I thought this was a really great article on our obsession with novelty by James Wilson at Wilson Quarterly. Our cultural addiction to what is new affects us in plenty of ways, most notably in our impatience with everything to our seemingly benign addiction with upgrading and updating - although I have an exemption clause when NCAA Football 2008 comes out in July...
We’ve come to expect a regular dose of novelty in our lives—in what we eat and wear, in how we’re impressed or amused or provoked or healed. The new is a defibrillator to jolt our flagging selves. “But wait,” comes the objection. “Hasn’t that always been so, at a level commensurate with the ability of each age to meet the demand?” Yes, it has. But what’s new is the intensity of our expectations and their elevation to entitlement, the proliferation of outlets for satisfying what have become our proliferating needs, and the capacity of so many people to afford to indulge them. What’s new is the rapidity with which the new becomes old. We spin through fads and passions as rapidly as tornadoes lift, sustain, and drop the contents of a landscape. What’s new is the seemingly infinite upward spiral of American abundance (though not—never—an abundance for all), a stairway not just to heaven but to the emptiness beyond.
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