Bad Habits
On the topic of breaking bad habits there are lately many useful books (just finished skimming the now trending Atomic Habits). The gist of all of their wise advice bears down to the following: rather than going full out against the old bad habit--the tactics that is unlikely to succeed since habits are nasty, notoriously persistent creatures--adopt a stealthier, more subtle method. Gingerly start by replacing the old bad habit with a new, more desirable one: fill up the slots of the old habit with its crisp new counterpart, repeat until the old habit goes senile and forgets and the new habit steadily sneaks in (66 days of faithful repetition, my scientific literature propones). Rinse and repeat. Then repeat again, and voila, before you know it, you are tethered to a brand new habit.
I had a bad habit of eating too often, too much. It dawned on me one day that I could replace some of my frequent eating with some of infrequent cigarette smoking, which appeared to me desirable because, firstly, I did not care for cigarettes, secondly, they had zero calories, and thirdly, they would most certainly block my ever bellowing appetite. I was right, they did. I started replacing several slots of eating (my first and third breakfast slot, my second lunch and third dinner slot) with several slots of smoking. Then I replaced some more. Repetition times many times and in no time at all, I was smoking quite a bit.
But then I noticed smoking was turning into a bad habit, and wanting to break out of this badness, I decided to replace the smoking with the drinking of whisky here and there. Mostly, here, at home. I had never drunk before, and I hated whisky, which made whiskey a splendidly innocuous habit candidate. I had good results. The whiskey had replaced some of the smoking, which, in turn, had blocked some of the eating. It was good, life was good, I chuckled to myself smokely, subversively, a little tipsily, atomically (though less so anatomically) more thinly, certainly in full satiety.
Then one morning I woke up, a little hung over, and realized I was now stuck with three bad habits rather than just one. To stop this pernicious process of bad habit proliferation, I decided to unfollow the advice of experts and go in reverse. I started unwhiskying myself from drinking with cigarettes, and -- once the state of satisfactory whiskeylessness was accomplished -- uncigaretting myself from smoking with eating. Over time, I was back to square one with eating only, but I was fine with it -- eating filled one up with desirable nutrients. One had to eat to survive, one had to live to eat, one had to survive to live, and for that, one had to have habits to cling to because survival is habitual and life is a habit -- irreplaceable with anything at all, and a good, desirable one at that.
Friends, I have given some time to contemplating habits and have reached the following molecularly brilliant conclusion: there is no generalized morality of habits just as there is no generalized morality of life. It is all good as long as one’s habits are suited to one’s life, as long as they serve as a non-too-awful crutch to it; it is all good as long as one is alive, as long as one’s habits keep you alive. It’s all good, everything goes, one must be habitually fine.
