When Problems Disappear, We Redefine Them….
I’m reading The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter and came across a concept that made me stop and stare at the wall for a minute.
It’s called prevalence-induced concept change, which is a fancy way of saying:
When problems become rare, we expand our definition of the problem so we keep seeing it.
Researchers ran an experiment in which participants had to identify threatening faces in a series of photos. At first, there were plenty of threats. Then the researchers quietly started removing them.
You’d expect people to say, “Hey, fewer threats!”
Nope.
Instead, participants started labeling normal faces as threatening.
Their definition of “threat” expanded.
Apparently, our brains really don’t like empty problem space. If the big problems disappear, we simply promote smaller ones.
And once you hear that idea, you start seeing it everywhere.
Parenting in the Age of Imaginary Dangers
One place it shows up is parenting.
If you’re roughly my age, your childhood probably included phrases like:
- “Be home when the streetlights come on.”
- “Don’t burn the house down.”
- “If someone kidnaps you, I’m not paying the ransom.”
And then you rode your bike around the neighborhood for six hours with no adult supervision.
Today, parents are far more anxious about kids being outside alone, largely because of fears of kidnapping or “stranger danger.”
The thing is, statistically speaking, stranger abductions are incredibly rare. I remember reading somewhere that a child would need to stand on a street corner for something like hundreds of years before the odds of being kidnapped by a stranger caught up with them.
But because the truly serious dangers to kids—disease, violence, unsafe environments—have dropped dramatically over generations, we’ve become hyper-sensitive to extremely rare risks.
The definition of “danger” expands.
Now, a kid walking to the park alone feels like a crisis.
When Success Creates New Problems
The same phenomenon happens at the societal level.
When governments or institutions successfully reduce a problem, the incentives don’t always reward saying, “Great! We solved it.”
Instead, the definition of the problem often expands.
Take language shifts like:
- Homeless → Unhoused
- Hunger → Food insecurity
Originally, homelessness meant someone living on the street or in a car. Today, depending on the definition used, it can include someone temporarily staying with relatives or couch-surfing.
Hunger once meant literally not having enough food. Now “food insecurity” can include uncertainty about where the next meal might come from.
To be clear, those situations can still be real struggles.
But the broader the definition becomes, the bigger the problem appears, which conveniently keeps the attention, funding, and bureaucratic machinery running.
When a problem becomes less prevalent, the definition often expands to fill the gap.
The Comfort Crisis Part
This ties directly into Easter’s larger argument.
Modern life has removed many of the hardships humans evolved to deal with:
- hunger
- cold
- physical danger
- boredom
- uncertainty
Our ancestors regularly dealt with real adversity.
We deal with Wi-Fi outages and slow lines at Starbucks.
But our brains still evolved to scan for problems. When the big ones disappear, we simply recalibrate.
A minor inconvenience becomes a serious grievance.
A rare risk becomes a looming danger.
A solved problem becomes a newly defined crisis.
The Takeaway
The lesson here isn’t that problems aren’t real.
It’s that our perception of them is relative.
When life gets better, we don’t necessarily feel better. We often just move the goalposts for what counts as bad.
Understanding that might help us do something radical in modern life:
Pause.
Look around.
And admit that things might actually be…pretty good.