Why change is not always good

We ran out of toothpaste last week, which is weird because I’m usually quite organized and I always have “refills” of the things we use every day, you know, shower gel, liquid detergent, that sort of thing. Fortunately, I had a travel tube in my toiletry bag. We had to resort to wearing that.

So when I went by truck to the weekly store, I bought more. I just received our regular brand. Well, I thought so.

“Why did you buy a different toothpaste?” It was the howl that greeted me the next morning. Actually, I didn’t, I said, I think if you look closely you will see that it is the usual brand …

And it was and, again, it wasn’t. You see, the makers, in their wisdom, had put out a new version of our old favorite. Apparently a new and improved version. According to whom, would I like to know? Hmmm … Who decided that the old formula was no longer good enough and decided to mess with it and make it totally unrecognizable from the original version? No one in our house, that’s for sure. I bet he was an executive in a large glass corner office who wanted to change things up a bit.

Why do some people feel the need to change for the sake of change? Haven’t heard of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”? But then I guess there is the other side of the coin that asks why, when things are clearly not right, no one makes the effort to change them for the better.

Or is it that we are not satisfied in any way? Do we just want everything to stay the same? Are we all fundamentally resistant to change?

There is comfort in the familiarity that you see. We like things that we understand, that we can trust. We really don’t like when things change. It makes us uneasy and makes us feel vulnerable and insecure. So we often move the same way doing the same old things and that seems to work for certain people.

And there is always the argument that if it is not broken, there is no need to fix it. Things that work perfectly fine as they are do not need to be changed. I understand the desire to have a new and updated “3.0” version of something that has been around for a while, but I really don’t see why we constantly feel the need to “improve” things that are almost perfect the way they are. I guess the perfect example of this is the logo of a famous cola company; its trademark writing has not changed since 1887.

The only problem arises when that familiarity turns into contempt; when we start to take too much for granted and then all of a sudden we are surrounded by disharmony and discontent and that is not a good result for anyone.

I am undecided in this case. I like change, but only if I feel like I have some control. What I find most difficult is when people who think they know better than me decide to make changes on my behalf and I have no choice but to agree with them. It’s the feeling of not knowing that I don’t like it. But then I’m a bit of a control freak, so I guess that’s never going to change.

What I do know, however, is that I would really like to have a chat with the person who decided to change our toothpaste. I bet he doesn’t like the new flavor any more than we do.