There is a subtle killer on the loose. It’s not airborne. It’s not waterborne. It’s not viral. It’s not bacterial.
It’s novelty.
What do I mean by novelty? By novelty I mean the notion we all have of something new. More importantly it’s the emotional and psychological desire for “newness,” for freshness, variety. The love of novelty is what makes it difficult to listen to the same song or watch the same movie repeatedly too often. Of course we vary in how much novelty we do and do not want in certain things, but we all have had some experience of something going stale. Something getting old, and entering that realm most hated and dreaded by we millennials; boring.
But are we moving across that boundary of new to old, novel to stale, more or less quickly as time has worn on? I feel that our desire for novelty and our desire for newness has a positive correlation to our patience; As our patience has decreased, the time between our yearning for the next thing has grown more intense. But why, and more importantly, how is this killing us?
This may seem intelligence insulting, but bear with me. The vast majority of your life falls under the category of “normal.” Now, of course, I’m talking about normal people’s normal lives, so if you live a routinely extraordinary life, my definition of normal won’t make any sense and I suggest you move on. I will be of little help to you. But for the normal person, the vast majority of us I assume, life tends to pass by in predictable patterns. Yes, there are moments of suffering, rejoicing, celebration, mourning, confusion, and other abnormal things, but taken together they actually make up a normal life; we all experience these things. In a universal sense, these things too are actually normal. But most of it is just school, work, homework, meetings, clubs, family, rinse and repeat. We have a fall semester, Christmas break, Spring semester, summer break and our lives quite entirely conform to that measurement of time. It’s easy to feel the allure of envying those aforementioned people who lead extraordinary lives (don’t worry, they’ve left now, we typical have no need to worry), of wishing and repining that that would be my life. That I could be a famous author or poet or professor or designer or personality or insert dream job here. But what’s so bad about this? Aren’t we supposed to “chase our dreams?” Aspire to be great? While there’s nothing wrong with planning and aspiring and having clear direction, I would simply like to ask us all what hip hop artist Beleaf asks us in the intro to Dream Junkie’s 2015 album: “What if everything you did were forgotten?” More importantly, what if none of your plans came to fruition? What if your life never becomes what you want it to be? The really devastating question, and I feel the difficulty of this just like anyone else, what if we’ve been working towards a life that will never happen when the people, the experiences, and the truths we need are here for us right now.
What if there are things that we as a broke student, as a skinny white kid, as marginalized, as put on a pedestal, as not masculine enough, as not feminine enough, as not smart enough, as not famous, as a whatever it is we don’t want to be, can only learn through walking through these things? What if right now is not a stopover to our next big step, but is a big step in and of itself? Novelty kills us because we don’t want to settle for the absolute beauty of the normal, the mundane, and the every-day all around us when that is all we’ve got. Do you have any empirical evidence you’re going to wake up tomorrow? Do you have any knowledge of when you will have your car accident, your stroke, your cancer diagnosis, your crippling accident? Our constant grasping and chasing the new, the shiny, the illustrious blinds us from finding the diamonds right at our feet, and is killing us slowly because when someone chases a goal consistently that they have no hope of achieving that they will give up. This is a psychological concept about human beings and virtually every animal that plays itself out again and again. The heartbreaking reality about chasing after novelty, always needing something new in life, getting bored or disgusted or apathetic about where you are now, is that it actually never works. When you wanted out, when you wanted somewhere new, when you wanted someone new, did they ever really live up to the hype? Were you ever really satisfied? I have found that the simple answer is no.
In short, what I’m talking about is the difference between discontentment and contentment. Breaking the cycle of impatient, disillusioned, hopeless, searching for novelty is a difficult one, and it’s probably one that we may not even always see at work in us. No matter what you believe, there are certainly benefits to hovering over where we are now and thinking of ourselves as where we are supposed to be, but it’s important we don’t stop there. Why do we so that? How do we do that? What reasons do we have for doing that other than that “its good?” As I said, a goal that we perpetually can’t reach will only end in our failure. If we’re just searching to enjoy life now the way we were searching to enjoy life to come, or the way it could be, then we’ll just have new words and new names for the same problem. Can family do it? Can hobbies do it? Can relationships or husbands or wives?The only thing that can help free us from the hatred of the normal, from the crippling grip of boredom, and the hopeless chasing of the wind is what the Apostle Paul called “the secret of being content in any and every situation,” which is the exact opposite of chasing novelty. The safest landing pad for this, what Paul had in mind, was settling in himself that “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me” (Philippians 4:12-13). Despite what top athletes tend to think, it’s this, not slamming the competition or grinding through another set, that the scriptures are pointing us. Freeing us from the rat race of always looking five years ahead, and instead worrying for nothing between this day and 1,000 years from now.
