We Love Change. We Hate Change.

We love change.
We hate change.

Both things are true at the same time, and the contradiction is not poetic—it is biological, cognitive, and deeply human.

To understand it, let’s tell a small story.

Inside our body, there is an organ that quietly believes it stands above all others. Conveniently, it is also the organ in charge of beliefs: the brain.

The brain sees itself as a kind of prince. It suspects that Queen Nature loves it more than the rest. That she forgives its excesses, its obsessions, even its destructive ideas, simply because it is her favorite child.

Everything important comes to the brain first.
The largest share of glucose is reserved for it.
If oxygen were ever to be scarce, the last drop would be saved for it.

When a brilliant idea appears, the applause goes to the brain.
When a masterpiece moves us, the brain takes credit—more than the hands that shaped it, more than the body that endured the hours, more than the breath that sustained the rhythm.

Deep down, the brain suspects the rest of the body looks at it with resentment.

Pain feels like sabotage.
Fatigue feels like a conspiracy.
If something hurts, the brain cannot think.
If the body protests, the brain cannot sleep.

It imagines the muscles complaining: we work harder than you.
It imagines the skin whispering: I am the one sweating.

The brain is insecure about its cost.
It consumes a lot.
It knows it consumes a lot.
And it senses the silent vigilance of the rest of the body, watching its expenses.

Here is the paradox.

The brain loves change.
It is plastic, adaptive, curious by nature.
Routine bores it quickly.
When things become predictable, it reaches for novelty.

But change is expensive.

Novelty demands more processing.
More variables to integrate.
More uncertainty to tolerate.
More glucose to burn.

And so the brain hesitates.

This tension—between desire and cost—forces a compromise.
When novelty feels too expensive, the brain chooses patterns.
Repetition.
What is already known.

This is where the paradox hardens into behavior.

We say we love change, but we defend what is familiar.
We praise innovation, but cling to habits.
We celebrate creativity, yet resist difference.

It is not hypocrisy.
It is accounting.

From the brain’s point of view, conservatism is not ideology—it is budgeting.

For creative people, this matters.

Because the resistance to change is not a moral failure, nor a lack of imagination.
It is a stress response.

And perhaps our task is not to fight the brain, but to educate it.

To gently convince it of two things:

First: you are not a lonely genius prince.
Ideas are not born in isolation.
They emerge from the whole body—movement, emotion, memory, sensation, rhythm, breath.

Second: novelty does not have to be traumatic.
Change does not need to arrive as a threat.
Difference does not have to feel like danger.

When we reduce the stress of the new,
when we soften the cost of attention,
when we allow gradual exposure to difference,

the brain relaxes.

And when the brain relaxes, curiosity reappears.
Not as pressure.
Not as obligation.
But as desire.

We love change.
We hate change.

And learning to create may simply be the art of helping the brain stop feeling guilty for wanting both.