Thursday, September 01, 2011

Antonia Macaro and Julian Baggini - Do our habits form us?


The Shrink (Antonia Macaro) and The Sage (Julian Baggini) discuss habits and their impact on who we are as human beings - from their regular column in the Financial Times Magazine.

Do our habits form us?

By training ourselves to replace tired old habits, we can reshape our character a little

The Shrink
Some people pour themselves a glass of wine every day when they come home from work; others always go on holiday to the same hotel in the same place at the same time of year. I even know someone who has pasta with pesto for dinner almost every night.

Habits can be useful and comforting – they create familiar textures that make us feel in control – but they can also turn into a straitjacket that restricts us and leaves little room for development and spontaneity.

Yet we can be far too quick to judge habits as wholly negative features of our life that we need to let go of in order to release the free spirit within us.
There's more . . . but here is the beginning of the The Sages section.
The Sage
It has become a self-help saw that one way to achieve an ambition is to act as though you had already done so: to become a winner, act like a winner. Perhaps the most striking example of the flaws in this thinking comes not from a life coach but a great Christian philosopher, Blaise Pascal.

Pascal reasoned that without knowing whether God existed or not, it was a better bet to believe that he did than that he didn’t. Believers had comfort in this life and a better chance of getting into any next one, while non-believers would have to live without any hope and no entry ticket through heaven’s gate, should it turn out to exist after all.

The logic of this is dubious, but even if it holds, how can you get yourself to believe in God if you don’t have good reasons to think he exists, merely that it would be good for you if you did believe?

Read the whole article.

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