on the new jobs and the spiritual yearning for novelty

Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. "Underwood Elliott Fisher Co. - Women posing with giant typewriter" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1935 - 1945.

Last Monday, I started a new job, the details of which are irrelevant to this discussion so I won’t get into them here, except to say that new beginnings are as exciting and life-giving as I remembered them.

New relationships, new routines—a steady drip of dopamine. The effect, though intoxicating, can also be overwhelming, though. 

​The first three days of the job were spent in orientation—an all-you-can-eat buffet of facts, figures, rules, and processes. 

And I did, I gobbled up every bit of data chucked my way, savoring each new morsel of flavor. Indulging, engorging—a gluttonous glob was I.

On Saturday, the first moment of stillness I’ve had all week it seems, produced reflection, as it does. And within that idleness and processing came this question: what is it about newness that drives me? Indeed, what is it about new information that drives all of us?

I’ve often considered this impulse, this hunger for new information, to be spiritual in nature, a sacred yearning if you will. 

And of course, over and over again, the world’s religions talk about seeking.

Jesus said, ask and you will receive. Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will open.

The Bhagavad Gita said those who seek the One without ceasing will find the Lord dwelling in their hearts. 

The Dhammapada said those who seek the Way without ceasing will find it. It is like cleaning glass until the dust is removed. 

Hell, even pioneering self-help author Robert Collier said, “Plant the seed of desire in your mind and it forms a nucleus with power to attract to itself everything needed for its fulfillment.”

From a purely numbers standpoint, yeah OK, of course. If you open so many doors, odds are you’ll find something useful behind one of them. Enough monkeys typing will eventually write Shakespeare, etc.

But as with most things that are truly spiritual—by which I mean, deeply, fundamentally human and also a part of something bigger and, thus, interconnected with all of existence—there’s often supporting scientific evidence.

Indeed, a Harvard University psychology researcher and a neuroscientist looked into where this thirst for new information comes from and found the answer is—no surprise—evolutionary in nature. 

Humans are deeply curious beings. Our lives, economy, and society are shaped so strongly by a drive to obtain information that we are sometimes called informavores: creatures that search for and digest information, just like carnivores hunt and eat meat. What is it that drives our hunger for information?

From an evolutionary perspective, there is a clear reason why animals would seek out information: it can be vital to their survival and reproduction. A bird that spent its whole life eating berries from a single bush and never explored its environment could be missing out on a much better food source nearby. Thus it is not surprising that exploration is common in the animal world. For example, monkeys will push a button at high rates for a chance to peek out of the window, and roundworms do not crawl to a food source directly, but rather circle towards it in a way that gives them the most information about their environment.

What drives animals’ information-seeking behaviors? One possibility is that each individual animal learns over the course of its life that a greater knowledge of its environment leads to rewards like food or other essential resources. However, while this is something we can imagine humans or monkeys learning, it is probably beyond the capacity of roundworms. Furthermore, we see curiosity-driven behaviors in very young animals, before they have had enough experience to learn the association between knowledge and rewards. For example, human newborns look at new visual scenes for much longer than at known visual scenes.

New information, it turns out, stimulates our brains in the same way food and sex do, that’s how hard-wired it is in us. Which must be why it's not even 9:30 and I'm ready for a coma.