Why do you continue to do something when you are convinced that it is no longer worthwhile?<\/p>\n
Every now and again – perhaps more often than we might care to admit – we develop – well lets call them habits – that persist long after the justification for them has lapsed or, even worse, the habit has become damaging in one way or another.\u00a0 I’m not talking here about anything that is necessarily pernicious or threatening or even “wrong” – simply no longer worthwhile.<\/p>\n
Clearly both good and bad habits have a tendency to persist – that is why they have become habitual after all.\u00a0 One must assume that the habit developed in the first place because there was some perceived benefit involved.\u00a0 We are much more likely to evaluate the benefit (or cost) of something when we are considering whether to ‘commence’ it rather than when we ‘ought’ to be considering stopping it.\u00a0 So we do have an inbuilt tendency to collect habits – reluctant to let them go and replace them with something more worthwhile (or even more achievable).<\/p>\n
We will in many cases avoid re-evaluating the worth or value of the habit.\u00a0 In those cases there is really no surprise in the persistence of the habit.\u00a0 However, there are other cases where the ‘uselessness’ of the habit has been made abundantly clear – and yet the habit is neither abandoned nor even lessened.<\/p>\n
Perhaps the reason that we still persist in such circumstances is that we are unconvinced by our own re-evaluation of the ‘worth’ of the habit.\u00a0 There is plenty of evidence that casts a light into the ‘thinking’ (or perhaps lack of thinking would be better – but not always) that causes this sort of behaviour.\u00a0 These cognitive biases shape our actions much more than we think – even when we are aware of the dangers.<\/p>\n
Thinking about one ‘habit’ that I possibly feed more than I should… It was a good habit that had developed over a number of years.\u00a0 It required a specific behaviour pattern that was – more often than not – rewarded.\u00a0 This – obviously – created an expectation of the reward and – sure enough – the rewards continued to come – and so the worth of the behaviour was reinforced.\u00a0 I should stress that this particular habit was neither harmful, nor dangerous, nor worrying, nor even costly.<\/p>\n
Recently the reward has only come very occasionally – often with a long period of no reward in between.\u00a0 In considering the reasons for that I can understand why the pattern of reward has changed and I can be reasonably sure that – although it may become frequent again in the future – the current likelihood of the reward is close to zero.\u00a0 So – I\u00a0KNOW<\/strong>\u00a0that it is\u00a0VERY<\/strong>\u00a0unlikely that my habitual behaviour will result in the desired outcome – and yet I persist in carrying it out.<\/p>\n Perhaps worse is that the ‘confirmation’ of the anticipated lack of a reward does cause me a certain amount of sorrow\/emotional pain\/angst.\u00a0 For that reason you could (rightly) point out that perpetuating the habit is actually “punishing” me (albeit mildly) – so\u00a0WHY<\/strong>?<\/p>\n Rationally there is no real justification.\u00a0 Indeed since the reward will actually arrive (eventually) even if I do not carry out the behaviour it is pretty clear that my actions are both irrational and unnecessary.\u00a0 I guess that there are probably good explanations for this, but an explanation doesn’t really help.\u00a0 I have already come to the conclusion that my behaviour pattern is wrong here so providing further evidence is neither helpful nor necessary.<\/p>\n So, this post is more question than answer – there is a mystery to be solved – and at the moment there is no conclusion….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Why do you continue to do something when you are convinced that it is no longer worthwhile? Every now and again – perhaps more often than we might care to admit – we develop – well lets call them habits – that persist long after the justification for them has lapsed or, even worse, the … Continue reading “A Pointless Habit”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[122],"tags":[79,103,119],"class_list":["post-407","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ignorance","tag-cognition","tag-philosophical","tag-worldview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/407","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=407"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/407\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":409,"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/407\/revisions\/409"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=407"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=407"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=407"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}