We’re like sharks. Sharks have to keep moving to stay alive, to breathe. They have to move even in their sleep. We don’t have to physically move, but rather, our brains only notice things that are changing. If we’re in a room with a certain constant smell we’ll only be able to perceive it for a few minutes. If we’re at a job that sorta sucks, we’ll slowly stop noticing exactly how much it sucks.

Same goes for good things. A great new position. A million dollars. A stable relationship.

This implies that in order to keep appreciating something, either it, or we, must constantly change.  Lest we suffocate.

The real point I’m trying to make is not about this eternal thirst for change and novelty, it’s about our threshold for what we notice as change.

The world is always changing around us. And we’re always changing within the world. Therefore there should be no need to seek out novelty… it’s around us all the time! The real source of our suffocation is our sometimes-too-high sensitivity to change.

Not only do we only notice things that change, but as we grow older and our brains become more efficient and noise-resistant, we raise the threshold for what we notice as change. We ignore all the kinds of change that “don’t matter”, and we constantly raise the bar on what “matters”.

This is useful in the sense that it will mean that we’re more likely to notice things that “matter” and not lose them in the shuffle of a million things happening at once. But, this trick of the brain that helps us become more efficient also makes us less likely to notice things that are enjoyable or painful or beautiful or ugly or silly or nonsensical simply for their own benefit.  It’s the noticing of small changes in the world that contributes to our aesthetic enjoyment of it.  The progress of the brain from one of enjoyment to one of efficiency over time can be seen as a benefit of aging. Or it can be seen as a cancerous growth that takes over our ability to enjoy the every day.

Notice small changes around you. Small changes in how you feel, what you’re doing, why you’re doing it. Don’t worry about bringing anyone else’s attention to these small changes, they’re probably not big enough to have value in that way. These small changes are yours, the reward is in having noticed them, and they don’t need to be saved or shared or captured or memorialized. Just noticed and appreciated.

This entry was posted by Buster on Sunday, November 22nd, 2009 at 11:29 pm. It is filed under Defining enjoyment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.