On a day without heat

One day without heat,
only mildly cold,
and a convenient place to go to get warm
without ever going outside --
not exactly Armageddon.
And yet -- the discomfort still reminds us
of how weak we are,
of how much worse it could be.

But oddly enough, what made it hardest
was our expectation of its imminent end,
the broken promise of a restoration time;
the assumption that we could wait it out
without taking the precautions we'd take
if we knew the deprivation was going to last...

and what does that tell us about the long term effect
of a systematic lowering of expectations?