Louis C.K., in an October 2008 appearance on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, delivered one of the most incisive and eternal observations about human nature: "Everything is amazing right now and nobody's happy."
Back then, Louis was talking about rotary phones and airplane WiFi and ATMs. Watch that clip today and it feels almost quaint. We've gone so much further. The phone in your pocket runs models that would have qualified as science fiction when that show aired. We landed commercial spacecraft on the Moon last year. Blue Origin stuck a booster landing in November. GPT-5 shipped in August and people were already complaining it wasn't good enough. In January, DeepSeek came out of nowhere and wiped $600 billion off Nvidia's market cap in a single day, because it turned out you could train competitive models for less than everyone assumed. Amazing.
And yet.
We saw protests erupt in Los Angeles, in Turkey, in Nepal, in Madagascar, in Bulgaria. Wildfires scorched LA in January. The Myanmar earthquake killed thousands in March. Israel and Iran went to actual war in June. The Gaza ceasefire collapsed, resumed, collapsed again. Pope Francis died. Pope Leo XIV was elected. The great comet passed. DeepSeek shipped. GPT-5 shipped. Blue Ghost landed. The first wheelchair user flew to space. And through it all, the dominant cultural mood online was... impatience? Cynicism? A vague sense that whatever we just got wasn't quite what we ordered?
The discourse around AI is perhaps the purest distillation of this phenomenon. Every model release follows the same arc: breathless anticipation, followed by immediate disappointment that it doesn't do some specific task perfectly, followed by proclamations that the whole enterprise is overhyped, followed by quiet acknowledgment six months later that actually it was a step function improvement in capability.
This is the same pattern Louis identified with airplane WiFi in 2008: instantaneous adaptation to miracles, followed by irritation that the miracle has edges.
I don't think this is a bug. I think it might be load-bearing.
If we were genuinely satisfied with what we had, we wouldn't build the next thing. The restless ingratitude that drives us to complain about GPT-5 is the same restless ingratitude that drove someone to build it in the first place. Nobody sits down to create something new because they're perfectly content with what exists. The dissatisfaction is the fuel.
But there's a cost to running on this fuel. At the individual level, it means perpetually chasing a horizon that recedes as fast as you approach it. At the collective level, it means we lose the ability to recognize when we're actually in an age of wonders. We had a commercial Moon landing. A first-generation American became Pope. A Chinese startup shipped a model that nobody saw coming.The texture of history is visible in real time, and mostly what I see on my feed is people annoyed that Claude's context window could be longer.
I wonder sometimes what people in 2040 will think when they look back at 2025. Probably something like what we think looking back at 2008, when Louis was doing that bit. "Those people had no idea how good they had it. And also no idea how much better it was about to get."
The trick, I suppose, is holding both truths at once: being genuinely grateful for the astonishing moment we're in, while remaining restless enough to build the next one. That's the tension. I don't think it resolves. I think you just have to live in it.
Everything is amazing. Nobody is happy. And somehow, that's how we got here.