Why Chasing New Experiences Leaves People Flat: CJ Williams of Roswell Makes the Case for Going Back

• A Roswell, Georgia chess player, car enthusiast, and traveler argues that the pursuit of novelty is overrated, and that the second visit is where real experience begins.

ROSWELL, Georgia, Jun 10, 2026, ZEX PR WIRE — The modern approach to leisure runs on novelty. New destinations get booked as soon as the last trip ends. New hobbies get started and abandoned inside a season. New gear gets purchased before anyone has learned to use what is already in the garage. The cultural pressure is always forward: more places, more skills, more experiences. CJ Williams of Roswell, Georgia has been watching this pattern play out for years. He believes it is producing exactly the opposite of what people think it is.

Williams is a chess player, car enthusiast, racquetball player, and traveler based in Roswell, just north of Atlanta. He follows Alabama college football and supports the Atlanta Braves, Hawks, and Falcons through every season. He also returns to the same vacation spots, studies the same chess openings, and has driven the same BMW M4 Competition long enough to understand it in ways a newer owner cannot. His argument is not against new experiences. It is against the assumption that new is always better.

“Most people treat novelty like it is the goal. They get to a new place and they are already thinking about the next new place. They never let the place they are in actually work on them.”

The Problem with Chasing New

The novelty model has a structural flaw. Every new experience starts with an orientation phase. A new destination requires figuring out logistics. A new hobby requires learning basics. A new car requires getting acquainted with its behavior. None of that orientation phase is the experience itself. It is the cost of entry.

When people move from one new thing to the next before the orientation phase ends, they never collect the returns that come after it. The city they visited was actually getting interesting on day three, right before they left. The chess opening they were learning was about to start making sense. The trail they hiked once was better the second time, when they already knew where the hard part was.

Cayden Williams, also known as C.J. Williams, describes the pattern as paying full price for a fraction of the product. The orientation cost is real. Walking away before the returns arrive makes it a poor trade.

“You spend two days figuring out how to be somewhere and then you leave. The third day would have been the whole trip. Most people never take the third day.”

A Return Mindset in a Forward-Looking World

The alternative Williams advocates is return. Go back to the destination. Go back to the hobby. Keep the car. Stay in the chess opening long enough to understand what it is doing.

The return mindset is not about nostalgia or settling. It is about recognizing that the first visit to anything is just the beginning of a longer relationship, and that longer relationships pay out in ways first visits cannot.

Williams books the same cabin in the North Georgia mountains when the schedule allows. He returns to the same beach town on the Gulf Coast. He plays the same chess openings consistently enough to see what they produce against different kinds of opponents. The pattern holds across everything he does.

Where the Pushback Comes From

Williams was born in Atlanta and grew up between Michigan and Alabama before returning to Georgia. He studied Political Science with a Business minor at Auburn University at Montgomery, where he served as Student Government President and led the College Democrats chapter. He now lives and works in Roswell, running an accounting firm that serves individuals and small businesses in the Atlanta metro area.

The critique of novelty culture did not start as a philosophy. It started as observation. Williams noticed that the people he knew who kept changing activities, destinations, and interests were often no more satisfied than the people who picked something and stuck with it. The variety did not seem to be paying what it promised.

“I have watched people go to forty places and come back not knowing any of them. I would rather know four places well. The knowledge is different. The memory is different. The whole experience is different.”

Why Going Back Is Not Giving Up

One objection to the return mindset is that it sounds like giving up on exploration. Williams rejects that framing entirely. He has traveled widely. He has tried many activities. He is not arguing against discovery. He is arguing against treating discovery as the finish line rather than the starting point.

The trail in North Georgia that he hikes regularly is more interesting to him now than it was the first time. He knows where the good views are. He knows which season makes it best. He knows what the light does in October at that particular elevation. That knowledge came from repetition, and it is not available any other way.

Returning is its own form of exploration. It is exploration in depth rather than in breadth, and Williams believes it consistently produces more.

“The first time you do anything, you are just orienting. The fourth or fifth time, you are actually there. You notice things you cannot notice when you are busy figuring out where you are.”

Patience as Practice

The skill that makes the return mindset possible is patience, and Williams has developed it deliberately. Chess is where he traces most of it. The game rewards players who can resist the instinct to react quickly and instead find the best available move. The player who stays calm after a mistake and plays the board as it actually is has an advantage that speed alone cannot overcome.

That quality carries into other areas. Williams has found that the same disposition that makes a chess player steady in a bad position makes a person steadier in general. The bad position is temporary. The response to it is permanent in the sense that it either improves things or makes them worse.

“Chess teaches you that the situation is not the problem. How you respond to the situation is the problem. That lesson works everywhere.”

What Depth Actually Looks Like in Roswell

In practice, the return mindset shows up across C.J. Williams’s life in ways that are not dramatic. He has played racquetball consistently at a club in the Atlanta area long enough to understand the geometry of the court in ways newer players do not. The sport rewards players who know where the ball will be, not just players who can get to where it is. That knowledge takes time to build and cannot be faked.

He hosts gatherings at his Roswell home regularly and has done it long enough to know which details produce a good party and which are unnecessary. The guest list matters more than the food. The layout of the room matters more than the decorations. Those insights came from repetition.

The BMW M4 Competition he drives in Roswell is a car he has kept because ownership changes over time in ways that make the longer version better than the shorter version. The car is more interesting to him now than it was when it was new.

A Different Default

Williams is not arguing that novelty has no value. He is arguing that novelty should be the beginning of a relationship, not the relationship itself. The trip should be the first of several. The hobby should get harder and more rewarding as it grows more familiar. The car should teach its owner more the longer it is driven.

That is a different default than the one most people operate on, and Williams thinks the difference in outcomes is real.

“Depth is not a limitation. It is the part most people skip on the way to the next new thing. The part they skip is where the good stuff is.”