More often my memories are thematic instead of specific. A series of events compressed into lessons. Easier on the meat proccesor and storage for retrieval and calculations. However I do have a set of stories in my mind that have stuck with me, as if at that moment I was so aware that it permiates all my decisions to this day. And they aren't even that interesting.
Be me, sitting on a chair, cross legged. See a sibling, possibly a parent, also cross legged. Become internally frustrated and immediatley change how I'm sitting.
What a ridiculous waste of space. I don't even remember my Dad's birthday. Yet I have a collection of these short temper tantrums. Moments where I needed to be different, unique. The anger serving as the method to brand these engineered dilemnas for some evolutionary purpose.
Are these memories simply a symptom of my human condition or are they the root of my ongoing decision making?
Is this a mountain to climb? or simply walk around?
Contentment
I've been self aware of this concept for a while. Like when you sometimes look in the mirror and remember you are flesh, these memories work in parallel to remind me I am human. That at some level there is an automation of my life. However, luckily as humans, we are capable of serving ourselves outside of our wiring and previous evolutionary needs.
This is to say, I just want to be content.
When I hear of the Monk with no need for the material, or the hermit with no need for a home. Not to overly romantacize (too late), but clearly it's possible for humans to not need for more.
So why not me?
Novelty acts as a disguise for want, that the grass is greener. That I must do something new, that I've already done this part, that habit and ritual are inherent failures to grow.
Novelty as Exploration
So why do we even need novelty. What alternative does it have to just being a failure of billions of years of teaching? Why are we evolutionarily trained to care about something new? The salmon seem to be fine going up a stream they do not know. My cat will complain about the same thing every single day at the same time everyday. Why aren't we fine with going to our daily cubicle?
The only way I've been able to reconcile this is with an inaccurate comparison. Since I'm a nerd, I can only explain this via artifical intelligence practices[1].
A general concept when trying to efficiently solve a task using artifical intelligence is the use of gradient descent. That any problem can be defined as a series of metrics and weights that can be represented as these hills or gradients. And the descending or climbing is the search for the optimal solution.
It's a hard task.
Say you are in a field of hills. It's quite foggy, you can only see so far in front of you.
Then I ask you to descend to the lowest point or reach the highest hill.
Well a simple strategy is to take your next step and feel if you are going higher or lower, and keep following that trajectory if it aligns with your goals. However the issue with this is that you can't even imagine the everest in the distance. That the real optimal path is going down a valley first because the peak is simply on the other side.
With all of that in mind we add another tool to your arsenal, a teleporter. Sadly this little hand held teleporter is written in an unknown language, with many knobs and levers. To the uninformed eye pressing the button will drop you off at any number of places.
This doesn't seem terribly useful at first glance, but this exact methodolgy is used to find optimal decisions. Simply making a random choice, with random inputs can be more efficient when on the search for finding the start to an optimal path.
Novelty, in this sense, is a tool for exploration. Forcing humans to be diverse allows for adaptable results. It doesn't always work, it might even hinder, but given enough searching the hope is that you will inevitably reach what you are searching for.
My contrived pulls
Even if all of that 'reach of an understanding' is true, what value does it really bring to my current life. If contentment is an argument for peace, then novelty is one for chaos. Is this made up “search” one with an actual end or merely a result of conditioning. Does contentment come from optimality or understanding. Or is this optimality simply found internaly, completley outside of external experience.
Another problem only solved by living a life you only have once.