Habit

LISTEN. Today in Happiness our focus is Habit, a chapter in James's Principles of Psychology and an anchor of the happy life.

James wrote Principles better to understand the origin of consciousness, but habit's great gift is its harnessing of the power of unconscious autonomous activity, thus freeing the conscious mind for other pursuits. Turn over as much of life's necessary and repetitive little tasks to unconscious habit as you can, James advises, and watch your mind and spirit soar.

John Kaag says James wanted to be somebody, to make his mark in the world, and that "makes being happy rather difficult." But James was always going to find happiness a challenge, ambitions or no. He knew intuitively that we are, as Aristotle said, the product of our habitual acts. 

So we'd better form good habits and realize that we're both "spinning our own fates" and creating social structures in the process. "Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society," to the huge relief of the "children of fortune" (like James himself) whose privileged status in the social hierarchy depends on conserving the status quo.  This is not a fly-wheel to brag about, if you fancy yourself a progressive egalitarian urging your readers to "be not afraid of life" and relish risk for the sake of its potential rewards.

James complained in 1884, as we teachers always do, that teaching "devoured" his time. Well, workers of the world in every occupation might remind us that that's what the working life does. Why should teachers be exempt? We actually have more flexibility than most, should we wish to form new and better habits of personal time management. 

I do think our four-course-per-semester load is at least one course over the line, at a school that purports to honor and expect research and publication as much as excellence in the classroom. But we who have steady and tenured employment might want to recall how exploited and undervalued many of us once were back in the days of adjunct, piecemeal employment.

"Do every day or two something for no other reason that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test.” That was once my rationale for rising at 5 a.m. Lately I wait for the first flicker of dawn, which these days (after the clocks fell back) is closer to 6. My biggest aversive daily effort now is probably my commute. Meetings, thankfully, are not a daily occurrence.

James’s most useful and damning observations:

There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding, or regretting, of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all. If there be such daily duties not yet ingrained in any one of my readers, let him begin this very hour to set the matter right.

There is no more contemptible type of human character than that of the nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer, who spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibility and emotion, but who never does a manly concrete deed. Rousseau, inflaming all the mothers of France, by his eloquence, to follow Nature and nurse their babies themselves, while he sends his own children to the foundling hospital, is the classical example of what I mean.

Happiness does not coexist well with misery and contempt. If either shoe fits, do “set the matter right.” Don’t forget: “Any sequence of mental action which has been frequently repeated tends to perpetuate itself.” We really are what we habitually do.