Habits Are Not Something You Run by Will — The Order of Facing Toward, Not Cutting Off

Introduction: You Gather Methods, and Still It Does Not Last

Ways to build habits are there for the taking. Start small. Discipline yourself with systems. Keep temptation at a distance. Keep a record. Each looks reasonable enough.

Still it does not last. Each time it does not, the memory that you are a person who cannot keep things up piles up. And you go looking for the next method. This searching itself has become, before you know it, endless work.

Techniques of habit-building have been told at length. What this article places is the question one step before them: why, however many methods distributed from outside you gather, you never arrive at a lasting state.

Let me give the conclusion first. It is not that methods fall short. As long as you design a habit as the work of damming, and it is not you who produces the desire upstream, the work has no end.

Desire Has Two Faces: Production and Consumption

Here I introduce a distinction: desire has two faces.

First, the face of consumption. How to handle a desire already before you. When you are hungry, eat or cut off. When the screen tempts, pick it up or hold back. What we usually call will and self-control is, for the most part, nothing but this consumption face — whether to drench yourself in a given desire or dam it.

What, then, is the face of production? Where did that desire come from in the first place? Why did you feel you wanted it? Suppose a certain coat suddenly becomes desirable; the feeling had no shadow or form until last month. A new advertisement appears, a trend moves. And a thing you thought nothing of yesterday begins to look indispensable. Though it feels welled up from within, the source of that want was outside.

The language of economics lights this distinction sharply: the means of production. The one who owns a field and the one who works that field. Sweating the same amount in the same place, whether you own the means of production or not changes your position entirely. The one who owns none has no choice but to sell his labour to the one who does.

Apply this view to desire and a sharp question arises. Do we hold the means of production of our own desire? Can we make what we want from our own worldview? Or do we merely receive and process desire made outside?

As Long as You Stand on the Damming Side, the Work Never Ends

Within this structure, habit-building technique is made to play a truly strange role — the downstream role of frantically damming desire made outside.

But the upstream factory never stops. Dam as you may, new desire flows down one after another. So this work has no end. As long as the owner of the factory is outside, you remain a subcontractor merely processing the desire that keeps being supplied. However high you pile the dam, as long as production continues upstream, no terminus visits the keeper of the dam.

Here an objection may come: I chose the habit unmistakably by my own will. True, the act of beginning you chose yourself. But look one step before it. Where did the very theme of what to make a habit of come from? Rising early, or exercise, or reading. That list, too, was prepared and supplied from outside from the start. There is freedom to choose, but what to regard as the task is already decided outside. The very range of freedom is fenced in from the outside.

If so, the road out does not lie on the consumption face. However skilfully you fiddle with the tap, the water source is someone else’s. There is one road out. To move your own standing position to the producing side of desire.

Not Cutting Off, but Facing Toward

What, concretely, is the experience of standing on the producing side?

It is a quieter event than expected. From some point, the very act of bracing to cut something off becomes a matter of indifference. You did not sever it by force of will. Before you notice, you are no longer bound.

The trigger was the taking root of a certain conviction. Set your goal fittingly. And nurture, within yourself, the sense that you can accomplish it. Get that far and you need not strain to move yourself by force. Once the direction you face is clearly set, daily behaviour comes into order of its own accord. The overseer who watches you ceaselessly is no longer needed.

Once this sense takes root, the work of damming loses its meaning. If where you face is clear, what does not draw near it recedes without your having to cut it off. Not cutting off, but facing toward. On that alone, how the world looks changes.

This experience can be translated into the language of psychology. First, goal-setting theory: people bring out far more power when they hold a clear goal than when they work vaguely — this many studies have consistently shown [Locke & Latham, 2002]. Next, the concept of self-efficacy: the sense of the prospect I can do this [Bandura, 1977]. The higher this sense, the more tenaciously a person faces difficulty. And autonomy, in the sense of self-determination theory: that the goal is not imposed from outside but chosen by yourself [Deci & Ryan, 1985].

When these three come together, a person begins to move naturally, without driving themselves. This is no groundless mind-over-matter. That people with clear goals bring out power, and that the sense I can produces tenacity, long years of research have borne out.

Above all, what matters is the order. Many people first try to control behaviour. But what should come first is not behaviour. It is what you want. Once this one point is set, behaviour follows after, needing almost none of the work of damming.

Step Off, Once, the Menu Distributed From Outside

Precisely for this reason, I will not hand you a concrete list of behaviours here. The reason is clear.

If I handed you a list of make these your habits, it would merely add one new external standard. Only the supplier would change; that you are a consumer of a menu distributed from outside would change nothing.

Successful people rise at five. The first-rate discipline themselves this way. The world overflows with such menus. At a glance they look like kind directions. But their true nature is a mechanism that takes over, on your behalf, the crucial judgment of what to want and what to hold back. Each time you receive a menu, you let go, little by little, of the means of production of desire.

So the first step is not to begin something new. It is to step off. Stop hunting around for the right method. Stop looking outside for the next rule to obey. Before moving your hands, stop the hand that receives.

This is an uneasy step. The moment you let go of the menu, the map that seemed underfoot disappears. But that very anxiety is proof that the work you had kept outsourcing has come back to your hands. The work of deciding what to want was never one to leave entirely to someone else.

To avoid misunderstanding, let me add: to step off is not to learn nothing more. Taking hints from the wisdom of predecessors is fine. The problem is swallowing it, as it stands, as a command to yourself. Whether you swallow received wisdom as an unchangeable command or treat it as material for thinking with your own head — that difference divides the consumer from the producer.

Conclusion: The Race Ends When the Standard Returns Inside

Habits do not last not because your will is weak, nor because the method was wrong. As long as you stand on the damming side, since production continues upstream, the work has no end.

The race ends when the standard returns inside. Because the one who decides the distance to run becomes you. You can judge for yourself this far is enough for today. No need to compete with anyone, no need to keep updating a record.

Do not misunderstand: the standard returning inside does not mean the standard grows soft. If anything, the inner standard is at times the tougher. The outer ruler was satisfied by meeting a number, but the inner ruler peers straight into your true feelings, allowing no evasion. The race ends not because the standard vanished but because the holder of the standard moved from outside to yourself.

And the act itself may remain. Once or twice a week, quietly observe your own body and state, and when you feel it is better to do, do so naturally. Do not count the days. Keep no record to show anyone. The same act changes its position from compulsion to choice. To keep on is the calm dialogue with yourself that remains after you step off the position of being made to run. The whole picture of this argument — sovereignty — is gathered in why trying to be stoic drives you further from freedom. Receive the overall blueprint as your next step.

References

Academic papers and theory

• Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. “Building a Practically Useful Theory of Goal Setting and Task Motivation” (2002) American Psychologist, 57(9)
• Bandura, A. “Self-Efficacy: Toward a Unifying Theory of Behavioral Change” (1977) Psychological Review, 84(2)
• Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior (1985) Plenum Press
• Uno, K. Principles of Political Economy (1964) Iwanami Shoten