The hedonic treadmill is the observed tendency of humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or life changes. According to this theory, as a person makes more money, expectations and desires rise in tandem, which results in no permanent gain in happiness.

Wikipedia

The technological treadmill is an analogy in work that involves technology: there’s a tendency for technology to keep changing at the same rate no matter what the task.

In other words, we need to keep learning new technologies just to keep doing the same job. If you learn more about said technologies, you will just have more to unlearn when they become obsolete.

Yes, it’s a little glib and imprecise. But in being surprising, and in seeming like it shouldn’t be true, it captures something: could there be a way of working that isn’t buffeted by technological progress? That merely benefits from it instead?

Can we get off the treadmill?

> If we can operate at higher levels of abstraction and work with more universal and fundamental concepts, we will be less affected by technological change.

The concepts in Design Patterns are as relevant today as they were in 1994 when it was written. However with the persistent changes in languages, compilers, libraries, IDEs, and so on, there’s a decent chance that had you implemented one of those patterns a year ago, you’d need to re-implement it today for your new app.

Instead, it should be possible to work at such a level of abstraction that concern for the implementation details can be delegated to some other entity — ideally a machine. This is the overall aim of HASTE.