heaven knows

It's interesting, looking up novelty seeking and risk aversion, I find that in psychology, novelty seeking is tightly correlated with risk taking and impulsivity. It makes sense. I guess what's interesting is that this surprised me.

They're not at all the same thing. I find myself both novelty seeking and risk averse. It's just that our appreciation for new things can be eroded by fears of  risks involved. An impulsive person leaps headfirst, while a thoughtful person hesitates to think, and in so doing, realizes it might be a bad idea. All these things are connected, but often life comes along and throws a person headfirst instead, and the lessons we take from that depend largely on what happens afterwards.

Patterns like this begin in childhood and become self-reinforcing, as our brains strengthen connections associated with our behaviour, and atrophy connections that go unused. This pattern reinforcement is strongest during early childhood, but continues throughout the rest of our lives. Old dogs being the hardest to teach new tricks.

Ideally, we want a balance. Excess novelty seeking can mean never really taking the time to appreciate anything while getting ourselves and each other killed. Risk averse patterns generally start to grow out of control due to trauma. It's pretty straight-forward; the more we've learned that experiences can be painful, the less we want to try new ones. When such traumas occur during childhood development, neural pathways of risk aversion can grow very strong.

Trauma is not what happens to us, but what happens inside of us. Life is painful for everyone, but how we learn to cope with it is everything. Finding that middle ground of novel experience is important for living a life conducive to good mental health. It's also vital to neurological development and plasticity, as well as staving off the cognitive decline of aging. 

Familiar experiences can be safe, comforting, and that can be desperately needed, but comes at a steep cost. For one, it means largely staying away from other people, especially new people, as they can be hella unpredictable. Additionally, the more repetitious our lives, the less the brain even bothers remembering it, let alone learning or growing. I don't believe in any concrete notion of who we are, but changes can be rough. It's taken me years to even slightly unwind how risk averse my own life has taught me to be. 

I've had to fight with myself every step of the way, from doing kickboxing and taking college classes, to riding a bus and going to a grocery store. This past year fucked all that up. I haven't even cleaned my apartment since getting back from Hawaii.

"Depression is the worst disease you can get."