Do We Really Need Something New?

I like new things.

A new place to visit. A new piece of technology. A new restaurant. A new hobby. Even taking a different road somewhere can make an ordinary day more interesting.

There is nothing wrong with that.

But recently I started wondering about something.

Why does something being new make it so easy to pay attention?

And what happens after it isn’t new anymore?

The New Eventually Becomes Normal

Think about buying something you’ve wanted for a long time.

For the first few days, you notice everything about it.

You pick it up differently. You explore the features. You appreciate how it looks. You compare it with whatever you had before.

Then slowly, almost without noticing:

the new thing becomes your thing.

The new phone becomes my phone.

The new house becomes home.

The new route becomes the usual route.

The new hobby becomes something I do.

Even moving to another country eventually becomes simply where I live.

Nothing necessarily became worse.

What changed was my attention.

Psychologists call part of this process habituation. When something occurs repeatedly without requiring a response, we naturally become less responsive to it.

That isn’t a defect.

Imagine having to consciously process every familiar sound, object and movement around you all day.

Familiarity allows us to get on with life.

But there is an interesting consequence.

Something doesn’t have to lose its value for us to stop noticing its value.

I See This in Japan

When I first came to Japan, many ordinary things caught my attention simply because they weren’t ordinary to me.

After living here for years, some of them barely register anymore.

They didn’t disappear.

I became familiar with them.

Sometimes it takes somebody visiting from somewhere else to point something out.

They ask about something I’ve passed hundreds of times.

And suddenly I look at it again.

Oh yeah. That is interesting.

Nothing changed.

For a moment, I borrowed their unfamiliarity.

I’ve experienced the opposite when returning to Europe.

Something I once considered completely ordinary suddenly stands out because I’ve been away long enough to see it against a different reference point.

Distance can make the familiar visible again.

But surely I don’t need to leave something—or lose it—before I can see it again.

My Drone Taught Me Another Way

I frequently return to the same places with my drones.

From the ground, I might think I already know a location.

I’ve walked there.

Cycled there.

Photographed it.

Flown there before.

But FPV changes the way I encounter it.

Suddenly I’m not looking at roads and paths.

I’m seeing lines between trees, openings underneath structures, changes in elevation and ways of moving through a landscape that weren’t relevant to me before.

The place didn’t become new.

My way of seeing it did.

Photography can do something similar.

Put a frame around part of a familiar landscape and suddenly I notice the light.

Walk somewhere instead of driving through it and I notice things I had been passing for years.

Visit in winter instead of summer and the same place reveals something else.

Sometimes we don’t need another place.

We need another perspective.

Learning Can Do the Same Thing

Gardening has taught me this too.

At first, a plant is simply a plant.

Spend enough time growing things and differences begin appearing.

The leaves tell me something.

The soil tells me something.

A flower means something.

The direction a vine grows becomes relevant.

Something I previously would have walked past without thinking now contains information.

The same thing has happened while learning Japanese.

At first, much of what I heard simply sounded like Japanese.

Then individual words became recognizable.

Then sentence structures.

Tone.

Context.

Things that had always been there gradually became perceptible to me.

Learning doesn’t only give us more information.

It can change what we’re capable of noticing.

Perhaps expertise is partly an increase in resolution.

The beginner sees one thing.

Someone who has spent years with it sees differences inside that thing.

That means familiarity has two possible outcomes.

We can become so familiar with something that we stop seeing it.

Or we can become so familiar with it that we begin seeing things we couldn’t see before.

Maybe Novelty Isn’t the Only Answer to Boredom

This is where the question became more interesting to me.

Modern life makes novelty incredibly easy to obtain.

Another video.

Another product.

Another restaurant.

Another destination.

Another upgrade.

Another experience.

If something no longer stimulates us, there is usually something new waiting.

And newness works.

Novelty naturally attracts attention.

But it has one unavoidable problem.

The new becomes familiar too.

Then we need something else.

And something else after that.

I started wondering whether some of what I occasionally experience as wanting something new isn’t really about the thing itself.

Perhaps sometimes what I’m looking for is simply the feeling of paying attention again.

That’s an important distinction.

There are perfectly good reasons to replace things.

Something breaks.

Something no longer suits our lives.

Our circumstances change.

A better solution becomes available.

There are also perfectly good reasons to travel somewhere new, learn another skill or try another experience.

I’m not arguing against any of that.

I’m wondering whether new sometimes solves a problem that could also be solved another way.

What If I Change the Experience Instead?

Researchers have actually experimented with this idea in wonderfully simple ways.

In one study, people ate popcorn normally while others ate the same popcorn with chopsticks.

The unusual method made the familiar food feel more engaging again.

The popcorn hadn’t improved.

The experience had changed.

That sounds trivial.

But I think there is something important inside it.

A familiar experience doesn’t necessarily contain nothing more for us.

Sometimes we’ve simply learned how to experience it automatically.

Change the conditions and attention returns.

I recognize this everywhere now.

A familiar place at sunrise.

The same garden in another season.

A road traveled by bicycle instead of car.

A landscape seen through FPV goggles.

An ordinary experience turned into a question for my blog.

Writing itself does this constantly.

Something happens during my day that I could easily forget.

Then I start writing about it.

I ask why it caught my attention.

One question produces another.

And suddenly an ordinary moment contains something I hadn’t seen while I was living it.

Curiosity May Be Another Kind of Novelty

This might be the distinction I’ve been looking for.

Novelty says:

Show me something I haven’t seen before.

Curiosity can say:

Show me what I haven’t seen in something I already know.

Both can lead somewhere interesting.

But only one requires continually replacing the familiar.

This may also explain why returning to the same places doesn’t necessarily bore me.

A place isn’t finished simply because I’ve seen it before.

The weather changes.

The season changes.

The light changes.

I change.

And the more I learn, the more distinctions I may become capable of seeing.

There is always a limit, of course.

Sometimes something really has finished with us.

A possession no longer belongs in our life.

An activity no longer interests us.

A place no longer gives us anything.

Keeping everything simply because there might be something else to discover wouldn’t make much sense either.

But familiarity alone may not be proof that something has run its course.

Sometimes familiarity simply means:

I stopped looking.

The Ordinary Doesn’t Have to Be Exciting

Perhaps that is another distinction worth making.

I don’t think an ordinary life needs to be constantly exciting.

Excitement asks for stimulation.

Interest asks for attention.

Those aren’t the same thing.

A river I’ve visited a hundred times doesn’t need to surprise me every morning.

But if I remain curious, there may still be something there I haven’t noticed.

The same may be true of a garden.

A skill.

A familiar place.

An old possession.

Perhaps even another person.

I don’t need to force myself to appreciate everything around me. That would turn attention into another obligation.

But every once in a while, I can interrupt familiarity.

Take another route.

Look from another angle.

Learn something about what I’m looking at.

Bring someone who hasn’t seen it before.

Return in another season.

Photograph it.

Write about it.

Or simply ask:

Do I really know this as well as I think I do?