Chasing the First Time: Why Novelty Fades and What Remains

On novelty, addiction, and what I learned the third time I came to Maui.

This is my third time on Maui. And I need to be honest about something.

The first time I came here, I was in full awe. I remember the feeling like it was yesterday. The light, the air, the colours. Everything felt electric. There was an energy moving through me that I could only describe as aliveness. I walked around with wide eyes, like a child seeing the ocean for the first time. Everything mattered. Everything was beautiful. Everything was new.

This time hits different.

The views are the same. The sunsets are the same. The ocean still does what the ocean does. But something in me has shifted. The novelty has faded. And I noticed myself doing something I did not expect: searching for it. Trying to recreate the feeling of the first time. Wanting the magic back.

And then it hit me. This is not just about Maui.

What are we chasing when we chase novelty?

This happens with everything, does it not? Places. People. Partners. Jobs. Ideas. The first encounter is electric. The second is warm. The third is familiar. And somewhere around familiar, we start to feel restless. We think something is wrong. We think the place has changed, or the person has changed, or we have outgrown the thing. So we go looking for the next new thing. The next destination. The next relationship. The next version of ourselves.

There is a name for this in psychology. It is called hedonic adaptation. The psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell studied how humans adjust emotionally to both positive and negative changes in their lives. What they found is that we return to a baseline level of happiness remarkably quickly. The brain is wired to notice change, not stability. When something is new, dopamine spikes. When it becomes familiar, the brain reduces its response. It conserves energy. It stops paying attention.

This is why the second bite of chocolate never tastes as good as the first. Why a new home feels extraordinary for a month and then just feels like home. Why a relationship can go from breathtaking to ordinary in what feels like no time at all.

And here is where it gets uncomfortable: the research also shows that novelty seeking operates on the same neural pathways as addiction. The dopamine system that lights up when we experience something new is the same system involved in compulsive behaviour. When we chase novelty, we are essentially chasing a hit. And like any hit, we need more of it each time to feel the same thing. The high gets shorter. The crash gets longer. And we are left scrolling, swiping, booking, leaving, searching, always searching for the thing that will make us feel alive again.

I recognised this pattern in myself here. Sitting on a beach I had sat on before, watching a sunset I had watched before, and feeling almost frustrated that it was not giving me what it gave me the first time. As if the island owed me something.

It does not. And that realisation was the beginning of a different kind of seeing.

The map is not the place.

The first time I came to the Island, I had no map. No expectations. No reference points. I simply arrived and let the island show itself to me. By the third time, I had built an entire map in my mind. I knew the roads, the restaurants, the beaches. I had opinions. Preferences. A picture of what the experience should look like. And that picture was the exact thing standing between me and what was actually here.

I think this is what happens in every part of life when the novelty fades. We replace the living experience with a mental model of it. We stop seeing the person in front of us and start seeing our idea of them. We stop tasting the meal and start comparing it to the memory of the meal. We stop being in the place and start measuring it against the version we carry in our heads.

Marcel Proust wrote something about this that I think is one of the most beautiful sentences ever put on paper: "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."

He was not talking about travel. He was talking about perception. About how we can stand in the same place and see two entirely different things depending on the quality of our attention. The landscape does not change. Our eyes do.

I wrote about this once before, about what it means to meet life with a beginner's mind. The invitation to let go of what we think we know and soften into the mystery of what could be. That idea feels different to me now, sitting here for the third time. Back then it was a concept I loved. Now it is something I am being asked to practice.

Forced into stillness.

I was forced to slow down on this trip. An incident happened that took the option of rushing around off the table. At first, I resisted it. I had plans. I had a list of things I wanted to do, places I wanted to revisit. But the slowness was not optional, and so I surrendered to it.

And something unexpected happened. When I stopped moving so fast, I started seeing differently. Not more. Differently. The quality of my attention changed. I noticed the way the light moved across the wall in the late afternoon. I heard birds I had never paid attention to before. I tasted my food more slowly. I watched the rain without wanting it to stop.

Henry David Thoreau went to the woods at Walden Pond for something similar. He wrote that he went to "live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what they had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I have not lived." What he found was that stripping away the unnecessary, the busy, the rushed, granted him the chance to appreciate the seemingly most simple aspects of life. He kept appointments with trees. He watched light on water. He did not need novelty. He needed presence.

I think I came to Maui three times to learn this. The first time was for the wonder. The second was for the familiarity. The third was for the stillness. And the stillness is where the real seeing lives.

The beauty of what stays.

The Japanese have a philosophy called wabi-sabi. It is the art of finding beauty in things that are imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. A chipped cup. A quiet rainy day. A face that has aged. It is an awareness of the transient nature of all things, and a corresponding appreciation for the things that bear the marks of time.

Wabi-sabi is the opposite of novelty seeking. Where novelty says "this is no longer exciting, find the next thing," wabi-sabi says "this is no longer new, and that is precisely what makes it beautiful." The crack in the cup is the story. The wrinkle is the life that was lived. The familiar beach at sunset, the one you have seen a hundred times, is not less for being known. It is more.

Rachel Carson, the naturalist who wrote The Sense of Wonder, believed that the capacity for wonder is something we are born with and slowly unlearn. She wrote that it is not half so important to know as to feel. That if facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow. She was talking about children, but I think she was also talking about all of us. We do not lose our sense of wonder because the world becomes less wondrous. We lose it because we stop paying the kind of attention that wonder requires.

And that is really what this comes down to. Not finding new things to be amazed by. Learning to be amazed again by what is already here.

The third time.

I think there is something sacred about the third time. The first time is discovery. The second time is recognition. The third time is a choice. Do you keep chasing the first-time feeling, or do you learn to love what is here now, as it is, without the sparkle of novelty to carry you?

The sparkle was never the thing. It was the invitation. It got your attention. It opened the door. But what lives on the other side of that door is something quieter and, I think, more lasting. It is presence. It is peace. It is the ability to sit on a beach you have sat on before and feel the wind as if for the first time. Not because the wind has changed. Because you have.

We do not have to chase the new to feel alive. We have to slow down enough to feel what is already here.

I am learning this here, for the third time. And maybe that is exactly why I came back.

Where in your life has the novelty faded? And what did you find underneath it? I would love to hear.

If this spoke to something in you and you want to explore what it means to slow down, to stay present, and to find wonder in what is already here, Breathe and Bloom might be for you.

Further reading:

Marcel Proust — In Search of Lost Time

Henry David Thoreau — Walden

Rachel Carson — The Sense of Wonder

Andrew Juniper — Wabi Sabi: The Japanese Art of Impermanence