The endless quest for novelty is a slow descent into madness.
I heard this the other day and have spent the last few weeks turning it end over end. Where in my life do I seek out novelty, and where is it a thirst that never gets slaked? Definitely I seek it out in creative projects I start with gusto and then abandon it the moment I hit a wall. Sports I begin and discard when I’m not immediately a prodigy at it (spoiler: I am absolutely never a prodigy at it.) I ask myself: where do I even subconsciously create a little bit drama, just for the rush of the consequences? Being late on taxes, putting off tasks that can easily be completed in three minutes flat? It all points to that little craving we all have for a little touch of chaos, of newness, of rush and novelty, just to keep it exciting.
As I raise my six year old, I think about this too. How he picks up a board game and wants to abandon it halfway because he’s losing. Where he doesn’t want to ride his bike because it’s a pain in the butt to put on all the protective gear, then take it off again, and the gratification is delayed. But I know once he’s done his ride he’ll be grinning from ear to ear. This is the manner I’ve been taking with him, see it through, and in that I’m learning to do it to myself. Because the feeling I’m craving through the novelty, is actually out the other side of being consistent with many, many mundane minutes.
Sometimes I watch my partner do a task. And while he’s as can’t-sit-still as me and needs to move his body frequently to get the electricity out, I think of how many times I’ve seen him finish a seemingly impossible task around the house. Just the other day I watched him and a truck driver spent 5 straight hours under the beating sun trying to place a 40ft shipping container on some concrete slats. The idea was to line it up perfectly, then slide the container out of the trailer onto the blocks. For every micro adjustment, the truck driver had to get back into the truck. Because the ground was soft, it required digging around the tires each time, putting rocks in the path for a steadier drive. Every single micro adjustment cost about 20 minutes, I watched them both just keep going, sweating out of their minds, until finally, at long last the shipping container sat upon the concrete blocks. Me, I would have lost my mind in the first hour. I would’ve thrown my hands up, declared it impossible, insist we call a guy, pay for a crane, set the shipping container on fire, whatever. Because there was too much *fucking around* between the desire - the shipping container- and the outcome -having it placed.
By letting myself let reward and quick dopamine lead for decades, I wonder f I’ve created a kind of madness, even at one point actively promoting this kind of thing. Quit your job, move countries, start again. I do think many of us benefit from this trial-by-fire experience at least a few times in our life. But I do think constantly ripping the bandaid off and starting again when life gets too hard makes the skin underneath a little too raw, a little too pink, and doesn’t allow the callus and grit to form, from which a lot of resilience and character is made.
In biking, I realize I was only repeating the things I had nailed so far, to keep my ego in the air like a balloon at a kids party. Because God forbid I admit even to myself there’s things I still need to work on.
And now, as I write a book, where the excitement for the premise is long gone, and I sit down for my page-a-day goal, and I want to abandon it, and start a new idea that feels shiny and exciting. And I know I need to finish it, no matter what, come what may, this is the draft that gets finished. Because if I constantly chase the novelty, I will never accomplish anything great or even good or even satisfying to myself.
To get better at biking, I need to spend a long time doing the things that frustrate me, being seen to fail and working at it over and over again.
To write a book, I need to put in hundreds and thousands of mundane hours to do so.
As I was writing this in Antigua, Guatemala, the walls started shaking, for about thirty seconds. Magnitude 5.6 earthquake. Like a little reminder that I don’t have to actively orchestrate drama, the natural world takes care of that. You want drama? I’ll rattle the walls.
New ideas are perfect when they’re new. They’re exciting, they’re full of possibility, they haven’t disappointed you yet. But any shiny thing you take off the conveyor belt, when you crack it open, the same thing will be there. The novelty box will always carry boredom, self doubt, frustration, flatness. You can not extract one from the other. If you’re in the middle of a chapter where you’ve started some exciting things but you’re in the mundane part, sit with me. I’m in that chapter too. Let’s see what happens if we don’t quit this time.
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