Shifting baseline syndrome

This comment on Hacker News by user internet2000.

This Douglas Adams quote is still undefeated:

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

This reminded me of the shifting baseline syndrome explained by David Attenborough in his book A Life on Our Planet.

There are fewer fish in the sea today. We don’t realise that this is so because of a phenomenon called the shifting baseline syndrome. Each generation defines the normal by what it experiences. We judge what the sea can provide by the fish populations we know today, not knowing what those populations once were. We expect less and less from the ocean because we have never known for ourselves what riches it once provided and what it could again.