Quick Summary: In this Substack, I write about novelty. I talk about striking the balance between detail and plot, why our new-found awareness of how much we forget has prompted a drive towards more novel experiences and the strangeness of novelty when assessing an intervention.
Yesterday marked the termination of my Grand Boring Experiment. I’m balancing a lot (a job and a masters) and I wanted to maintain Inner Peace as I did so. As a result, for the last five weeks, I’ve been more adult than I’ve ever been - complete with 8 hours sleep, budget, workout plan, SPF Factor 50 and bathroom cleaner. I’ve even got my first proper adult line slap-bang in the middle of my forehead, my skin responding to the strange prefrontal-cortex-thing inside my skull. I have been insufferably, unbelievably, unbearably adult.
And then I cracked. 20 minutes after cracking I was on a train to Stockholm. An hour later I was dying my eyelashes blue. I headed to the Moderna Museet, saw five horse bodies hanging from a wall, a rotating six foot penis bedecked in pink netting and the Pope struck down by a meteorite. I finished the day sipping G&T’s with Italian Alessandra. I got the novelty hit I’d been craving. I ‘Did It For The Plot’.
A few years ago ‘Do It For The Plot’ was very much in vogue. Sleep with your drug dealer! Take the capeioria class! Become Grade 9 at the Kazoo! Post-pandemic, we wanted to gobble up all the novelty that we’d been missing out on. But now (at least if my social media is anything to go by), the focus is much more on ‘Living in the Detail’. Aestheticise your life, romanticise the small moments, enjoy the coffee, the walk, the leaves etc. etc. etc. Originally this Substack was going to extol the virtues of this Boring Life á la Wendy Cope.
And I get it. A bit. Too much plot is not great. Too much vice makes you feel awful over time. Too little sleep, eating badly, not taking time to be slow or look after your body is a recipe for disaster. Navigating and adjusting to pile upon pile of newness is exhausting. I also think there’s a pressure - particularly on some women - to chop up your time into bite-size events for others (‘lol I’m so chaotic’) in a way that just sucks. I like the ‘Detail Movement’ as a way of resisting this pressure - letting people know it’s okay to be boring, to not feel the need to be plotty if that’s not where your preferences lie.
But some plot (at least for me) is necessary. I’ve just read Turgenev’s short story in George Saunders ‘A Swim in a Pond in the Rain’. Turgenev succeeds in the astonishing feat of cramming an unbearably tedious amount of detail in an 11 page short story. It’s so dull. You get to know exactly what everyone is wearing, exactly what their features are composed of, exactly how they’re viewed in the village etc. etc. etc. On page 8, there’s a moment where you think - finally - something might actually happen and then Turgenev hits you with ‘it may be as well to say a few words about each of the characters’. You’re reading and internally screaming ‘for the love of Christ PLEASE give me an event’.
My Grand Boring Experiment culminated in getting ‘Turgeneved’. Too much detail created a strange kind of ennui - everything familiar, everything small, horizons crumpling in. The reader is lost, bored and looking to pick up something else. Plot is important. It’s a sign of trying new things, new events happening, new people. It’s what moves the story along! It also forces us to pay renewed attention to the details - who am I and what do I notice after this event? What is it like to be me, here, now? Without it, we exhaust the relevant details pretty quickly (and end up writing paragraphs on glass food storage containers…).
Detail is also important. ‘Boy sits on boat with tiger and survives’ doesn’t make you as invested as reading the whole of Life Of Pi. Blinkist summaries of fiction books are a massive ick and utterly pointless. It’s the detail that makes us care about the plot, and that give us the wash of a period. My first trip to Kenya was now a year and a half ago (??!?!?), and it’s the details (sun in the tent in the morning, fronded eyelashes whilst swimming, smoothie residue dripping down two cut Cola glasses) that give me the tenor of the time even as I forget the more ‘plotty’ events.
There’s a balance between the two - one that I’m still figuring out how to strike. Annoyingly for someone who deals in extremes there’s not a nice neat rule about marginal utility of plot vs. marginal utility of detail. Too much plot and life is a tsunami, event after event after event with no time to react. Too little, and it’s a stagnant manky pond. Like story-writing, striking the balance between detail and plot in life is a question of intuition - how fast to let things flow.
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I am a Novelty Junkie. I’ve cliff-jumped, skydived, swum with sharks and bunjeed after six pints of milk. I’m the friend who pops up with ‘do you want to go to a trapeze fitness class/ Dalston Clown Egg Museum/ Fawlty Towers Immersive Dining Experience?’. Today, someone sent me a Drag Queen guided tour through the National Portrait Gallery. My bucket list includes spending a day as a street statue, a goth and in a cult.
There’s two reasons for this. One is (as above), I like novelty. I like new things. Plus you can only find out what you like if you try it. Maybe I am a goth? Maybe I’ll love Tibetan Sound Baths? Who knows - certainly not me until I’ve been there*. The second was part of my big freak-out around memory and how much we forget (more on this here: On Memory). Novelty is the easiest way to preserve time. You hadn’t Xed, and now you have. X is added to the stock of sentences about who you are and what you’ve done. Novelty has a ‘Ta Da’ moment - do the new thing, and all of a sudden the day is preserved, the memory exists and the time spent Xing is carried forward.
I think that the ever-inventive, ever-more-random suggestions of things to do (why has 30% of corporate Gen-Z been axe-throwing???) are part of a bigger reaction - to our newfound awareness of the infirmity of memory. We’re seeking out newness to try and overcome it. And is probably (?!?) not the most healthy response. Do Novelty if you like Novelty. But don’t do it to preserve time - there’s much better ways to cope with this (see: On Vipassana: The Big Thoughts for more).
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One of the things I would love a study on (if anyone knows of one, ping it my way) is the average size of the Novelty Effect. The Novelty Effect is the distortion that comes from the newness of something, not the intervention itself (Hume’s ‘flutter or hurry of thought which attends the first perusal of any piece’). We all experience dopamine rushes when we see new things, and so every new intervention is distorted by this.
I’d love to know how it behaves - what sort of fields make it bigger/ smaller? How much variation is there? How significant? How on earth do you test for this, given that getting rid of the novelty effect means doing something over a longer period of time in which all sorts of other stuff can get into the mix? I’m reading ‘Science Fictions’ to try and get a grip - but if anyone has any other recommendations, I’d love to hear them.
P.S. Check this out for the benefits of Novelty. I’ll update you with my next adventures next week - here’s hoping I end up doing shots in a Bulgarian tequila bar with my lovely royal friend Ethel. Have a fab Halloween everybody!
*This is also why I find people who say they’re 100% straight from the get-go weird - because how do you know?? Surely bi-agnosticism is the rational position to take?? A Substack for another time.
“And we shouldn’t be here at all, if we’d known more about it before we started. But I suppose it’s often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of a sport, as you might say." - Lord of the Rings
Moby - Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet … then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.