Miranda July's Lucrative Fantasies

Sun Feb 15 2026

There are all manner of lifestyles that are built around the pursuit of endless novelty, such as those centered on drug use, sadomasochism, extreme sports, endless travel…. And what happens, very very very often, is that the pursuit of new experiences becomes in and of itself the boring slog that all of the rest of us experience too. Says July, “Novelty helps women stay very alive which is part of our very important purpose here on Earth. Doesn't mean you have to slut it up constantly, but the idea of one person forever was...probably not something women came up with.” I find it kind of remarkable to say this without letting the other shoe drop: notoriously, after enough time pursuing it, novelty itself ceases to be novel. I don’t know if you’ve ever talked with people who have just spent like three or five years straight traveling, “walking the earth,” etc. For self-defensive purposes, they’ll usually assert how it was life-changing etc etc, and it probably was. But if you dig deeper, they will very often admit that they came to find it all enervating, a grind, that over time the novelty had a directly counterproductive impact to the point that it ended up dulling sensations rather than burnishing them. Meta-experience, as well as experience, is entirely capable of becoming just another grind.