A couple of years ago, I got to fly in the ultra-luxurious business class of an especially high-end airline; and now all lesser air travel – which means all other air travel, basically – is ruined for me forever. I’m not expecting an outpouring of sympathy for my plight. But I did feel a flicker of vindication when I read, via Scientific American, about a new study on the psychology of restaurant diners: serve them a really delicious appetizer followed by a mediocre main course, it seems, and they’ll rate the main course much more negatively than if had been preceded by something equally mediocre.

The researchers – whose results were published in the appropriately titled journal Food Quality and Preference – gave participants a boring pasta dish, preceded by an appetizer of bruschetta, made either with excellent fresh ingredients, or uninspiring dried ones. The resulting difference in their assessments of the pasta illustrates a phenomenon known as “hedonic contrast”, and it’s a familiar one to food psychologists and restaurateurs alike: what counts as tasty depends on what came before. If you’re planning to dine at Olive Garden, don’t pop into Nobu for a quick amuse-bouche first.

In short, context counts. You might reasonably argue that this isn’t the most surprising revelation in the history of the study of the mind – but, obvious or not, we don’t take nearly enough account of it in the ways we think about happiness. We persist in assuming that certain things will make us happy, intrinsically and of themselves: on a grand scale, the right partner or the right job; on a smaller scale, the right vacation destination or choice of novel to read next. But our judgments are profoundly influenced by how they contrast, positively or negatively, with recent previous experiences. And, for that matter, how they contrast with other people’s experiences: hence the famous suggestion that people would prefer a smaller pay raise than a larger one that their coworkers also received; and the hypothesis that more people commit suicide in happier nations because it’s worse to feel sad in places where everyone else is cheerful.

That appetizer study – like my ruinously enjoyable time in business class – is a case of good experiences making subsequent, less good experiences even worse. But hedonic contrast works the other way, too: if those pasta-eaters had been given a truly awful appetizer first, I suspect they’d have rated the main dish as delicious. Or to give another personal example: I’m writing this from the Yorkshire Dales, where chilly rain is falling from dark skies, and hiking’s a matter of trudging through muddy bogs. But you know what? I came here from the smothering, sweaty humidity of New York – and by comparison, it’s sheer ecstasy.

Indeed, there’s a case to be made that some of the loveliest small pleasures in life (as I previously argued here) come from the joy when bad things stop. Who doesn’t adore that special quality of indoor silence when a houseguest who’s outstayed his welcome finally leaves? It’s not just that I’m glad he’s gone; I’m glad he stayed, too, otherwise I’d never have been able to relish his departure.

The most extreme way of putting this is that many experiences mean nothing good or bad at all, except insofar as they contrast to previous experiences we’ve had, or are aware of. Medieval peasants didn’t feel deprived by their inability to take cheap breaks in far-off cities using budget airlines – just as I don’t feel outraged by the fact that I won’t live to 200, though that may one day be commonplace.

Equally, though, once a certain level of income or comfort becomes your default position, you can be sure it’ll stop delivering pleasure by contrast with earlier experiences, thanks to “hedonic adaptation” – the way we acclimatize swiftly to new circumstances, so that they become the unquestioned backdrop to our lives. “We are so made,” Sigmund Freud wrote, in Civilization and its Discontents, “that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things.” Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m heading out to the grey skies and drizzly rain. It’s going to be so enjoyable to be somewhere warm and sunny after this!