Eating your meals on time.
Getting regular exercise.
Devoting time to and for yourself to study for an hour every day.
Washing your plate after a meal.
Disposing wrappers into waste bins and not contaminating a street you are on.
All of the above are habits.
Consuming alcohol daily.
Needing that smoke every morning in the washroom.
Using public washroom facilities and leaving a mess for whoever uses the facility after you to clean up.
Never finishing your work deadlines, and ready to bust out of office at sharp 5 p.m. each evening no matter what.
The inherent desire to party every weekend, bust a lot of money with a clique of peers who are loud, rude, and violent, and like to vandalise. A bunch that drive while drunk and start fights wherever possible.
All of the above are also habits.
So what are habits?
Habits are routine behaviour that are cyclical and repetitive in regular frequency, often happening as part of a natural process, but occurring subconsciously.
Among the myriad psychological definitions of a habit, the following is popular: context behaviour associations in memory that develop in patterns via repetition. It’s a form of habitual behaviour cued directly by context and doesn’t require conscious intentions and supporting goals.
Wow.
That’s a mouthful, isn’t it?
Let’s narrow it down further.
In a nutshell, any regularly repeated behaviour that requires little or no thought, is learned and not innate is a habit.
Habits involve routines, reinforcement and repetition.
Habits are ingrained into our being, a quintessential part and parcel of our daily lives. Habits can be the source to our stimuli, the things that anchor us in life, the behavioural attributes we permeate across our formative and more advanced functions. Habits govern us. Habits motivate and inspire. Habits can work as positive and negative triggers in our lives.
The good habit
Habits are those routines we develop throughout our lives, in certain epochs that inform the rest of our behaviour, thoughts, processes and patterns.
“You have power over your mind – not outside events. Realise this, and you will find strength.”
– Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
So what then are good habits and bad habits? How do we differentiate between them?
Are good habits those patterns and routines we build inherently that we self consciously hone and develop to enhance our knowledge, skills and talents in order to conceive meaningful experiences? Those behaviour traits that contribute to our well-being and lifestyle, our mental and physical betterment, our lives and livelihoods?
Are good habits those repeated and reinforced routines and formulas that push us to become better? To reach beyond our comfort zones. To challenge ourselves and grow?
Yes. I would imagine so.
Easier done, easier said
I don’t like the word “hack”. This term “life hack” perturbs me to no end. Because a hack constitutes a shortcut or an easy substitute to achieve a directive or goal by means of cutting corners. It’s an inimitable crash-course of quick temporary solutions that can resolve problems much faster and conveniently.
Okay.
Let me give the coined phrase the benefit of the doubt.
In today’s context, “life hacks” are ideally techniques and strategies that are adopted by embedding and emboldening beneficial habits to better manage one’s time, duties, responsibilities and daily activities more efficiently and effectively.
“Life hacks” are useful tips and clever techniques for achieving certain goals or accomplishing certain tasks.
It’s a faster approach to tackling a predicament. It’s efficient methods and tactics to reach an end goal without wasting valuable resources; time, energy and money on something needlessly.
The ideal behind it makes sense. The idea behind it naturally has appeal.
Why take a year to achieve what you can in a few months?
Why would you let your frustrations grow, your dissatisfaction, self denigration and resentment manifest when you can find a quick fix in a shorter span of time, and fulfil your task at hand taking a much quicker route?
To hack or not to hack
Isn’t a life hack akin to taking a shortcut with less traffic via a PickMe and Uber, as opposed to taking the long traffic-laden road constantly travelled, which will take you longer to reach your destination?
The truth isn’t that simple. The reality isn’t always that simple either.
There are disciplines in life where you can’t just take short cuts. Take for example the difference between an educated person and a person who has education to show but no knowledge to boot. There are people of money and influence who obtain doctorates and degrees, who carry the letters in their name but lack the knowledge, theory, practical acuity and experience to strategise and articulate a structured and organised plan to solve a crisis.
Take some MPs in third world countries as an example. They cannot offer a substantial and meticulous solution to resolve an economic crisis because they lack the aptitude, ability, capabilities, and competencies to tackle such a dilemma. Sure, they might well be crafty, insidious businessmen and women, but they are not qualified to resolve a national debt crisis or economic emergency. They’ve risen to positions of power using life hacks and bad habits that, when push meets shove, finds many of them lost at sea.
Instead they utilise life hacks. Such people might have the money and resources to set up a high-quality modern studio facility, quickly learn to use a recording software, develop ill habits in just splicing music, copy-pasting, and depending way too much on autotune to digitally fix audio issues, that such individuals would finally not be able to hold their own, or carry themselves with proficiency in a live setting with confidence, competence and prowess. These are the people who rely on so much backing tracks and lip syncing, it’s an embarrassment to artistry.
You see, taking shortcuts and cutting corners in life to finalise and reach a swift solution isn’t always a good thing.
Take the volume of people at gyms. Some who blindly follow the advice of a fitness industry with a penchant for conditioning and programming people with hacks often promulgate bad habits, getting people hooked on supplements and anabolics to reach faster gains in muscle hypertrophy, or give dietary programmes that don’t offer any real short or long-term benefits.
Those trainers focusing on quick promised results don’t bring into consideration that every person’s body and metabolism is different, and that we all respond to stimulus, recovery and growth in varying degrees because of age, weight, habits, lifestyle choices, medical history, athletic proficiency, meal plans, rest and recovery periods etc. – there are so many factors to consider before loading everyone with the same workout routine and plan to garner quick weight loss and muscle development.
Often, people who try to balance their professional, personal, and social lives with their wellbeing don’t research the science and data behind working out. Gyms and social media fitness influencers might fill your heads with baloney, with terms like progressive overload, time under tension, and metabolic stress, but won’t bother taking painstaking time to show someone how to first develop proper form and technique, to avoid injury.
The hack conclusion
Is it not true that we all seek value by means of virtue, hard work, relentless pursuit, finding a balance of combinations of purpose and passion, method and meaning, risk and reason? Don’t we traverse those hard and winding paths of existence by facing challenges, willing to live dangerously by accepting our vulnerabilities without subjugating ourselves to weakness?
Don’t we all, or most of us in some form, shape or manner seek achievement by rising from the proverbial ashes, by confronting our worst fears and anxieties and challenging every debilitating notion of doubt that we can push beyond our limitations?
Meaning, there are some things that we must see all the way through to the end. But that’s not all. We must endure the journey – life’s complex storms and Moore cathartic moments of calm. To do this we need to humble ourselves to be willing to learn from our mistakes, errors, missteps and failures.
To learn we must be prepared to live and live fully. To learn we need to experience the gamut of circumstance and consequence. To ingrain profound habits that are good for us, we must learn with patience, focus and self-consciousness to be prepared to take those long, hard roads that will bend and try and break us before we see the first smiles of dawn after a particularly morose and hopelessly darker night.
“Everything you value is a product of unimaginably lengthy developmental processes, personal, cultural, biological.”
– Jordan Peterson
Don’t confuse life lessons with life hacks. Don’t mistake techniques and strategies to grow and evolve, with swift mechanics to reach an objective.
Life isn’t about shortcuts. It’s about taking those arduous, hard roads less travelled to reach your intended destination, yes, but having learned valuable lessons along the journey.
(The writer is the frontman and lyricist of Stigmata, a creative consultant and brand strategist by profession, a self-published author and poet, thespian, animal rescuer, podcaster, and fitness enthusiast)
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The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of this publication.