Buy Different Coffee

A coworker told me about a conversation she’d had with an older guy — the usual generational complaint. Something about the kids these days. The specifics don’t matter because they never do. It’s the same script every time, and the script is always about the same thing: the world changed and I didn’t sign up for this.

We got to talking about why that happens. The easy answer is that people fear change. That’s true, but it’s not very useful. It’s like saying people fear heights — okay, but some people jump out of planes for fun. The interesting question isn’t whether people resist change. It’s why some people calcify and others don’t.

The conveyor belt

When you’re young, novelty is the default. You change schools every few years. You move from your parents’ house to a dorm to your first apartment to maybe a different city. You meet entirely new groups of people over and over. Your life is structurally designed to keep throwing unfamiliar things at you.

Then it stops.

Somewhere in your late twenties or early thirties, the conveyor belt of novelty shuts off. You find a job. You settle into a neighborhood. The weeks start to look the same — not because anything went wrong, but because you built a life that works, and a life that works tends to repeat itself. This is fine. Routine isn’t the enemy. But unchecked routine becomes calcification, and most people don’t notice it’s happening until they’re already rigid.

I see it all the time. You don’t have to be old. You just have to go long enough without anything changing.

Chosen vs. imposed

Here’s the thing people miss when they say “people fear change.” Most people don’t actually fear change. They fear loss of agency. When you choose to change something — your job, your city, your lunch order — it feels like freedom. When change is imposed on you from the outside — a layoff, a policy shift, a technology that reshapes your industry overnight — it feels like subjugation. Same change, completely different experience.

This is why the discourse around every new wave of technology sounds the same. AI is going to reshape society. Before that it was crypto. Before that it was social media. Before that it was the internet itself. The ink gets spilled, the takes get taken, and then we adapt and move on. That’s the cycle. It’s always the cycle. But people who’ve spent years in an unchanging routine have no muscle memory for adaptation, so every wave feels like the first earthquake they’ve ever lived through.

The move, then, is to build that muscle before you need it.

Micro-novelty

I love a routine. I wake up, drink my coffee, walk my dogs to the same park. I’ve gone weeks eating the same egg sandwich for lunch every day. I get it. Routine is comfortable, and comfort isn’t something to be ashamed of.

But when I buy coffee beans, I buy a different brand every time. Not because I’m chasing the best cup — I have preferences, and some of them are strong — but because the act of choosing something unfamiliar is the point. You might find something new. You probably won’t. That’s fine. The discovery isn’t the goal. The willingness to discover is the goal.

It’s the same with restaurants. Try a new place once in a while. Sometimes it’s bad. You don’t go back. It’s not a big deal. You don’t have to commit to anything. That’s the whole point — nothing has to stay the same forever, and nothing has to change forever either. You just have to keep the door open.

I change my hairstyle from time to time. Grew a mustache recently. Bleached my hair once. These aren’t fashion statements — they’re a way of reminding myself, and reflecting outward, that I’m not the same person I was six months ago. You’re going to age. You’re going to look different regardless. You might as well have some fun with it. Dye your hair blue. What’s the worst that happens? Somebody has an opinion about it? Good. Let them.

The Zuckerberg problem

Steve Jobs wore the same outfit every day. Zuckerberg does too. This gets brought up constantly as life advice: simplify your decisions, reduce decision fatigue, optimize your bandwidth.

What gets left out is the context. These are people running some of the largest companies on the planet. Their days are stacked with high-stakes decisions from the minute they wake up. For them, eliminating trivial choices is a legitimate optimization. They also have to market themselves — the outfit becomes the brand, and consistency is the brand’s point.

Most people are not running trillion-dollar companies. Most people are not building a personal brand. Most people can afford to pick a different shirt. And they’d probably benefit from it — not because the shirt matters, but because the act of choosing something different, however small, is practice for the bigger changes you don’t get to choose.

Taking their advice at face value, stripped of context, is like watching a professional bodybuilder’s training program and assuming it applies to someone who just started going to the gym.

Progressive overload

Speaking of the gym — the weight-training analogy holds up here. You don’t walk in on day one and load the bar with 300 pounds. You start where you are. You add weight gradually. Too much too fast and you injure yourself. Too little and you don’t grow.

Novelty works the same way. Buying different coffee is a warm-up set. Going to a new restaurant is adding a plate. Travel — real travel, not the Instagram kind — is where you start to feel the weight.

I don’t want to be snobby about this. Someone who takes a trip to Florida and comes back buzzing about it — that’s genuine. That’s the novelty high doing its thing, and it’s real regardless of the destination. A cruise counts. Vegas counts. But if you want a deeper adaptation, go somewhere nobody speaks your language. Eat food you can’t identify. Navigate customs you don’t understand. You’ll feel disoriented. You might not love it. But you’ll come back with a capacity you didn’t have before, and that capacity compounds.

The key is knowing your own level and progressing at your own pace. The person who’s never left their hometown doesn’t need to book a flight to rural Japan. They need to try a new lunch spot. The person who’s been to thirty countries might need something else entirely. Meet yourself where you are, and then push a little.

The mustache test

Here’s a side benefit of intentional change that nobody talks about: it shows you who around you is most resistant to change themselves.

When I grew a mustache, the reactions were revealing. Some friends didn’t even mention it. Some said “cool” and moved on. Others couldn’t stop talking about it. People I barely knew would walk up and share their opinion — unsolicited, emphatic, sometimes weirdly aggressive. About hair on my face.

The people who shrug are the ones who have their own relationship with change figured out. The people who can’t let it go are telling you something about themselves. Not in a judgmental way — it’s just information. And it’s useful information, because it maps pretty cleanly onto how those same people handle bigger disruptions.

You also build resilience to criticism this way. If you can weather “what are you doing with your hair?” without flinching, you can weather a lot more than that. It sounds trivial, but trivial is the training ground. Confidence isn’t built in high-stakes moments. It’s built in low-stakes ones you stopped avoiding.

Keep opening doors

The cliche is that when one door closes, another opens. But you can just keep opening doors. You don’t have to wait for one to close. You don’t even have to walk through every door you open — sometimes you just look inside, decide it’s not for you, and move on. The point is the opening.

If your routine is something you’ve chosen and you genuinely enjoy it, great. Stay there. But if you’re honest with yourself and the routine is fear-based — you eat the same thing because trying something new feels like a risk, you wear the same clothes because standing out feels dangerous, you avoid unfamiliar places because discomfort feels like a threat — then that’s worth examining. What are you actually afraid of? A different sandwich? A haircut? A conversation with someone who doesn’t look like you?

Fear is the mind-killer. Not the Dune kind — the mundane kind. The kind that keeps you eating ham sandwiches every day, not because you love ham, but because you never considered that you might also love roast beef. You can expand your capacity for liking things. You can expand your capacity for enjoying your own life. But you have to do different things to get there.

Nobody’s saying burn it all down. Keep the park you walk your dogs in. Keep the morning coffee. But buy different beans. Go to a different barber. Order something you can’t pronounce. Paint with all the colors. You never know what you’ll find, and the not-knowing is the whole point.