The Familiarity Trap

Homesickness hit me recently. It made me wonder: what exactly do I miss? The people? The food? The weather? Or is it just the familiarity itself?

This led to a question that flips cause and effect: Do we like things because they're familiar, or are things familiar because we like them?

The Brain's Energy Budget

Our brain uses about 20% of our body's energy despite being 2% of our weight. It's expensive to run, so it constantly optimizes for efficiency. 

When you first navigate a new city, your brain burns significant energy forming neural pathways. Every decision - where to buy coffee, which route to take, how loud to speak in shops - requires active processing.

Through repetition, these neural connections strengthen and unused ones get pruned away. Eventually, heavily-used pathways develop insulation that speeds signal transmission. What once required intense focus becomes automatic and cheap.

Our brains physically reshape to make repeated tasks efficient. We develop preferences for things we're exposed to. We also repeatedly engage with things we already like. This creates a feedback loop where familiarity and preference reinforce each other until we can't tell them apart.

The Familiarity Trap

This efficiency creates a problem: we default to familiar patterns even when they're suboptimal. In relationships, we stay with the familiar even when it's suboptimal. In careers, we stick to known industries even when opportunity lies elsewhere. In investing, we keep funding the same patterns even when new models emerge.

Many investors I know, myself included, anchor on previously experienced patterns of success. We keep searching for the same same setup, the same founder archetype, the same market narrative -  even when the world has changed. The neural circuits encoding "what success looks like" become a constraint. We stop seeing what's actually there and start seeing what we expect to see. When a pattern feels familiar, we stop analyzing and start assuming.

It's also when something "works" that we tend to want to repeat the same thing again in hopes that it will work again, or at the very least to prove that the first time wasn't dumb luck. This repetition serves a deeper psychological need: maintaining the illusion that we control outcomes rather than merely stumbling through randomness. If we can reproduce success, we weren't just lucky - we were skilled. Our agency matters. The alternative - that much of what happens to us is chance - is too threatening to our sense of self. The pattern itself becomes identity.

Breaking the Loop

Homesickness might be withdrawal from cognitive efficiency. Away from home, everything requires active processing. New streets to navigate. New social cues to decode.

In markets, the best opportunities often come from forcing this discomfort. When everything in your portfolio feels familiar and comfortable, when every trade fits your established playbook, you're probably not seeing the next shift. The patterns that feel most natural are often the ones most priced in.

But those expensive new pathways are how we adapt. Sometimes the best move is paying the energy cost of thinking fresh instead of defaulting to what worked before.

And maybe that's exactly why disrupting our patterns matters - even when it’s exhausting.