The Myth of Choice_ Personal Responsibility in a World of Limits - Kent Greenfield [83]
We should try to be more intentional in creating our routines and in monitoring the ones we have. Habits that “just happen” are as likely to be destructive as constructive, and as likely to be the product of some marketer’s manipulation as of considered thought. It’s probably worth taking stock of our habits and schemas once in a while, to check in with ourselves (or someone we trust) and deliberate about whether our routines of mind and behavior should be adjusted. Once, when I was in high school, my mom was driving me to school as I complained about how I didn’t want to go. She pulled to the side of the road and told me that it was my decision whether I would go to school or not, that she would drive me back home if I wanted. It was a brilliant parenting move. I realized I needed to go to school for this or that, and asked her to drive on. Her stopping the car jarred me out of my habit and forced me to make a fresh choice. Not a bad strategy once in a while.
As we examine our habits, if we find ourselves making habitual mistakes, we should try to make some different mistakes. “Make a new mistake,” my friend Jeff sometimes says. He means that when we get in a rut we should be willing to try something new, even if we are clumsy or inelegant in the attempt. We can also be on the lookout when we create new habits—when we go into new jobs, new schools, new stores, new homes, new relationships—because that’s when we can most easily create good routines and avoid bad ones. Here’s an example: my wife and I just bought a new stove, and I am using the change as the reason to learn how to cook something other than scrambled eggs. I am using the new stove as an opportunity to create a new habit—cooking better and more often.
Writers John Seymour and Joseph O’Connor say that “once a response becomes a habit, you stop learning. Theoretically, you could act differently, but in practice you do not. Habits are extremely useful, they streamline the parts of our lives we do not want to think about . . . But there is an art to deciding what parts of your life you want to turn over to habit, and what parts of your life you want to continue to learn from and have choice about.”7
A fourth way to build our choice making power is to develop an awareness of how culture influences us. This suggestion is, in a sense, a subset of the guideline that we should acknowledge the influence of circumstance and situation, but I think it merits its own discussion. As I discussed earlier in the book, culture is like water to a fish. We live in it and depend on it but aren’t always conscious of its presence. Our political and social culture is the sum of our public habits and routines—it short-circuits deliberation and is very difficult to break.
Just like personal habits, culture can be good or bad, empowering or debilitating. We need not be such cultural skeptics that we question everything all the time. Just as an insistence on constant awareness is a recipe for insanity in our personal lives, constant skepticism and challenge to cultural norms is a recipe for quick ostracism at our next cocktail party or PTA meeting.
But we become better choosers if we learn to recognize how our choices are influenced by cultural and political norms. Once we see where and how the norms operate, we are better able to choose whether to operate within them or outside them. The more we see the influence of societal habits on sex and gender roles, views of race, the