Since we are in the new year, it brings up a warning in my spirit that C.S. Lewis discussed in his wonderful The Screwtape Letters. 
The horror of the Same Old Thing is one of the most valuable passions we have produced in the human heart—an endless source of heresies in religion, folly in counsel, infidelity in marriage, and inconstancy in friendship. The humans live in time, and experience reality successively. To experience much of it, therefore, they must experience many different things; in other words, they must experience change.
I used to call this the “next big thing” syndrome. We find it difficult to just accept the experience of now, both in the living in the present and in the changes that God brings to us regularly. Lewis’s spokesman explains this such:
If we neglect our duty, men will be not only contented but transported by the mixed novelty and familiarity of snowdrops this January, sunrise this morning, plum pudding this Christmas. Children, until we have taught them better, will be perfectly happy with a seasonal round of games in which conkers succeed hopscotch as regularly as autumn follows summer. Only by our incessant efforts is the demand for infinite, or unrhythmical, change kept up.
So, what happens to us? What HAS happened to us? Screwtape explains, “Now just as we pick out and exaggerate the pleasure of eating to produce gluttony, so we pick out this natural pleasantness of change and twist it into a demand for absolute novelty. This demand is entirely our workmanship.” Meaning what? Well, I saw it clearly when I was in Mexico. At first I could not really put my finger on it, but by the time I was riding up an escalator into part of the Atlanta terminal, it was clear to me. Our country is sick with gluttony.
This idea of gluttony is more than an issue of food, but it connects to the point Lewis was making. You see it in a gluttony for possessions, you see it in a gluttony for stimulus, and yes for food. And, we have a gluttony that refuses to allow us to be content with the joy of each day, but instead we are twisted “into a demand for absolute novelty.” Or, as I called it, the “next big thing.” With this focus, we can’t enjoy what God gives us to enjoy but rather we slide into immoral things (though we can’t even see it for our minds grow dark and even up seems down [Rom 1:21-32]). Screwtape explains:
This demand [for the ever-changing new] 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.
God has a better plan for us. Lewis wrote it this way:
And since they need change, the Enemy [the Christian God] (being a hedonist at heart) has made change pleasurable to them, just as He has made eating Pleasurable. But since He does not wish them to make change, any more than eating, an end in itself, He has balanced the love of change in them by a love of permanence. He has contrived to gratify both tastes together on the very world He has made, by that union of change and permanence which we call Rhythm. He gives them the seasons, each season different yet every year the same, so that spring is always felt as a novelty yet always as the recurrence of an immemorial theme. He gives them in His Church a spiritual ear; they change from a fast to a feast, but it is the same feast as before.
So, as you go into the new year and (as you should be) are thinking about new goals and fresh starts….don’t become so gluttonous in pursuit of the new that you become attracted beyond wisdom.