The Springboard of Complacency

My day-to-day experience is the last thing you'd expect. I am complacent (except when I'm not). My daily habits are highly repetitive (except when they're not). Even with food, I'm damned happy sticking with the same small circle of humble local eateries...except when I don't.

I keep buying and stockpiling incredible computer games, but when I reach for my iPad I inevitably just play my 100,000th game of dull old Strategery, which feels comfortable. This is confoundingly unlike me. I live to be creative, not comfortable. I've dug nearly all the way down in several realms. I'm a dynamo of gleeful curiosity! Aren't I?

The contradiction has disturbed me all my life. My tendency to favor boringly complacent predictability makes no sense. It's the antithesis of everything I like; everything I am. It's like an anti-matter shadow following me around, showing my laziness—my lack of curiosity and brio. What happened to my carpe diem?

I finally figured it out. I shift and dance and grow and shrink and leap and backtrack with litheness. As an inveterate jumper, I don't need a jumpy environment. Many people like that sort of thing, and this explains the popularity of horror movies, roller coasters, and "Rich People Problems" melodrama. If you are an effectively stationary particle, you will naturally crave a world which shifts like a kaleidoscope.

Me, I am the kaleidoscope. So it's natural that I'd prefer a world which mostly stands still. That way I can target my leaps more freely. I thrive with stable launching pads and persistent background images.

In fact, I just leapt in this very moment, to make a connection. You know how small children often watch the same movie over and over, driving their parents mad? Well, who jumps and grows and changes more hyperbolically than young children, eagerly absorbing all the culture, language, history, skills—all the everything in such a short span of time? They, too, favor a static background!

Now where's my damned iPad...


See also "Creating a Vacuum to Leech Out Eurekas"