I never used to think much about the word novelty.
It generally lived in the same mental drawer as snow globes and joke ties. You know… A novelty mug. A novelty song that played once on the radio and never again, which was probably for the best. Novelty used to mean, at least to me, pleasantly unnecessary.
Then the pandemic came and suddenly the word novel stopped being quite so charming. Novel coronavirus. Novel transmission. Novel uncertainty. It turned out that novel didn’t mean “fun and new.” It meant no one knows what happens next. And that really changes a word.
Not long after that, I started hearing novelty show up in podcasts and interviews—usually spoken reverently. And once you notice a word like that, you start seeing it everywhere, the way you do after buying a red car.
From a biological standpoint, novelty makes sense. The brain pays attention to what breaks the pattern. A sudden sound in the woods. A shape that doesn’t belong. Novelty wakes us up because, for most of human history, new things tended to be important. Sometimes dangerous. Occasionally wonderful. Often both.
But novelty used to be rare.
Life moved slowly. Seasons came and went. People knew what was expected of them, and most days looked a lot like the days before. Stories were told again and again, not because people were unimaginative (ok, some were), but because repetition is how stories sink in. Meaning takes time, doesn’t like to be rushed (kind of like a friend of mine. you know who you are).
Then — so unfortunately — we discovered that novelty could be manufactured.
Once technology learned how the brain works, how attention is captured and boredom sends people wandering, novelty became a strategy. Something to be produced on demand. You know the drill — the feed refreshes. The headline escalates. The next thing must be newer than the last thing, even if it isn’t better.
And when that happens, stillness starts to feel suspicious. Like something that you can’t quite trust.
But culture eventually follows the money — no matter how much we liked things the way they were. When novelty becomes the organizing principle, traditions seem tired. Familiarity feels like stagnation. Even identity becomes something you update, like software, instead of something you grow into over time.
Which is why it’s hard not to think of that older, quieter world where nothing much happened, and that was perfectly fine with me.
A place where voices on the radio sounded the same every week. Where your grandfather’s stories unfolded gently, often without a point, and somehow… that was the point. You didn’t tune in to be startled. You tuned in because it felt like home.
In that world, novelty wasn’t necessary. And, in most cases, it was avoided. Meaning tended to accumulate the way dust does on a bookshelf; slowly, until one day you noticed it was there.
But, that kind of life doesn’t trend. It’s comfortably livable, yes. But it doesn’t trend.
The trouble with a novelty-driven culture is that novelty is expensive. It takes energy to produce, energy to consume, and even more energy to recover from. A system that depends on constant stimulation eventually wears people out. Which may explain why so many of us feel tired all the time despite sitting still most of the day (reading essays on Substack, of course). We’re entertained constantly and yet, somehow, we’re still bored. Surrounded by chatter but short on real experience. Everything is loud. Very little is really heard.
Even silence has become awkward for most of us. Boredom feels like a personal failure. An enemy. And yet boredom used to be the doorway to imagination, to noticing, to thinking thoughts all the way through. Remember that?
Novelty, it turns out, is not the same as progress. And newness is not the same as depth.
A slow culture allows meaning to settle in. A fast one forces meaning to constantly audition. When everything has to be new to be noticed, nothing gets the time required to become trusted, beloved, or sacred.
The irony is hard to miss. Novelty once woke us up so we could survive. Now it keeps us awake so systems can survive. But, maybe the task isn’t to reject novelty altogether. That would be patently unrealistic. Even in the quietest towns, something unexpected eventually happens.
Maybe the task is simply to remember where novelty belongs. As an occasional visitor. Not a permanent resident. Because a life made entirely of novelty doesn’t feel like a life at all. It feels like a series of interruptions. And interruptions, no matter how exciting, are a poor substitute for living.
Well. That’s the news from wherever you happen to be – where nothing much is new, and that’s just fine.
Cheers, friends. Let’s keep discovering together.