Familiarity breeds contempt- True or False?

'Familiarity breeds contempt' goes a famous adage, but does it hold true for matters of the mind too? All to often, people get into ruts, only on the account of familiarity. Far from contempt, people develop a sort of love to things that are familiar to them and in fact, tend to avoid changes. People doing the same work day in and day out admit to feeling bored, but often shrink away in fear when asked why they don't do something different. It's like a pacifier given to a baby. Conditioning sets in after a while.

In the book 'Who moved my cheese?' author Dr. Spencer Johnson suggests that the biggest reason for long standing problems not getting resolved is because our mind is conditioned to avoid changes, even those that could solve the problem.

We have a fear to start off on things that are unfamiliar to us. In a field like Computer Science where today's knowledge may become obsolete the next day, many professionals shy away from updating their skills giving the excuse that the changes don't really fall in their domain. The real reason is that though they know that the changes are very much part of their domain, they look the other way only because they are scared to do something new. How long has it been since you have learned something new?

Many of us want to learn new skills, new past-time activities and explore new and uncharted territories, but the inner-mind gets in the way, telling us to stick to what we know and have explored, to stick to the tried and tested recipes. We have to overcome this inertia in order to be able to progress. Change is after all one of the signs of life and yet, people avoid it all the time and later even complain that things are not the way they used to be, and that they feel that something has died inside of them, that the passion is not there, where it used to be.
Ask a gardener what to do in case you see that your favorite potted plant is on a decline and chances are high that he will ask you to dig up the soil and recharge it, i.e replenish it with new soil that is nutrient rich and also add a bit of fertilizer as the plant would have used up all the nutrients in the soil for its growth. We ought to do the same with our minds, but do we ever give it a thought?

Our mind is capable of a lot of wonderful things, but it too needs to be recharged every once in a while, otherwise it too, like the potful of nutrient deprived soil, will not be able to support the germination of new thoughts and the blooming of new ideas.
Familiarity is a good thing to have, but exploration of the unknown refreshes our minds and keeps us young, in the mind.