Reminds me of the Hedonistic Treadmill - whatever your environment, your brain adapts as the baseline and everything slightly below it is now disappointing while everything above it slightly elating. Usually this concept is used to explain why lottery winners do not seem to be all that much happier than the rest of the populace, but it applies here to:

Whatever is required to get media is the normal: You build little rituals around it, you have tiny little traditions in the friend group.

For some guy this is "getting into the old family beater to drive to the VHS-rental", for another gal it's "the Netflix ba-doom sound while settling into the couch" and I am sure they both could write a nostalgic blog post about it 15 years later.

On the one hand, this is aligned with the articles premise that we maybe have not actually moved forward in an emotional sense, but I also like the other, maybe Stoic side of this - the outside world and its offers matter way less than what you make of it in your head and heart :)