Chapter 15: The Novelty Paradox

Everyone who writes about time perception eventually arrives at the same advice: seek novelty. New experiences create distinct memories. Distinct memories make time feel longer. Therefore, do new things.

It's correct. It's also, for most people in midlife, nearly useless.

Because here's what happens when you tell a 45-year-old with a job, three kids, and a mortgage to "seek more novelty." They add it to the list. Learn Italian. Try rock climbing. Take that ceramics class. Book the trip. And each of those things, however appealing in theory, becomes another demand on a bandwidth supply that's already overdrawn. The new experience doesn't thicken time. It thins it further, because it arrives as yet another obligation in a life already dense with obligations.

I know this because I've done it to myself. I have instruments in my house that I don't play. Books I haven't read. Gadgets I bought with genuine excitement that now sit in drawers. Each one was supposed to be a source of novelty and engagement. Instead, they've become sources of guilt. A quiet accusation from the corner of the room. You said you'd learn guitar. You said you'd read that. You said you'd use this.

The accumulation of unused potential is its own form of temporal theft. Not because the objects are bad, but because each one represents an open loop. An unresolved commitment sitting in the background of your mind, consuming a small but steady amount of cognitive bandwidth. Multiply that by a dozen abandoned interests and you've got a permanent background hum of low-grade inadequacy.

So the paradox: novelty is essential for thicker time, but pursuing novelty in the wrong way makes time thinner.

The resolution is in understanding what kind of novelty your brain actually needs.

Your brain doesn't need grand adventures. It doesn't need you to learn Mandarin or summit Kilimanjaro. It needs stimulus that doesn't match its existing predictions. That's it. Anything that deviates from the expected pattern triggers the heightened processing and richer encoding that produces thick time. The deviation can be enormous. It can also be tiny.

A different walking route uses different spatial encoding. New music activates different neural patterns than your usual playlist. A conversation with someone whose background is nothing like yours fires up processing centres that a conversation with a familiar colleague doesn't. Even rearranging your desk, eating somewhere unfamiliar, or reading outside your usual genre counts. The brain doesn't care about the magnitude of the novelty. It cares about the deviation from prediction.

This suggests a framework I think of as 70/30. Seventy percent of your life stays stable. Your routines, your work, your relationships, the structures that keep things functioning. This stability isn't the enemy. It's what frees up cognitive resources for everything else. The remaining thirty percent is where you inject targeted novelty. Not random novelty. Not chaotic novelty. Deliberate, manageable novelty that gives your brain something new to process without overwhelming your schedule.

The key word is "targeted." Rather than accumulating a dozen half-pursued interests, pick one or two at a time. Go deep enough that the brain gets genuine engagement, not just a surface brush with something unfamiliar. Then, when that interest has been explored or has naturally run its course, close it consciously and open something new.

This is the opposite of how most people handle interests. Most people, myself included, tend to accumulate. A new curiosity arrives and gets added to the pile without anything being removed. The pile grows. Nothing gets depth. Everything gets guilt.

The alternative is to treat your interests like a rotation, not a collection. One instrument at a time. One book at a time. One new skill per quarter, explored with enough depth to produce genuine engagement, then set down without remorse when it's time for the next one.

This also means giving yourself permission to stop. The guitar in the corner isn't a failure. It's a completed chapter. You explored it. You got what you needed from it. Moving on isn't quitting. It's making room.

There's a particular kind of novelty that's worth singling out because it's both powerful and overlooked: perceptual novelty. This is novelty that doesn't require new activities or commitments. It requires noticing familiar things differently.

The tree you walk past every day looks different in morning light versus evening light. Your commute contains details you've never registered because your brain templated the route years ago. The face of someone you love has changed in ways you haven't noticed because familiarity has dulled your perception. Perceptual novelty is the practice of deliberately overriding the brain's efficiency filter and actually looking at what's in front of you.

Artists do this naturally. It's why many artists report a rich, slow-feeling relationship with time. They've trained themselves to see what the brain would otherwise skip. But you don't need to be an artist. You just need to occasionally look at familiar things as if you've never seen them before.

Novelty, then, isn't about cramming more into your life. It's about ensuring that roughly a third of your experience is genuinely new, that you go deep rather than wide, that you close chapters rather than accumulating guilt, and that you occasionally override your brain's autopilot and actually see the world you're moving through.

Not more interests. Deeper engagement with fewer of them. And the freedom to rotate.