Unthinking by Harry Beckwith

Author:Harry Beckwith [BECKWITH, HARRY]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780446574204
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2011-01-25T16:00:00+00:00

How the New Gets Old: The Ocean That Stopped Roaring

On the evening of Friday, January 26, 1968, Jeff Greendorfer and his college roommate arrived at his roommate’s home on a cliff on the northern Oregon Coast. It was Jeff’s first visit to Oregon’s coast, but he knew the Pacific Ocean well, having grown up minutes from it in San Francisco. To give Jeff the full benefit of his visit, his hosts assigned him the green bedroom, from which he was able to look out its floor-to-ceiling window and see thirty miles out to sea.

That night was Jeff’s last in the room.

The next morning at breakfast, Jeff apologized to three hosts. He felt grateful for being given the room with the best view in the house but couldn’t sleep there again. “The waves sound so loud, they kind of scare me.”

Jeff’s announcement startled his hosts. They’d lived alongside the ocean for decades, so the ocean sounded different to them; it did not sound at all.

Jeff’s hosts had experienced what psychologists call perceptual adaptation: they’d adapted to what they heard to the point where they no longer heard it. That is why advertisers change ads often. We become so accustomed to ads that we cease to notice them, just like Jeff’s hosts no longer noticed the crash of the waves on the rocks below.

Familiarity breeds numbness. This is why we often struggle with marriage. Each partner becomes habituated; we notice less, which causes us to appreciate less. This also explains why receiving a gift at an unexpected time makes us smile for several days, but a birthday gift—being expected—usually touches us less.

We love what is familiar, and then we don’t.

Familiarity eventually breeds fatigue, but until that occurs, we crave what is familiar and recoil at what is not, as Mary Tyler Moore discovered in the middle of the 1970s.

And it’s the tightrope several American companies are now walking.

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