Ulterior Motives

We (humans) are creatures of routine and habit. No matter what we do to escape one routine we just find ourselves in another one. If you go to the movies and eat popcorn with your right hand, and to break the habit you switch to the left, won’t you then develop a habit for eating popcorn at the movies with your left hand? To break a habit we have to create a new habit. Humans don’t work well without routine, even people that live life with spontaneity. They still develop a routine to their spontaneity. Take Henry David Thoreau at Walden, he left the city because he was tired of all of life’s routines. When he first got to Walden it was new, there was no routine for him. Life was different. Then over time he started to notice the paths he naturally made and he would do things at the same time everyday, everything for him was just becoming new routine in an un-routine way/place. By breaking one routine/habit we just replace it with a new one, be it a good or bad habit. We as humans go crazy without routine, it’s like our brains are naturally wired for it.

The key is how to find bad habits and replace them with good ones. I think they should do a study with smokers, every smoker has a daily routine to their smoking. They wake up and first thing they do is smoke, every time they drink coffee they smoke, they get in the car they smoke. I see it all the times with my friends that are smokers. So if they found ways to replace smoking with something else within the smoker’s routine, then maybe it would help break the habit. What do you think?

Is it a habit if someone returns to the same seat after lunch? How do we know if these people are behaving mindfully or mindlessly?

Some people try to "reserve" their seat and leave personal effects behind. Some people want to sit with their friends. Some people prefer certain locations. Others want to avoid potential conflict by not occupying a seat used previously by another person.