“It’s just a bad habit”
A few weeks back, I solicited and received feedback from you on how to improve the newsletter. A friend suggested that I include stories in order to infuse life into these staid textual references. What started with a few thoughts about the meaning of these quotes and how to add a few stories, ended up with a lot of thoughts and questions about the purpose of the newsletter overall.
Originally the newsletter was a way to make sense of and revisit some of the best books that I’ve read over time, but then looking back on what was written and what remains to be done (I have about 24 other newsletters that I’d like to write), I thought about how empty most of these quotes are if their context and importance isn’t made more clear. So here goes: a brief dramatic interlude that will hopefully create a more colorful context for the dozens of newsletters yet to be published.
Why these quotes? Each quote is, for me, a gentle nudge of how I ought to be ameliorating my own life; a reminder of what’s important and what I should be thinking about. I’m guessing that most people, when they read the quotes, can find some meaning for themselves, but for me the relevance of each, and of habits in general, points back to a conversation in the mid-80s that I’ve been trying to make sense of ever since.
My mother was a smoker, occasionally avoiding it for a month or two here or there, but for the majority of her almost 70 years, she smoked. When I was about 7 years old, I asked her why she smoked. Her response: “It’s just a bad habit.” I didn’t question it and just accepted that smoking was outside of her control. But years upon years of the same answer became knotted in my brain in a way that only philosophy, psychology, or therapy could untangle. I took the first route and tried to use philosophy to try to understand how it’s possible that we can be conscious of our behavior and yet not have control over that behavior. How can she smoke, know that smoking is bad, and yet still smoke and enjoy the activity?
I spent my undergrad and master’s studying the history of philosophy, all the way from the upanishads through to contemporary cognitive science, and eventually honed in on Charles S. Peirce’s work on habits and habit formation. The deep metaphysics of Peirce’s work, although fascinating, didn’t provide me with enough traction to understand why we do what we do, why the frustrations that waylay our consciousness can’t be overcome by a simple nudge of the mind towards our better nature. I needed to understand how our conscious desires stand little chance against the goliath of our habitual behavior.
So I started reading pop psychology books like Duhigg’s, Clear’s, and others. These books don’t provide the deep insights that Aristotle, Husserl, Peirce and others provide, but their accessibility was more valuable to me than their depth. Coupled with contemporary research on the neurobiology of habits, I was able to better understand the chemistry that accompanies our conscious states. For example, the feeling of tiredness can be separated out between bodily tiredness and decision fatigue. It gave me the language of neuromodulators to understand our motivation or lack thereof. I struggle a lot with finding the right nutrition and exercise to produce the kind of high-energy days that I aim for, but a better understanding of my habits helps me to become a little more self aware and helps me inch my way towards a better life.
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to make complete sense of the phrase, “it’s just a bad habit,” but with each book I read, each podcast I listen to, I find insights that I think are worth sharing, hence this newsletter. So this is all a long-winded way of saying thank you for the helpful feedback and thank you for helping me reflect on why this is important and how to share that importance with others in a more thoughtful way.
