Everyone's Looking for the Same Thing - In the key of C?

This has been a most stimulating day, so this post can't wait until tomorrow. Today, at our Writers Group meeting, a friend introduced me to a new author(ess), B. M. Bower, AKA, B. M. Sinclair, AKA - never mind. The book my friend had in hand was almost 100 years old and it was all about the terrain near Quincy, specifically around the base of Mt. Hough, and forest fire lookouts.. Since I have lots of lookout friends and have lots of time on Mt. Hough, I had to check this out. Turns out our town library has a copy under lock and key due to its fragile nature. So, I searched the fiction section which had over a dozen of her books. I checked out two. The one called "Cabin Fever," begins with what I consider a great line: "here is a certain malady of the mind induced by too much of one thing." You can probably guess where she goes with this, considering the title of the book. However, her treatment of the idea is not at all superficial. The question that comes to my mind is Why didn't this happen to Thoreau or the Dalai Lama, or thousands of others who spent many hours meditating? Also, what do we mean by "one thing." I have hiked the same trail hundreds of times, for instance, and it's never the same trail twice. The river metaphor is strong in Buddhism, and we all know that the river is never the same river from one moment to the next?
The title of this post comes from the first Kate Wolf song I ever heard. It was played on a radio station near Mendocino and was a humorous take on the postings on community bulletin boards back in the day when it seemed that Mendocino and Humboldt counties were swarming with transient folks looking for free things - the same free things - rent-free housing, milk goats, firewood, most anyth8ing that could be bartered for..... Once you've seen these bulletin boards for a while, it's hard to avoid stereotyping the seekers after the "same thing."
The lesson in it for me, because I think I'm incapable of "catching" cabin fever, is that we really live in the place between our ears, no matter where we are geographically. I think it was Checkov who wrote a great story along these lines called "The Bet." If we get bored, perhaps we need to change our outlook [our our inlook], and not blame circumstance. Anyway, I hope the rest of the book lives up to my expectations because "Cabin Fever" starts off playing directly to one of my favorite biases.