I was pondering on the nature of things, and all my pondering lead me to one conclusion: we are wired for our own unsatisfaction.
I'm sure you've heard more than once that humans are creatures of habit. I guess this can also be seen as a good thing, we follow patterns, but mainly what it means is that we are design to adapt. There are very limited circumstances to which humans could not adapt to and continue to survive in. This means anything new you're experiencing now, every new sensation, will become dull and common with time. It's meant to so you can deal with different temperatures, light levels, noises, anything surrounding you, even if extreme, if you should need to for a longer period of time. Hell, you'll stop eventually feeling fire if you were to walk on it often enough. Not that your skin will thank you.
So what does this lead us to? We're constantly adapting to new things, which makes anything exciting or thrilling stop being exciting and thrilling eventually. I see all around me people trying to get new thrills on new things: travel somewhere new, jump out of a plane, learn a new dance. We need to get a jolt of that here and there, it's also in our nature. There's no easier way to get me depressed that doing the same things over and over. The majority of people I know (if not all) subscribe to the same notion.
But what have we done? We've built a society based on exactly the opposite idea. Society subscribes to the notion that someone who's "got their shit together" has a permanent place where to live, a permanent job, a permanent relationship. It makes good terms of "contract", "full-time", "long term", "monogamy". And yes, I know all the different lifestyles within; I live in San Francisco, and I surround myself with people who don't agree with any of the above. But still, they fall in the same patterns. We all get a job, a place, a relationship.
But why? If all we crave for is the thrill of the new, why not work contracts here and there, move from place to place, country to country, and hop from bed to bed, from arms to arms? All I could really think of is: it's just too damn hard. We've built ourselves into rules and laws that make going against it all perfectly unpractical. We laid down a road with fences on each side that points in one direction. You can try to hop over the fence here and there, but eventually, you just get too tired.
If I had the will or patience, I would build a Second Life world where all different rules applied. Where we had a different job to do each day, a different place to live, and no limits to our love. I'm not saying it would be satisfying either, but it'd be an awesome experiment.
In the end, I guess I know it wouldn't work. And I know the reasons why. I am, after all, one of those humans.
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I enjoy novelty as much as anyone else, maybe more, and I've thought about what you're saying. Everyone likes their job at first, but grows to hate it eventually. Why couldn't we just swap jobs for a day? The barista at my coffee shop could come sit at my desk and type code, and I could put on an apron and make drinks and change all day. So why wouldn't that work? Because I can't make change, and they can't make code. By focusing our attention on one thing we get better at it. We learn the tricks of the trade, and are more efficient because of our practice. Sure it's easy to get burned out this way, but no one was every truly great at anything without practice.
I figure the same goes for relationships. We could all go from person to person reveling in the glow of NRE, but what happens when our lives hit a rough patch? If you broke your back who would take care of you? If your mind broke down and you went insane who would love you enough to remember you for who you really are? It seems a selfish reason to be monogamous, but the fact of the matter is that we are social creatures for our own survival. If we didn't need each other, why would we be wired this way? We need affection and validation, and strangers are not a safe or consistent source of either. If you go home with someone you met at a club what good is it? How can it be anything but a temporary solution to a need that will be with us our whole lives? But if you spent most of your time with that person, and the see you at your worst and still put up with you, that's validation. That's acceptance. And I think that's all we're really looking for.
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