Does Familiarity Necessarily Breed Contempt?

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We are creatures who cannot tolerate the repetitive and mundane for very long. And I really need to be finished with a project I’ve been working on every day for several months.

In the early 20th century work Hand-Made Fables , George Ade wrote that “familiarity breeds contentment.” A few years after Ade wrote those words, the American humorist and author Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain) would famously claim that “familiarity breeds contempt — and children.”

Over the past several months, I have struggled to put the finishing touches on a manuscript to be published at the end of this spring. I have looked at the material daily, and it has gotten to the point that I’ve actually developed an aversion to it. Perhaps familiarity, at least over-familiarity, truly does breed contempt.

It seems we are creatures who cannot tolerate the repetitive and mundane for very long. Something becomes exhausted in our spirit when we have no variety, novelty or new opportunity in our lives. Our distaste for monotony is so deeply rooted that scientists are spending a lot of resources devising ways that might keep astronauts sufficiently occupied with interesting and stimulating tasks on very long space flights, such as a mission to Mars.

Of course, the opposite is also true. There are folks who are so novelty- and stimulation-seeking that they can’t savor some of the blessings of constancy and commitment. The have an almost pathological distaste for boredom in their personality, even in situations where most of us wouldn’t necessarily get bored. This inevitably gets them into big trouble. So it seems, as always, that it’s a matter of balance.

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All that said, I really can’t wait to be DONE with the project with which I’ve been involved. I felt this same way after completing my first book. The only way I even came to like it again was after it was published and I began getting some kind letters from various folks validating the work. I sure hope that happens again. But for right now, my feelings are much less contentment and more contempt. I just need to be done!

Can anyone relate?

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