Rinse, Repeat, and Innovate
Redundancy Makes Things Less Interesting
Why we need innovation and stability both.
In the past year, I have moved from this place to that. I have lost the sense of home. In fact, now, even my hometown seems alien, as if I was never born in that place. Too much moving has made me restless and anxious. 4 months ago, I arrived at this city and I will stay here for a couple of months or years to get my shit together. To plan for a future I want to have on purpose.
Can you relate?
It is the feeling you feel when you have done a task so many times that it has lost its flair. Redundancy has left the activity at hand mundane and uninteresting. You have played that game daily, on a regular basis that it is not fun anymore. The barbecue cheese pizza, your favorite, tastes like raw flour because you ate it too much, without any gaps.
Heck, you don’t even want to be with your partner because you have spent almost every moment together. It is not that you don’t love him/her anymore. You have been together too much that you are used to each other now and cannot appreciate it until you lose them for some time. Force them away for a few days and you will be restless like a dying fish to at least see them again.
So, does this feeling seem similar?
I bet it does.
There are two phenomena that play a crucial role here:
- You doing the same thing redundantly.
- You not innovating enough to keep the spices up.
Let’s talk about both of them.
1. You doing the same thing redundantly.
When we keep doing the same things over and over again our brain stops releasing chemicals that gives us pleasure.
According to Dr. Irving Biederman, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, my problem involves opioids, a chemical in the brain that gives us pleasure. — Temma Ehrenfeld, Psychology Today
It basically works in a simple way. First time you have an experinece the brain releases the chemicals that gives us pleasure. The second time you do it, other neurons take over to the task while other neurons get busy with other tasks. Third time, fourth time, will not give you the same opioids hit as it was the first time. The task has been done already. The wow experience has passed. The neurons came and left. To keep the opioids coming, you need new experiences.
In fact, the receptors Biederman studies are the same ones that give heroin and morphine their kick.
I am sure you can understand now why do we need to keep up the experiences going.
But, doing the same tasks on a repetitive basis is not a completely bad thing at all. Biederman says that a task that repeats is a good way to reduce the anxiety. He continues that the best way to not get bored is to keep doing what you love, mostly what you are good at.
I understand you need stability in life. A sense of belonging. If you keep changing your work and people in your life, you may learn a lot but you will also be more anxious. That is why according to Biederman there should be that familiarity to keep the anxiety at the bottom.
This post starts with my own story of moving too much. I was moving, not on my choice, but because I had to. For work, for other reasons. My life had become a series of packing and unpacking. It was tiring. As soon as I came to this place, where I am living now, I was offered to move again to a new place, but I rejected. Staying at the same place may be boring, but moving too much is taxing and too much on the mind.
I had to do it for my job. This time I had a chance to say no, so I did.
If you see my moving too much is also me doing a thing redundantly and as I kept doing it, it got boring and anxious. Instead of fun, it made me anxious.
2. You not innovating enough to keep the spices up.
I am a writer.
What does a writer do? He keeps writing daily, which means a redundant job. ‘But, Syed you just said that doing things on a repet…’
Hold your horses.
Repetition can make the task at hand less interesting but I also said that doing the same thing over time will reduce your anxiety. Biederman says, “The best way not to be bored is to do what you like doing, typically something you’re good at.”
I love writing but that does not mean that there aren’t days when I don’t feel like writing. In fact, I almost never write on weekends.
I write because it is who I am. I feel good when my fingers are typing on a keyboard or writing with a pen. Things do get pretty repetitive but I have to keep going.
Not innovating enough?
Then, what do I mean by saying that you are not innovating enough?
If I am a writer, I write daily, but, do I write about the same things over and over again? No, I do not.
That is what I mean by innovation.
Apart from being a writer, I am a learner too. I learn new things and I write about new things. I keep the creativity wheel rotating. If I keep posting the same stories that everyone else is posting on Medium, which you have heard a million times, will I get any attention? I don’t think so. As for me, it will become a job of copy-paste. A mundane day-job.
This is how I write anything new:
I read something → Is it interesting? → Yes → Can I relate it to a personal experience → Yes → Write it.
There are two points where there can be a Yes or No.
If the topic isn’t interesting enough to me, I will not write it from my heart. It will be a high-school essay.
If I cannot relate it to a personal experience, I try to research and find more about it to write.
Any way I go, I try to write so that I don’t fluke.
It is best to write from your heart because in your heart, there is you. Your uniqueness is in your heart. There is a great saying that I believe in:
To create exceptional art, your heart must go through great pain.
The point being, you must innovate in one way or the other.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, it comes down to this:
You cannot keep changing what you do because ironically the process of change will itself become redundant and you will become more anxious and unhappy.
This means that you will have to keep doing at least one thing in your life that is on a repeat mode and to not fall in the loop of repetition and boredom, innovate enough to keep it interesting.
The best way not to be bored is to do what you like doing, typically something you’re good at. — Dr. Irving Biederman
