“Variety is the spice of life” is one of those phrases that feels obvious enough to dismiss without a second thought. A throwaway line, justification for novelty or just a slogan used to sell everything from breakfast cereal to streaming subscriptions. But beneath the cliché sits something fundamental to being human.
Humans crave variety not because we are fickle, greedy, or easily bored, but because variety is wired into how we survive, learn, and stay alive. Long before it became a marketing strategy, variety was an evolutionary advantage.
In the early days
In early human environments, variety meant safety. Eating a wide range of foods reduced the risk of nutritional deficiency and was essential as nature is seasonal. Exploring different landscapes increased access to resources – as hunter gatherers we were always on the move covering great distances following food sources. Engaging with different people in other small groups enabled the DNA pool to be widened.
Our brains evolved to notice change.
New stimuli sharpens attention. Novel experiences trigger curiosity and variety keeps us alert, adaptive, and always learning. When environments become too predictable, engagement drops, motivation is reduced and we can stagnate. Even our eyes only focus on about 1-2 degrees of our visual field at any one time – the receptors quickly tire and by changing our focus we enable them to refresh. We rely on peripheral vision to trigger alerts or change. These biological realities have not changed, even though our environments have.
Modern life often presents itself as endlessly varied. New shows, fashions, gadgets, upgrades, versions, trends, diets and identities. Social feeds are designed to be addictive by continually serving up new content just by scrolling. Marketing has become exceptionally adept at tapping into our appetite for novelty. This is not accidental. Marketing understands something real about human psychology. Variety activates desire fore more and more consumption.
Every season brings a reinvention.
Every product promises a new version of you.
Every trend suggests that sameness is to be left out or behind.
Variety or novelty?
But there is a difference between meaningful variety and manufactured novelty. Meaningful variety nourishes, expands perspective, deepens experience and leads to more knowledge and eventually wisdom. Manufactured novelty often does the opposite by creating stimulation without satisfaction. Consumption replaces engagement and genuine satisfaction and the cycle accelerates.
We chase “new” not because we are fulfilled by it, but because we are hungry for something we cannot quite identify. Variety is not just about material items or experiences – it is also wired into our need for relationship and intimacy needs.
A life of variety but just one partner
We ask our partners to be everything we need, forever. A lover, friend, confidant, co-parent, emotional regulator, adventure companion and a source of intellectual stimulus. Can one person really satisfy these needs for an entire lifetime? How does this expectation fit with our hard-wired need for variety? For most people it doesn’t.
Variety keeps desire alive because desire thrives on difference. While familiarity brings safety (like companionship), difference brings stimulation. Both have value at different times in our lives but when life becomes overly repetitive, when roles harden and identities shrink, the nervous system goes looking for something new. It’s quite normal.
The evidence of needing variety is everywhere
In careers, people burn out not just from workload, but from monotony. Often having risen to the top of their field they suddenly decide to retrain in a completely different area. Some people have had multiple successful unrelated careers. In relationships, people disengage not because love has vanished, but because novelty has been eliminated. In parenting, people feel trapped not because they dislike family, but because their world has narrowed.
The grass is greener, sometimes
Sometimes the grass is greener elsewhere and even if it isn’t curiosity drives us to take a look. Humans have always done this – its how we expand our horizons and discover new things. Its how we grow, even when we are wrong. This does not mean constant change for change’s sake. To survive the way we live in the modern world people do need stability and routine, we have to be pragmatic about that.
The trick is to identify when the advantages of the familiar are outweighed by the need for variety, or greener grass. It is very challenging because we live in societies that demand fixed routines whilst constantly and pervasively selling us other choices. We are all caught between a rock and hard place.
The tragedy is that we often attach shame and guilt to the desire for variety instead of understanding it. Wanting novelty is framed as immaturity – we even have names for it – when young its ‘fear of commitment’, when middle-aged its a ‘mid-life crisis’. But humans did not evolve to live out each day in a sanitised predictable bubble, we simply need degrees of variety, sometime small, sometimes drastic.
We falsely train ourselves, or allow ourselves to be trained to: Be consistent. Be reliable. Pick one path. Stick to it. These values are essential for civilisation to hold together (though not foraging societies) but for some of us the personal price we pay is far too high.
Variety is not the enemy of commitment, it is what keeps commitment from suffocating. When we understand variety as a biological and psychological need rather than a consumer impulse, we can stop condemning it and start using it freely and even wisely.
Human Apes do not crave novelty because they are broken. They crave it because they are living as they should.