Hypothetical Scenario: You are to travel by plane every week for 10 weeks via Business class. As you begin, you realise you are not used to this level of comfort as your usual method of travel is Economy. But by the 4th week, you become used to it and all of a sudden your brain forgets what Economy feels like.
Then something unexpected happens, on the 9th week you are told you have to travel by Economy for reasons out of your control, how do you reckon you’ll feel?

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The Bar-Ante Effect states that:

The bar gets lowered, raised, or stays the same for a recurring activity, anytime an event occurs. [1]

That is, for every recurring activity you’re involved in (daily, monthly or any period), every time you up the ante, the bar gets raised and every time you down the ante the bar is lowered.

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Mentally, since you know where the bar is, you’ll tend to aim for it.

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This is particularly common with food. If you are consistently exposed to prestigious food quality over a period of time, your food bar is raised.
Any instance in which you are subject to something lower may result in distaste, even though on average the food is regarded as good.

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This effect can also be seen in the workplace. When a very talented person joins a good team, if you observe closely, the effectiveness of each team member tends to go up. The reverse can also occur, in which unenthusiastic colleagues can reduce the effectiveness of a talented individual who just joined the team.

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Here are some other random examples to illustrate:

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Raised Bar

• The increase in money spent on gifts for your loved ones every year. Even if there’s no new addition to the number of people you love, the bar gets raised every time you up the ante. If you get a PlayStation for your niece this year, you’ll tend to aim for that same bar or go higher the following year.
• The elaboration and expansion of marriage proposals. This also extends to weddings and milestone birthdays (e.g. age 21)
  A friend of mine brought doughnuts for his birthday to the office, the next person to celebrate their birthday upped the ante and brought in a cake. If I was to celebrate my birthday with colleagues, the lowest bar I can go to is to bring in a cake. [2]
• If you temporarily upgrade to a new laptop or a new phone, you may notice the speed increase in application use, or perhaps a better feel or a better way of navigation. What happens when you switch back to your old device?

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Lowered Bar

• Littering.
  If someone drops a sheet of toilet paper (just a sheet) on the floor of a communal cubicle without picking it up, and the person who uses the cubicle after also litters the floor with toilet paper, the bar for a clean toilet floor gets lowered.
  The more people use the toilet in that state, the more they would perceive littering as the norm and think it does not matter. Even if the first sheet of paper and the next after that were all unintentional.
  You can extrapolate this to all types of littering e.g. chewing gum.
• Lateness.
  If you tolerate lateness in the first few occurrences of a repeated activity (e.g. a meeting), then trying to switch to promptness can cause a bit of friction as you have to exert effort to raise the bar.
• Offensive jokes.
  If you allow people spew offensive jokes at your gathering, then people are always going to test the bar until it hits a new low.
• Stoicism.
  Stoics have been known to intentionally lower the bar on their ways of living occasionally (e.g. once a month, for a week, they eat just beans and drink water) and then slowly ease back to normal life.

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There are so many scenarios these two sides can apply to but hopefully, you get the point.

Frankly I don’t think this idea is new (see related), I just haven’t read enough to know what it is called, but hopefully, someone can help me out. In addition, truth be told “ante” and “bar” are synonymous with each other but in this scenario, it helps explain the concept and forms a mental model to use for daily scenarios.
As a side note, in Product Design, the cousin to the Bar-Ante effect is called the Kano Model.

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Personal lessons

• The Bar-Ante Effect can aid in understanding your level of comfortability and help determine how long to hover around that level until you’re in a position to move to the next one.
  Similarly, if you drop your level of comfortability or excellence, things will not feel the same and you’ll yearn to get back.
• This framework can also help you size up the consequential effects of your actions on a 1st order, 2nd order or n-order level.
• So far I’ve mentioned the bar in the context of you controlling the position. It’s much harder to ascertain whether you can hit the bar if it’s outside of your control. Or more importantly, it’s much harder to adjust the bar if it’s outside your control.