“Watch your thoughts, for they will become actions. Watch your actions, for they'll become... habits. Watch your habits for they will forge your character. Watch your character, for it will make your destiny.” Margaret Thatcher
You've just discovered this? Honestly, Aristotle's ethics is all about habits: keeping and nurturing 'good' habits (virtues) and preventing 'bad' ones (vices)...
You are right, I think he is carried away by his experinces. Actually, Book 'The power of Habit' (which I am also reading) is more about how habit forms and how to change/replace any Habit (from bad to good), whether it is Individual, Organization or Society. It is 'how' that is important here.
For Individual part, I am planning to launch an app for addicts so that they could also get benefit from same principles. I believe in that cue, routine, reward cycle. But, For creating app I need to do my own research for individual cases.
I also discovered that forming habits doesn't mean it takes 21 days or 30 days or whatever nice round number people like to trout. To me, by 21 days to 30 days, something I am trying to make a habit is well on its way to becoming a habit.
I managed to add a bunch of habits such as doing math at khanacademy, writing 500 words a day, measuring data points on my body such as blood sugar, weight, steps, sleeping time, pulse rate, and blood pressure.
nice post BUT: i brush my teeth because i want to keep them clean, minus the tingly feelings since my tooth paste doesn't have the chemicals, and according to your technique, you are reducing us to this reward model which actually is detrimental to our psychological progress as human beings, i don't need a cue to depend on when i want to do something, i know what i want to do and i go do it, using your technique you are perpetuating distrust in our own minds and un-confidence in our thinking process by relying on placing cues in our immediate environment to trick us into doing things, i sense a habit of distrust of our abilities coming on and slithering through our psyches, you want to make people feel confident about their decision processes not insecure about relying on external cues, i mean i tend to think we are slightly more advanced than lab rats, but then again that is why advertising is so successfull, because we really do operate on this reward model and most of us don't know what we need or want and think some third party might
I agree the tooth brushing example was detrimental to the point of the post.
You could also say, I put on my underwear after drying off merely out of habit and the underwear cartels make their cottony underwear so smooth merely to provide a pleasant reward for my ass cheeks. But, in fact I put on my underwear for a variety of practical reasons and the smoothness is not really a reward.
The snack break example was more to the point. That's a voluntary thing that becomes routine, but could be skipped with no social repercussions.
I'm not sure "mass" is the appropriate collective term for habits. Perhaps "collection" serves better here.
I'm more than my habits, Aristotle aside. I'm an economist and a programmer and a father. The last causes disruptive change to habits more often than not.
A mass of habits and addictions, so behavioristically pessimistic yet quite true. I think a more useful question would be: what habits should you acquire?
You're especially nothing more than a mass of habits if one of those habits happens to be attempting to render all life nothing more than a mass of habits.
You're actually a big sack of chemicals, mostly water. It's actually remarkable that those chemicals manage to form such complex and remarkable things as habits.
