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Random photo from RoamingPhotos.com THE FAMILY COURT PROJECT HAS COME TO A CLOSE. Effective 6/1/08, Family Court Chronicles has become inactive (announcement), and no new information will be added. The page below is retained for archive purposes, but it could be out of date. Upon request, the webmaster will continue to correct significant errors and will consider removing information that is destructively obsolete. (Email: FamilyCourtGuy (at) gmail.com) See Glenn Campbell's home page for his still-active websites. KillroyCafe.com

The Case Against Marriage A Book in Progress by Glenn Campbell “Read it or weep!” Chapter 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 Next Chapter>> Production Notes | College Lecture | Glenn's Home Page   NOTE: This work has been ABANDONED as too long-winded and repetitive, but you are welcome to get whatever you can from it. The essential ideas are best summarized in a single page. Most of my new philosophical musings on relationships, etc. are now found in Kilroy Cafe. —GC, 5/09

The Seduction of Novelty

The Case Against Marriage - Chapter 18 - 7/30/07

Let's say you visit a place of great scenic beauty, like the Rocky Mountains of Montana or the perfect beach on Maui. You are so impressed by the scenery that you decide to make it your own. At great expense, you buy a house with a picture window that looks out on the very scene you adore so much. Now you can possess it forever!

What happens then? After a few days, you stop noticing the scenery. You get used to it, and it stops registering on your consciousness. Instead of thinking about where your house is located, you become preoccupied once again with what is going on inside. In the long run, all that matters is the projects you are working on and how to get them done.

This describes an inherent problem of beauty and all other forms of sensual pleasure. If you find what you think is the perfect chocolate cake, and you surround yourself with it, it is eventually going to lose it's appeal. You get the full sensual pleasure from something only when it is new or relatively rare. The more you experience it, the more it becomes routine, until it is just part of the background of your life.

As enthralled as you may be with your romantic partner right now, the sensual part of your relationship is going to grow dull after a while. You are going to stop noticing all the fixed characteristics about them that you once found appealing: the sound of their voice, the color of their eyes, the shape of their body. All you will really be concerned with is the operational and intellectual part of the relationship—that is, how well you execute projects together. The color of their eyes has no bearing on that.

Drug addicts also notice this phenomenon: Their first high from a new drug is fantastic, the second is almost as good, the third is good, the fourth is routine, etc. Over time, you have to take more and more of the drug to achieve the same effect, and eventually even that doesn't work. Soon you are taking the drug not for the high it gives you but because of how bad you feel when you don't take it.

In psychological terms, this process is called "adjustment." Whatever new experience you encounter, good or bad, your brain is eventually going to adjust to it and the experience will come to seem normal and routine. The sensual passions of the experience are destined to fade, and what you have left are the practical problems of living.

It would be great to win $100 million in a lottery. The experience would be exciting at first, and it might seem that all your problems are solved. Even that good fortune, however, would eventually seem routine. Yes, some of your problems would be solved, but you would find that they are replaced by a whole new set of problems—ones, perhaps, that money can't fix. No matter what happens to you, there will be challenges on the other side, and your overall happiness will probably drift back to the same level as before.

Most people seems to have great difficulty grasping the concept of adjustment and predicting it in their own lives. They think that if they are attracted to something new right now, they are going to be attracted to it forever, and they may have no problem signing a long-term contract the guarantee its delivery.

If you are in love with a certain kind of chocolate cake, and someone offers you a special discount, you might eagerly sign a contract to have this cake delivered to you every week for a year. What you are bound to discover, however, is that the company changed the recipe. Your second and third cake don't taste nearly as good as the first. You call up the company to angrily complain, but then you find that, no, the recipe hasn't changed. Only your brain has.

People are easily seduced by novelty. They'll buy whatever the new thing is—like the latest entertainment device—without realizing how quickly it will become the old thing. They are even willing to go into debt to buy the new thing, so they are still paying for it even after it has become outmoded.

This is a natural human error of perception. If a certain product thrills you now, then you figure the same product ought to thrill you just as much tomorrow and the day after. After all, the product still has the same ingredients and physical characteristics. Science suggests that it should produce the same emotional reaction every time.

But the brain doesn't work like that. Pleasure depends on novelty. You laugh at a joke, for example, only because it is new—because it blazes a new neurological trial through your brain. You might laugh at the joke the second time you hear it, but probably not the third, fourth and fifth times. It has lost its novelty and thus its pleasure.

When we encounter a new experience that appeals to us, we tend to repeat it. If we like a movie, we may be drawn back to see it again and again. There is a limit, however, to how many times we will do this. Sooner or later, our brain has explored every nuance of the experience and will be ready to move on.

Of course, you can't move on if you have already signed a long-term contract committing you to that experience. Then you may be forced to repeat it over and over long after you have lost your passion. In that case, real pleasure is eventually replaced by the intellectualization of pleasure, where you say all the right words but don't feel the same feelings.

How many exciting new products have you bought and used only once? If you have a garage, it is probably filled with these failed experiments. You were swept away be the novelty of the product, but once you had it in your hands, your passion faded quickly. You don't use the product now because it turned out not to fit your practical operational lifestyle. What you are left with is the dull carcass of a dream, occupying space in your garage. You can't throw it away, because it is still "valuable"; it just isn't valuable to you.

Life, after a while, can become an accumulation of these dead dreams. You repeat the same old activities, thinking that they must be pleasurable because they once were. You don't feel the same feelings anymore; you only tell yourself you do.

Continued in Chapter 19