{"id":99706,"date":"2018-11-25T17:14:16","date_gmt":"2018-11-25T23:14:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artofmanliness.com\/?p=99706"},"modified":"2025-12-22T11:28:03","modified_gmt":"2025-12-22T17:28:03","slug":"getting-over-the-horror-of-the-same-old-thing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/beta.artofmanliness.com\/featured\/getting-over-the-horror-of-the-same-old-thing\/","title":{"rendered":"Getting Over the Horror of the Same Old Thing"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Illustration<\/a><\/p>\n

Does your life ever feel like the movie Groundhog Day<\/em>? You seemingly repeat the same old loop over and over again: wake up, commute, work, commute, home, bed. Rinse and repeat.<\/p>\n

It can feel a little depressing, a little desperation-producing. It can seem like inhabiting a certain kind of hell.<\/p>\n

To understand and break out of it, then, perhaps what we need is some intel from a fictional emissary who is intimately familiar with that very landscape.<\/p>\n

The Horror of the Same Old Thing<\/h3>\n

C.S. Lewis\u2019 classic book, The Screwtape Letters<\/em><\/a>, is famously structured as a series of missives, penned by an eponymous senior demon to Wormwood, his nephew and \u201cTempter-in-training,\u201d on how best to lead human beings astray.<\/p>\n

In one of these satirical letters, Screwtape suggests that Wormwood \u201cWork on their horror of the Same Old Thing\u201d:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe horror of the Same Old Thing is one of the most valuable passions we have produced in the human heart\u2014an endless source of heresies in religion, folly in counsel, infidelity in marriage, and inconstancy in friendship.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The horror of the Same Old Thing is useful to Tempters, Screwtape explains, because it increases a human\u2019s desire for novelty, and \u201cThe pleasure of novelty is by its very nature more subject than any other to the law of diminishing returns.\u201d In modern scientific terms, this phenomenon is described as the \u201chedonic treadmill\u201d: while a new possession\/relationship\/experience provides an initial rush of elevated pleasure, we soon become adapted to it, so that our happiness returns right back to where it started. To continue getting hits of pleasure, you have to keep moving on from one thing to another — a new gadget, a new girlfriend, a new trip. Or, you have to increase the \u201cdosage\u201d of the stimulus that has stopped giving you the old \u201chigh\u201d — \u201cprogressing\u201d to ever more explicit porn, bigger purchases, or literally harder drugs.<\/p>\n

Frantically running on the hedonic treadmill can lead to some poor decisions — to overspending, to damaging relationships, to messing up your health — and to simply never staying with something long enough to get good at it, to make something meaningful of it.<\/p>\n

Even if one does not respond to the horror of the Same Old Thing by endlessly searching for novelty, its specter — the burden of feeling bored by the monotony of one\u2019s life — can lead to discontent, malaise, and depression.<\/p>\n

One need not think his immortal soul is at stake, to recognize that figuring out how to handle the horror of the Same Old Thing is critical to his earthly happiness.<\/p>\n

To Every Season, Turn, Turn<\/h3>\n

In each of Screwtape\u2019s letters, Lewis cleverly reveals the wiser path by having the senior demon describe the ideal state of affairs that Tempters must actively work to sabotage. In the particular letter referenced above, Screwtape explains how the Enemy (God) counters the horror of the Same Old Thing:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe humans live in time, and experience reality successively. To experience much of it, therefore, they must experience many different things; in other words, they must experience change. And since they need change, the Enemy (being a hedonist at heart) has made change pleasurable to them, just as He has made eating pleasurable. But since He does not wish them to make change, any more than eating, an end in itself, He has balanced the love of change in them by a love of permanence. He has contrived to gratify both tastes together in the very world He has made, by that union of change and permanence which we call Rhythm. He gives them seasons, each season different yet every year the same, so that spring is always felt as a novelty yet always as the recurrence of an immemorial theme. He gives them in His Church a spiritual year; they change from a fast to a feast, but it is the same feast as before.<\/p>\n

Now just as we pick out and exaggerate the pleasure of eating to produce gluttony, so we pick out this natural pleasantness of change and twist it into a demand for absolute novelty. This demand is entirely our workmanship. If we neglect our duty, men will be not only contented but transported by the mixed novelty and familiarity of snowdrops this<\/em> January, sunrise this <\/em>morning, plum pudding this<\/em> Christmas. Children, until we have taught them better, will be perfectly happy with a seasonal round of games in which conkers succeed hopscotch as regularly as autumn follows summer. Only by our incessant efforts is the demand for infinite, or unrhythmical, change kept up.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One need not be religious to appreciate the keen psychological insight in this passage.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s unpack it a bit, and then dig into how to utilize it in our lives:<\/p>\n

Humans like change; it\u2019s pleasurable to us.<\/p>\n

Humans do<\/em> like familiarity as well. No one wants their life to be a long stretch of unbroken monotony, but we appreciate much sameness. No one would want every day to be a chaos in which you had to continually figure out new routines, learn new tasks, and establish new relationships. Imagine having to re-learn how to tie your shoes or re-start your relationships in the small talk stage every single day — it would be a nightmare! Some sameness saves us. Not only does a sense of permanence help us carry out our lives efficiently and effectively, as well as imparts its own kind of satisfaction, you can\u2019t build any project of significance without sticking with it for long periods of time. You can\u2019t build a meaningful relationship if you\u2019re always trading in your old friend or lover for a new model; you can\u2019t gain mastery in a career if you\u2019re always moving from job to job; you can\u2019t raise Rome, or a child, in a day.<\/p>\n

We sometimes feel the horror of the Same Old Thing — we think we can\u2019t be happy doing the same things over and over again — but the truth is that we can be happy with such repetition, if <\/em>we build some rhythm into it.<\/p>\n

To balance the need for novelty, with the need for familiarity, you persist in the same things, but keep them fresh by breaking them into phases or \u201cseasons.\u201d<\/p>\n

This dynamic works on a couple of levels.<\/p>\n

First, by not doing the exact same things all the time<\/em>, you don\u2019t grind down events\/experiences until you become desensitized to their enticements and they lose their pleasure. By spacing them out, you can repeat the same things over and over, but they retain a degree of novelty and pleasure each time they come back around.<\/p>\n

Second, by scheduling certain things as reoccurring events on your calendar, you get the pleasure of looking forward to them. While dopamine is often thought of as the pleasure chemical you experience when you do something rewarding, it\u2019s actually released in anticipation<\/em> of doing something rewarding<\/a>. The more good things you know await you, the more pleasure you\u2019ll feel in your life.<\/p>\n

Building \u201cSeasonal\u201d Rhythms Into Your Life<\/h3>\n

The hard part about living a life of seasonality, the reason it\u2019s so easy for us to fall prey to the horror of the Same Old Thing, is that the modern age is set up in a way that\u2019s completely contrary to such rhythms.  <\/p>\n

Few people observe a religious Sabbath, or attend a church with a liturgical calendar. Few of us even have a real weekend — one\u2019s job bleeds into evenings during the week, and then into Saturday, and then into Sunday . . . and then Monday comes around again without our ever having truly broken off from work. Our entertainments take the form not of periodic festivals, or monthly bowling leagues, but televisions and phones, the latter of which remain an incessant companion during every waking minute of our lives.<\/p>\n

Instead of rhythms, instead of embodying \u201ca union of change and permanence,\u201d we live lives of uniform, flatlined sameness. Everything runs together in an undifferentiated, and depressing, blur.<\/p>\n

Restoring a sense of seasonality to your life requires actively countering this cultural paradigm by intentionally building rhythmicity back into it. Here are some ideas on how:<\/p>\n

Enhance the pleasure of the traditions already built into your calendar.<\/strong> While modern life is largely flattened and monotonous, some reoccurring events still happen of course — mainly in the form of holidays and birthdays. Sometimes these don\u2019t give us much pleasure though — neither in the anticipation of them nor in their actual celebration — as they don\u2019t depart sufficiently from our normal lives, or are filled with activities we don\u2019t actually enjoy.<\/p>\n

Fix that! Establish traditions on\/around holidays and your birthday that you 1) truly enjoy, and 2) don\u2019t do at any other time of year<\/em>. Do some activity that\u2019s only a once-a-year occurrence, travel to a place you only visit on that holiday, eat foods that you only eat on that occasion (while this is determined more or less automatically on holidays, it\u2019s something you can entirely create for yourself on your birthday; dedicate a restaurant as a place you only eat on your birthday, and\/or save the eating of a certain favorite food for that day alone, e.g., if you love Pop-Tarts, but can\u2019t justify making them a regular part of your diet, allow yourself to eat all the Pop-Tarts you want on your birthday).<\/p>\n

Deliberately create your own \u201cseasonal\u201d events\/experiences.<\/strong> The number of cyclically occurring traditions in your life need not be determined wholly by society, but can be something you shape and establish yourself. Intentionally create reoccurring events on a monthly\/quarterly\/yearly basis, and give them a set date — this ensures a cycle in which your anticipation builds as the event comes closer. Here are some examples:<\/p>\n