Interesting Salon interview with Mike Lewis. I'm particularily intrigued with his explanation of how novelty-obsession causes us to maintain an adolescent point-of-view.
He did this study in which he finds that if people who haven't tried a new kind of food, like, say, Japanese food, by the time they're 25 years old, there's a 99 percent chance that they won't try it for the rest of their lives. If they haven't tried a new kind of fashion by the time they're 20, like an earring or a nose ring, there's a 99 percent chance that they'll never do it for the rest of their lives.
He finds that rats show exactly the same propensity. They are born very conservative creatures. There's a brief period during adolescence when they are obsessed with novelty. They are frantic to try new things. An adolescent rat is an explorer, is an adventurer. But then after this brief period, they return to the same conservative tendencies they showed when they were very young, and the same hesitancy toward new things. He surmises that there is something wired into us, but he has no explanation for it.
What's interesting about it is that this trait in human beings now intersects with the economy in a really rich way. If you have an economy that's premised on really rapid technical change, young people, people who are willing to accommodate that change and embrace it, are going to do better than they've ever done. That trait in adolescence, that essentially adolescent trait, becomes highly prized.
And once you realize that, you start to explain a lot of the behavior of the people who were sort of in the middle of the technology world as they get older. They understand as they get older that they've got to preserve this quality in themselves, and they end up preserving an awful lot else of adolescence along with it.
