The fastest-depreciating currency in the world is amazement.
July 1969: 600 million people hold their breath around a single grainy lunar module ladder. Three years and four months later, Apollo 17 goes to the Moon and it is the last time anyone does. Men were walking on another world, live, and the country had already moved on.
The miracle hadn’t gotten smaller (in fact it had become even more miraculous), but the audience had gotten used to it.
That gap – between the ladder and the shrug – took just 41 months.
We’ve been running the same experiment lately and the half-life is down to about eighteen. A machine that talks like a person: impossible, then astonishing, then a productivity tip, then “huh,” in barely a year and a half.
30 seconds of video conjured from a sentence, a spec that was state of the art in December 2024. The complaint curve is even faster: we went from “it can think” to “it’s a bit slow today” like passengers who boarded a flying miracle and are now upset about the legroom. Louis CK saw this coming from seat 14C, back when the miracle was just Wi-Fi.
Economists would recognize the shape instantly. When you print too much of a currency, each note buys less. We are printing miracles at an industrial rate, and the purchasing power of a miracle (measured in seconds of genuine awe per unit of impossible) is collapsing accordingly.
Amazement inflation. The wonder is being debased, not destroyed.
The standard response is a lecture about gratitude, and I’ll spare you. After all, adaptation is the mechanism, not a character flaw. Put differently, the brain files the repeated as furniture so it can watch the door. No creature that spent its afternoons marveling at fire made it through winter. The “huh” is survival equipment.
I catch it in myself most on the road. Five months of jumping through Asia and the temples started arriving pre-seen – yet another astonishing thing, said the brain, filing it with the furniture. Nothing was wrong with the temples. I was surviving.
But a currency losing value quietly changes what people reach for, and this one’s no different.
When the impossible costs nothing, attention migrates to the merely scarce – the handmade, artisanal, the slow, the one-of-one.
The last asset standing in an amazement hyperinflation might be the ordinary thing that can’t be printed at all.
Anyway… we sure live in the most interesting of times.
The machines conjure worlds from sentences now, the miracles arrive on a subscription, and the whole thing has stopped raising anyone’s pulse.
Related: Miracle Inflation – the long version.
Sources: USIA viewership estimate, July 1969 · Sora launch specifications
We've reached the point where "This changes humanity forever" has roughly the same shelf life as milk.