Familiarity breeds indifference — human nature loses interest once someone (or something) is fully known. Robert Greene ties the fix directly to a law from The 48 Laws of Power: use distance and absence to create respect and honor. Applied to seduction, social life, politics, and celebrity persona alike, mystery has to be actively manufactured through calculated absence rather than left to develop on its own.
Constant visibility burns out audience interest in about a year before attention moves to someone newer and less-seen — continuous engagement has diminishing, not compounding, returns. The counter-move is disappearing for weeks at a time so people start talking and wondering, rather than posting constantly. Social media raises the pressure toward constant visibility, but Greene argues the same law still holds. Beyoncé (a multi-year gap before a surprise country-western album) and Michael Jackson (three-to-four-year gaps between albums, in a pre-social-media era) are cited as artists who used absence deliberately to generate anticipation.
No one knows their partner completely — that reserve of undisclosed facts or experiences functions as strategic material to deploy later as a surprise. People take a partner for granted within just a couple of months by default; a surprise resets that complacency, and it doesn't even need to be a positive one — a bad surprise still keeps a partner "on their heels" and thinking about you. Without continued unpredictability, the relationship's energy fizzles.
Calendar Scarcity (Fill Your Calendar) works the same scarcity lever through a different channel — availability of time rather than availability of information/presence.