''Familiarity..is a feeling meant to be so sweet..''
That's the opening line in a song from my upcoming album.
In fact, depending on when you read this, the above probably qualifies as the first official 'sneak-preview' on what is possibly a milestone of sorts in my musical career-but that's a different story.
And in case we haven't met, we've already skipped the small talk at this point.
You guessed right-I am an artist.
A professional one (sounds a lot more romantic than the realities involved on the backend, as this article will reveal, if you keep reading).
One of the strange privileges of making art for a living is that you spend a lot more time absorbing things before the vocabulary to name a lot of what you go through is something you start to own.
This song, just like many of its predecessors, knew things before I did. I wrote it while visiting my mother a few months ago in a city that has come with a lot of baggage. The kind that requires a lot of mindfulness on my part to unpack, navigate life despite, and heal its implications, of late.
Notice it doesn't actually call familiarity sweet, but refers to how it's a feeling. One we tend to associate with a kind of relief we assume will be, well, sweet (as opposed to say, sour. Or bitter).
It's an assumption that arrives before any actual conscious assessment of the situation involved.
And when the evaluation arrives, if at all, it does so later.
Which is why today's article is an invitation to consider having a closer look at this feeling.
What the feeling actually tells us
The science, (and i'm not a scientist, just a somewhat thorough nerd), as it turns out, backs my song up.
Psychologists (yeah, them peeps), have apparently known since way back in the late sixties that the simple act of seeing something repeatedly usually suffices to make us prefer it.
Robert Zajonc 's experiments took this on quite seriously when meaningless symbols were shown to participants often enough to observe how they eventually start liking them more than symbols they'd seen less often.
Nothing about the symbols improved. They were just recognisable at some point.
More recent neuroscience describes the brain as a prediction machine rather than a happiness machine (referred to as 'predictive processing').
Whatever it thinks it can predict feels easier, whatever feels easier, starts to feel true as well.
And whatever feels 'true' starts to feel 'safe'.
I doubt if we actually need a lab to verify this theory.
We've all felt it.
- The relationship we stayed in a couple of years too long.
- The job that stopped fitting but kept paying.
- The city we couldn't leave even after it emptied out for us.
In every case the feeling said something close to the word 'home'.
But what it actually meant was 'familiar'.
Familiarity is a record of what we have survived, often dressed up as a promise about what will keep us safe.
That's a pretty provocative statement to make. But there is actual research documenting how people find 'guaranteed' bad outcomes less stressful than uncertain ones which might reap more benefit.
My mother brought me up on the saying 'known evil is better than unknown evil'.
Which is a flawed premise in itself-cos the way I see it, if it's unknown I'm pretty sure I don't actually reserve the right to label it 'evil' in the first place.
Or am I missing something here?
(You're welcome, Ma).
My mum, along with many other members of my extended family, have been good examples of how a known wound can feel more comfortable than an unknown opening. I can confirm that the levels of trauma they've been through qualifies this for a lot of compassion and not blanket judgement.
But the physics of it is real. I know, cos I've inherited a lot of it and spend a lot more time dealing with the debris than I'm comfortable admitting on some days.
The brain will often call this affinity for the 'known', something like prudence.
But most of the time all it really is, is just (you guessed it), familiarity.
I'm going to take this oppurtunity to share with you today, how this has played out in my world. Not just the personal angles involved (some of which I already have at this point), but also the industry I work in, one which has been one of the most contentious laboratories for this spiel.
The way that spiel affects everybody in ordinary life happens to artists as well, but in a manner much more amplified and accelerated, often with consequences that are a lot more immediate to sense emotionally, physically and mentally.
Which makes it a useful metaphor to use to see the pattern clearly, and then identify what might be a more camouflaged version of it in your own life.
Feels like 'home'
Long creative relationships generate enormous levels of comfort.
You know how a session with this person unfolds.
How they take their coffee, where the conversation will and will not go.
That comfort reads, internally, as understanding. But by the time we realize that knowing someone's habits is not the same as being understood by them, the familiarity has already masqueraded as trust for years without us recoqnising the deeper patterns underneath.
I am in the middle of 'negotiating' one of the most important collaborations of my life.
The trickiest part has not been the paperwork-we haven't even gotten there yet.
It has been watching my own system reach and almost settle for older arrangements because they were easier to identify with. The familiar dynamic, the silence around questions that should have been asked decades ago. The knee jerk urge to manage emotions that aren't my responsiblity. The reflex to conflate compassion with enablement.
None of that familiarity is necessarily evidence of the 'fairness' many of us strive to be a beacon of, but an act of endurance.
Endurance of conditions that were actually relatively simple problems to be solved instead (for those of you who know me longer, you might know that I'm not the biggest proponent of problem-solving as the ultimate problem-solver it is sold to be-so know that I've contemplated this hard before putting it down on paper).
Pardon the presumption, but I'd guess that you have a version of this too.
Everybody does.
- A friendship running on memory rather than presence (another word doing the rounds these days).
- A business partner you stopped being truly honest with somewhere around year three.
- A family role you feel pressured to perform because the script is so well rehearsed that going off it feels like betrayal.
The question is the same in every case: is this really who I am, or clothes I'm comfortable wearing?
The story that thinks for us
The music industry runs on an old bedtime story: get discovered, get signed, get taken care of.
The story is so well worn that despite the ever-increasing atrocities that not just get normalized but defensible amidst the numbness, only the brave few seem willing to examine it, while generations of artists keep signing ther ownership and agency away quite nonchalant to the way their passions continue to get exploited for the profit of a third party.
The legacy of our own work threatens to get lost amidst the noise of fear, while the dream continues to feel too familiar to question.
The systems that did the damage were never hidden. They were sitting and continue to do so in plain sight, wearing shapes everyone recognises.
Familiarity continues the negotiation.
And artists keep paying for it.
The universal version of this is any inherited script we hesitate to put on the table and take a long, hard look at.
- Buy a house.
- Get a 'job'.
- Take the promotion.
- Pray you won't be the one who 'got fired'.
- Stay near the family.
- Don't make a fuss.
None of these stories are 'wrong'.
But there's just one problem with them.
They're unexamined.
And a story unexamined is not a choice.
It's a default.
Defaults are written by those who got there before us. The familiar path often feels safer because of the footprints it has to show.
Even though those footprints are not our own.
Suffering as a Costume
One of the traps I watch my peers fall into the most, one that took me the longest time to see in myself, is being broke conflated with 'authenticity'.
(Ouch, right?)
The starving artist has centuries of mythology behind them, and that mythology comes with the kind of familiarity that almost manages to qualify it as an inherent destiny. A home for some of the most brilliant minds and hearts I have had the privilege and heartbreak to have made the acquaintance of.
Meanwhile, those who choose to investigate the validity of this theory by educating themsleves in topics like business, psychology, economics, sociology and value, run the risk of having these endeavours labelled as some form of 'contamination'.
A betrayal of the real art.
As you might have guessed by now, the reality in my opinion, is far from it, but an actual opposite.
I challenge anyone reading this to find anything that erodes creative freedom faster than precarity.
Try saying 'no' to the worst offer you've ever received in your life when rent has been due for longer than you can even bear thinking about.
The struggling artist does not have more 'authenticity'-just less artistic freedom.
And the 'struggle' is one of the most familiar spaces to be in--to a point where exiting it feels scarier than remaining there for the rest of our life.
We become the bird who fails to find the courage, let alone the capacity to visualize a freedom that might come with the act of flying out the door, even if opened, despite the gift of all the ability to do so, the whole time.
Embracing that identity will eventually feel like the 'easier' thing to do, as the suffering now starts becoming a normal part of how we describe ourself.
The 'overworked' one.
The 'unlucky' one.
The one who never 'catches a break'.
Pain gone unexamined so long that it stops being an experience and morphs into something we 'are' instead.
And once we're at that semi-final state, we will be ready to defend it till the very bitter end.
Because now, letting go feels like losing ourself, not the pain.
What the unfamiliar taught me
Most of the decisions that actually have actually changed my life felt not just petrifying, but 'wrong' at the time I took them.
Leaving secure structures. Moving countries. Walking away from rooms I had spent decades earning my place in. Building a business as an extension of an artistic career when the culture around me treated the word 'business' as a confession.
None of it felt safe, and some, rather absurd.
And every single one of those decisions had the one thing in common that so many of us strive every day to avoid.
Unfamiliarity.
Each of these steps were filed under the same category by my nervous system: danger.
There is a very distilled lesson I have learnt in that, and what it really cost me was never really the safety I was worried about losing, but some willingness to take curiosity to its deepest level to apply.
Growing, expanding-never arrives feeling familiar.
And the feelings we use to evaluate our choices are more often than not, biased against the very choices that would bring the change the depths of our being yearn for.
Parting thoughts
In my article, 'Confirmation Bias and the Law of Attraction', I talk about verified scientific evidence (again, not a scientist, just a nerd!) on how entire functions of parts of our brain revolve around seeking evidence to confirm what we believe within our physical environment-the basis of what has gone on to establish one pop cultures biggest and most questionable movements: the Law of Attraction.
Regardless of what brand of wu, science or art one prefers to lean towards, the reality of our respective journeys and its correlations with what feels comfortable to us while not really up for debate anymore, still provide ample impetus for the kind of investigation the events of the world around us not just invite, but now push us to investigate.
'Sweet' is indeed a 'matter of taste'.
And that which the tip of our tongue chooses to come in contact with and the role we play in it in both directions, but now has a responsibility that is not about a 'thriving versus surviving' thought experiment anymore, but a question every single one of us will want to gain a brand of authentic (there, I said it), familiarity with, in our relationship with the planet during the precious time we have together.
Time whose finite and fragile nature make itself apparent in ways possibly unprecedented in history.
References
Zajonc, R. B. (1968). Attitudinal effects of mere exposure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 9(2, Pt. 2), 1–27.
Friston, K. (2010). The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory? Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11(2), 127–138.
Barrett, L. F. (2017). How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
de Berker, A. O., Rutledge, R. B., Mathys, C., Marshall, L., Cross, G. F., Dolan, R. J., & Bestmann, S. (2016). Computations of uncertainty mediate acute stress responses in humans. Nature Communications, 7, 10996.
Hasher, L., Goldstein, D., & Toppino, T. (1977). Frequency and the conference of referential validity. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 16(1), 107–112.
Nickerson, R. S. (1998). Confirmation bias: A ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises. Review of General Psychology, 2(2), 175–220.
Mullainathan, S., & Shafir, E. (2013). Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much. Times Books.
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