Habits shape our social interactions

I am not an expert on behavioral science but I would argue that this is worth studying. I believe it’s crucial for everyone to learn how our own lives revolve on layers of habits and as how it connects with our own community or social group. This way, the interactions we make becomes more easier to manage.

Forming a habit is easy to mess up, infact we do it most of the time without thinking of it. The way we speak our native language is an example a habit that we acquire from our family when we were younger and we just absorb sounds from everyone around us.

Our biases are part of our human nature and cannot be easily scrapped out of our decision making process. Fundamentally we think in patterns, recognize information from our senses and compare it from what we already knew - typically past experiences coded in patterns. Bias normally trigger our brain initially, as it is cost effective for us to think in patterns that we normally have a firsthand information, easily engaged on reinforcing what we already knew. This happens crazy fast as our brain is capable of doing 100 to 1000 trillion synapses in a second.

The human brain easily gets distracted with information like the stuff you read from social media or news. Since most of these platforms are designed to cause stress, this event triggers the release of cortisol to the blood stream, immersing our body to the feeling of uneasiness. As a consequence, we get easily attracted to doing the easy stuff and negate this feeling. This becomes a big driver of our habit formation nowadays. My personal take on this is our generation is becoming weaker and weaker as we are left most of the time doing the easy stuff.

Here are some observations:

• I lived in the islands before and observed that it was easy for them to receive money from politicians in exchange of votes during local elections. Since everyone is okay with it, this got instilled to their thinking as “a normal thing to do”. Corruption became accepted as a way of life.

• Another observtion that even medical experts are monitoring in recent time is the fact that more and more people become obese. I’m not a dietician or nutritionist, but my personal studies on ketogenic diet convinced me that carbohydrates is one of the culprit. It is very easy for us to develop the urge to eat a lot sugars and grains because as we increase the glucose in our system, we release energy automatically even if there is no need for it. The funny thing is our ancestors rarely lived on carbohydrates. One reasearch on a human fossil in Morroco showed that they normally ate plenty of gazelle meat, occassional wildebeast and ostrich egg.

• We are so attached to stories around money. Friendships get lost along the way because of money, people change because of money. It is in somewhat logical as money is fundamental to our everyday living. But is it? destroying your own identity just because of money? I find this idea much more deeper.. I came across a video of Dr.Jordan Peterson which deep explains the topic of “relative poverty” as the source of all crimes. He explains that criminals do wrong things because they are “poorer compared to another person” that “other person” maybe your friend, brother or people they follow on Instagram. Most people at present are accustomed to this habit as evidenced by daily conversations about the typical idols - movie artists or sports figures instead of original thinkers like Albert Einstein or Elon Musk. Society follows these people on what they do, wear or buy. Sounds familiar? yes this is how traditional media works, they help us develop a habit to buy or consume stuff..thus fueling the economy.

Even though we feel that our decision is our own, it is not our own..it is rather heavily relying on our emotions… emotions that are driven by necessity.. needs that are intertwined with our environment.. It is a chain reaction of things out of our control.

Starting at an early age, my family problems caused me to think very independently. Coming up with my own decisions, failing and learning became a habit I never thought I was creating. This was a situation I never wanted but became a pre-condition to who I am now - a more grateful and observing person, still make tons of mistakes but learns from them. This is worth discussing in a different blog post.

I want to end this post with a short clip from the book Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman:

A worker is asked: “why did you do it this way?” The answer, because that’s the way we’ve always done things. The answer frustrates every good boss and sets the mouth of every entrepreneur watering. The worker has stopped thinking and mindlessly operating out of habit. The business is ripe for disruption by a competitor, and the worker will probably get fired by any thinking boss. We should apply the same ruthlessness to our own habits. In fact, we are studying philosophy precisely to break ourselves of rote behavior. Find what you do out of rote memory or routine. Ask yourself: Is this really the best way to do it? Know why you do what you do - do it for the right reasons.