Most people don’t refuse new things because they are certain they won’t enjoy them. They refuse because trying requires a brief surrender of certainty, of control, of the version of themselves that already knows how to exist.
New experiences don’t just offer pleasure; they threaten familiarity. And familiarity, even when it’s limiting, often feels safer than the unknown.
The more you hide, the more joy hides!
What people often don’t understand when they refuse to try new things, or ridicule others for trying them, is that they are not rejecting an activity. They are rejecting a feeling. An experience. A possible doorway to joy.
If someone has already tried something and genuinely disliked it, that’s different. But to decide in advance that nothing new can bring happiness and joy, that everything meaningful lies strictly within one’s comfort zone; that is not wisdom.
It is a quiet waste of life.
How can you know you don’t like something unless you’ve felt it?
Why experimenting is the key to knowing more
I’m not talking about drugs or anything risky or harmful to health or society. I mean very basic things. Simple things. New food. A new sport. A different kind of book. A place you never imagined yourself in. Sometimes even a version of yourself you never thought you could be.
Imagine if the only instrument you had ever known was a pair of tongs, and you believed that was all music could be. You made do. You accepted it. And then one day, you discovered a piano. You wouldn’t just hear new sounds, you would realise how limited your definition of music had been all along.
This is true of food. Of art. Of movement. Of relationships. Of joy itself.
Unless you have experienced something, how do you know what it might awaken in you? You might discover a part of yourself, a joy bone, you never knew existed.
It may not completely be your fault
Sometimes, this resistance to trying new things is not arrogance. It is fear. For people struggling with mental health issues, change can feel unsafe. Predictability becomes survival. Newness threatens the fragile sense of control they have built. Avoidance, in such cases, is not a failure of character. It is a nervous system doing its best to cope.
But there is another kind of resistance. One that comes not from active pain, but from old, unexamined trauma, now fossilized in the form of projection.
What is not processed stays like a bone in your body
This trauma is so old and so familiar that it no longer feels like trauma at all. It has calcified. It has turned into a habit, into fixations and rigidity. Into a personality that prides itself on being “practical” or “settled” or “realistic,” when in fact it has simply stopped being curious.
That’s where the real question lies.
Are you losing your curiosity?
When someone does something you haven’t – do you feel intrigued, or irritated?
Are you genuinely uninterested, or quietly grieving a life you never explored?
Judgment, more often than we admit, is grief wearing moral clothing. Labels give us a sense of superiority, but they also protect us from looking at what we might be missing.
Awareness ,of both the life you have lived and the life you haven’t, is what slowly brings curiosity back. And curiosity, when paired with safety, leads to joy. Not all at once. Not dramatically. But steadily.
An orange waiting to be peeled
As long as you keep peeling away the layers you’ve built around the possibility of joy, you will keep finding it, sometimes in places you never thought to look.
After all, the unlived parts of life don’t disappear, they remain veiled.
They wait.
Carpe diem, hooman!
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