The Terror of Familiar

Our brains are hardwired to both crave and fear novelty. From an evolutionary standpoint, this makes perfect sense. Humans could only survive if they sought out new foods to eat, new places to shelter, and new people to procreate with. On the other hand, novelty carries risk. New plants can be poisonous, new people can be hostile, and new caves can harbor unknown dangers with fangs and claws. Our brains are constantly trying to solve this paradox: how do we satisfy our longing for something new, and still stay safe and secure.

Our modern world is a lot more friendly than that of our distant ancestors. Food and shelter and mates are easier to find. Unfamiliarity is more likely to be a restaurant we haven’t tried than a saber toothed tiger lurking in a cave. Rather than grapple with the risks and imperatives of novelty, we’re left to negotiate the flip side: the pleasures and displeasures of familiarity.

Just as we simultaneously crave and fear newness, we love and hate familiarity. With no novelty in our lives, we become complacent and bored, yet we hate to give up the comfort and ease that familiarity brings.

The classic example of this is the midlife crisis. After years spent building a stable, predictable, comfortable life, held together by long standing relationships and careers, some of us grow restless and impulsive. We sense that mortality lurks around the next corner, and we may try to dodge it by abandoning everything we worked so hard to build. 

I think that crisis is avoidable if we find a balance between novelty and familiarity, and work to maintain it. As we get older, we can try to seek out enough newness to scratch our itch without setting the whole thing on fire. We can reinvent ourselves through continuous, generative evolution, rather than convulsive demolition. As my friend Bob Franke likes to say: “Buy the leather jacket, not the motorcycle.”