we won't wake up at all. We'll just keep recalibrating to conditions that are killing us, filing each new degradation under "fine."

Because the data might say emergency, but our minds say: nice day for it.

That mismatch, between what's measurable and what's feelable, is the crisis. You can't mobilize against threats your nervous system has filed under "normal."

I don't have a solution. The problem is biological. Your brain has to recalibrate to survive; you simply can't walk around in a permanent state of alarm.

But you can do something harder, and admittedly smaller: get better at noticing when you stop noticing.

When you catch yourself saying "things used to be different", whether that’s about seasons, about politics, about anything, don't file it as nostalgia. Ask: What changed? When? Did I choose this, or did I adapt to it?

When you catch yourself saying "it's fine", about heat, about workload, about news that should be shocking, pause. Ask: Is this actually fine? Or have I just recalibrated to make it feel fine?

Name the drift out loud. Say it to a friend: "Isn't it strange that it's this warm in October?" or "Did you notice we don't even react to school shootings anymore?" Naming the drift is the first step to resisting it. It recalibrates you and the person you're talking to, creating a shared baseline built on observation instead of adaptation.

Will this fix the climate? No. Will it restore democratic norms or repair your attention span? For sure not.

But it might fix something smaller: your ability to tell when your perception is lagging behind reality. And maybe, if enough people start naming what's happening instead of adapting to it, the collective baseline holds a little longer before it collapses entirely.

Or maybe we'll all just keep recalibrating until there's nothing left to recalibrate to.

Either way, at least you'll know you saw it coming.

That aunt at the wedding also told me all about how there hasn’t been a good ski season since 2014. Again, when she told those stories, there was no urgency. Just wistfulness. Just another artifact of a world that used to exist.

That sentiment (remember when things were different?) is the sound of a species ill equipped to register what it's losing.

And I realized: that's going to be me in forty years, if I'm so lucky. Standing at some kid's wedding, telling stories about when we needed jackets in winter. When citizens would go out and protest against government overreach. When you could still finish a movie without checking your phone.

And the kids will smile politely and think: okay zoomer, times change.

And they'll be right.

The world is changing faster than it ever has in human history. We're watching it happen and we’re talking about it constantly.

And still, somehow, it feels fine.

Until one day, we'll look around and realize we're standing in a completely different world, and we never felt ourselves cross the threshold.

All because we adapted. One degree at a time.