Whoever loves money never has enough; whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with their income. This too is meaningless. Ecclesiastes 5:10
“This demand is valuable in various ways. In the first place it diminishes pleasure while increasing desire. The pleasure of novelty is by its very nature more subject than any other to the law of diminishing returns. And continued novelty costs money, so that the desire for it spells avarice or unhappiness or both. And again, the more rapacious this desire, the sooner it must eat up all the innocent sources of pleasure and pass on to those the Enemy forbids. Thus by inflaming the horror of the Same Old Thing we have recently made the Arts, for example, less dangerous to us than perhaps, they have ever been, “low-brow” and “high-brow” artists alike being now daily drawn into fresh, and still fresh, excesses of lasciviousness, unreason, cruelty, and pride. Finally, the desire for novelty is indispensable if we are to produce Fashions or Vogues.”
C.S. Lewis in The Screwtape Letters: Letters from a Senior to a Junior Devil (Samizdat University Press) 51.
Don’t misread this. The evil forces, as demonstrated by the words of Screwtape to Wormwood, aim to stir the demand for pleasure and novelty in us so that we don’t enjoy anything.
When we succomb to their ways, in the words of the famous song, we get “no satisfaction” and the evil forces celebrate because it leads to avarice, unhappiness, and sometimes even lasciviousness.
What about you? Don’t let your story include avarice, unhappiness, or lasciviousness. Continued novelty will not only cost you money. It will stifle your joy and your generosity.