“Man is a creature that gets used to everything, and, I believe, to everything, even to justice.”Georg Christoph Lichtenberg · Caietele de însemnări · 1799 · Caietul K, însemnarea 18
Repetition anesthetizes: whatever we live daily, good or bad, becomes invisible background.
Habit is a blind force: it does not distinguish between hardship and blessing. Whatever we live with daily fades into the background, whether it is an injustice or a privilege. Repetition numbs attention. Someone who is always treated fairly stops noticing the fairness, just as someone living under an abusive regime comes to see it as normal. A worker with good conditions forgets to value them; a citizen used to humiliating bureaucracy no longer protests.
Lichtenberg goes further than the simple observation that we get used to everything. He suggests that justice is the easiest thing to forget, precisely because it does not hurt. Pain wakes you up at least once; fairness asks nothing of you, so it never catches your attention. That is why a person treated fairly all their life can go blind to another's humiliation. Think of the neighbor who always had running water and simply cannot see that the building next door has none. Sensitivity to justice does not maintain itself; it must be kept alive through deliberate questioning. And that raises the question: how exactly could we train ourselves to see again what has become background?
Why it matters It helps when life feels flat and nothing moves you anymore. It is a warning to check, now and then, what you have quietly grown used to.