Misoneism

"fear, hatred or intolerance of change" Merriam Webster Dictionary Online

<>From the first time you heard the word "mistake", to sometime in your education when you discovered "mishap" and "misanthrope", you came to the realization that the prefix "mis-" rarely started anything good. This time, from a troop of online and in-print dictionaries and the virtual land of weltschmerz, I bring to you, the king of all "mis-"s, "misoneism".

Personally, I think that it's an underused word. Misoneism is a concept that is, though hard to recognize, common in every day and age. A bunch of people, who were used to not having a king, became suddenly faced with having an emperor, albeit a well-liked one, decided to assassinate Julius Caesar on the Ides of March. As children worldwide, ushered in a new era of adoration for a certain book (by J.K. Rowlings), certain churches and parents grew afraid of the demonic influence of said book and banned it. Not so far from fair Waterloo, through long field of wheat and of corn, the dusty road runs by, to many-silo-ed Amish Country, where lives a group of people caught in time. Oscar Wilde hated change to the skyline of Paris so much that he would have lunch everyday at the Eiffel Tower, just so he wouldn't have to look at it. A whole class was shocked and confounded when one of their classmates got a hair cut. Making a crazy change in one's life is generally considered … crazy and out of this world. Need I continue? From measly incidents, like the loss of 8 inches of hair, to resolves of great fortitude, like the assassination of Julius Caesar, misoneism has ruled history.

Today, misoneism is not admitted by Microsoft's spellchecker (without some persuasion), but it is admitted, in mild doses, everywhere. People talk about making a change to their life. They talk about making everything better for themselves. Throughout the land, there are murmurings of drastic diets, sensational makeovers, and the ever prevalent "life-changing experience". But, changing one's image, with hair or weight or over-the-top makeup, is perceived as going out on a limb. Changing one's life, when all's said and done and the life-changing moment's come and gone, is a resolution that is often softened by things like "Rome wasn't build in one day", "there's always tomorrow", and the idea that change should come slowly and must be evaluated at every step to make sure it's a change for the better. People are ever preoccupied with the idea that they'll lose their idea of self if they change just one bit, thus causing their name to be synonymous with "misfit" and other travesties to the magnitude of the sky falling down on their lives. So, in the end, those dramatic life-altering experiences are fairy tales that we can watch on reality television because people are all too afraid or too reluctant to let go of a former self. I believe that's called a mild case of misoneism. Oh, and cause for weltschmerz.