A while ago, I was inspired by an episode of Rhett and Link’s Ear Biscuits podcast to take up daily journaling as a healthy and reliable emotional outlet and a way to chronicle the evolution - or lack thereof - of my thoughts over time. This task, like many other similar projects, entailed the intentional cultivation of a habit within me. In other words, it meant creating and nurturing a new identity, namely that of a journaler. Perfect success at this endeavor looks like future me automatically and effortlessly feeling compelled to journal because the practice had become so deeply integrated into my person and reaping the psychological and intellectual rewards.
Around the same time I made this decision, I was listening an audiobook of Atomic Habits, a productivity guide by James Clear, on my afternoon walks and reading Fear and Trembling, Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard’s paradoxical take on of what it means to have faith, before bed in the evenings. (Kierkegaard coined the phrase “leap of faith“ and is widely considered the father of existentialist philosophy.) It did not take long for me to notice some interesting parallels between the two texts. Specifically, Clear’s approach to habit formation requires a kind of pseudo-Kierkegaardian faith.*
People want to cultivate routines and habits because they believe doing so will yield positive benefits in their life. They want to start going to the gym to improve their health and appearance, meditating to decrease their stress levels, falling asleep earlier to boost their energy throughout the day, and so on. Which habit one aims to form at a given point in time is typically determined by a utilitarian value judgment. In moments of self-reflection (most of which occur around New Year’s), one identifies places in his life which could use some improvement, considers the costs and benefits of various habit options, and opts for the one which seems like it will deliver the most bang for the buck.
Most of us have gone through this process, which feels immensely empowering in the planning stages. We relish the unearned sense of accomplishment we get from the simple act of imagining the feats of our perpetually motivated, indefatigable future selves. (It’s unbelievable how hardworking and disciplined we are in the future!) Of course, once we actually have to sacrifice in the present moment things become considerably more difficult. There are many different reasons why we fail to form our desired habits, but here I focus on what is arguably the most sinister and critical obstacle: reason itself.
The same utilitarian calculus which suggested to our past self it was worth it to cultivate the habit informs our present self that to practice the habit right now would not be worth it. Of course, sometimes this is just plain laziness masquerading as reflective judgement. But other times, arguably most of the time, this conclusion is actually correct from an immediate cost-benefit standpoint. Practicing the habit right now would not, in fact, yield benefits capable of outweighing the costs.
I encountered this resistance in my quest to become a journaler. The initial stage of my plan, crafted according to the advice adduced by Clear that frequency matters more than quality for habit formation, was to write a single sentence in my journal each night when I went to bed for two weeks. The first couple nights, I felt intrinsically motivated to do this. No part of me protested jotting down the one sentence. However, on the third night, which followed a very long, tiring day, a critical thought flashed through my head: “Are the costs of forcing yourself to stay awake longer to pull out your journal, cognitively filter through all the sentence possibilities, and legibly write one out on the page sufficiently outweighed by the benefits accrued by this effort to make it worth doing?”
The answer in the moment, of course, was no. Writing one arduous sentence wasn’t going to balance my emotional chakras or provide my future self with material sufficiently representative of my current self to be included in any sort of worthwhile intellectual genealogy. So, what changed?
Time. Time changed. And I don’t mean time alone changed while other factors remained constant, time changed the ingredient elements of the habit building process. Time acted; it rearranged the game pieces. Once the way time influences the process is taken into account, the necessity of having faith - of embracing absurdity - to build a habit will (hopefully) become apparent.
Time alters the habituation process by constricting and expanding the scope of the relevant cost-benefit calculations. Initially, when I was planning out which habit would be best to take up, I thought about the long term. Maybe, I thought, if I practice this habit consistently for a while (a couple months maybe?), then eventually I’ll develop the kind of relationship with journaling where I’ll intrinsically want to journal and hopefully, somewhere along the way, I’ll start to reliably reap the psychological and intellectual rewards. This is all very vague, but it really is impossible to predict with any certainty how long the habituation process will take or when the expected benefits will be realized. We mostly gain these benefits when we successfully become a new person by integrating the habit-identify and there exists no straightforward way to deduce the marginal utility of each additional habit practice on the overall progress of the becoming.
When considering the cost-benefit ratio at this high-level, the costs are fuzzy and difficult to compute. I’m unable to accurately incorporate into the costs factors like the burden of journaling when I’m dying to just go to sleep because I can’t make myself feel that negative feeling on command. This inability leads to an underestimation of the costs and an exaggeration of the alluring benefits in the cost-benefit equation in a manner which tips the scales in the direction of “worth it.” However, when time impresses new evaluations of the costs and benefits upon me in moments like the one I experienced the third night of attempted journaling, the arithmetic transforms and the scales are pushed dramatically in the opposite direction. My attention is focused on the short term because the salience of the costs is high and the benefits seem so distant and disconnected from the immediate costs. These circumstances reveal a paradoxical asymmetry between the two analyses: Until the benefits are consistently produced through successful habituation, the costs will almost always win out in short term analyses and the benefits will dominate the long-term ones.
This time-derived asymmetry reveals the profound effect of human psychology on our decisions within the habit economy. We are emphatically not purely “rational,” disinterested creatures emotionally detached from the various circumstances in which we find ourselves. On the contrary, our economic behavior in the habit sphere is subject to the whims of transient feeling, mood, and situationally determined trade-offs.
The asymmetry also unearths the paradox inherent in the habituation process when the relevant decision-making strategy is based solely on the utilitarian criterion of “worth-it-ness.” Habituation is either worth it or not worth it depending on when you’re asked. The critical question becomes: How does one decide which time-stamped analysis of worth-it-ness is the better one?
In my view, there is no purely utilitarian way to answer this question without recreating the same dilemma at a different conceptual level. You could zoom out and try to determine whether the long-term or short-term analysis is better based on which one is more worth it, but this analysis of analyses falls prey to the time problem all the same because the costs and benefits of this meta-analysis are equally affected by one’s current psychological state as the analyses it compares.
Enter faith. One way this paradox can be reconciled is through what Kierkegaard called the “teleological suspension of the ethical,” a sort of paradigm shift that occurs when one embraces absurdity to overcome a contradiction between what one knows is right/best and what one can ethically justify through reason. In the case of habits, this entails using the standard cost-benefit logic of the long-term analysis to determine which habit would be best to build and subsequently, during the journey of habituation, dropping utilitarian considerations altogether in favor of blind faith. This means continuously practicing the habit with the belief doing so is intrinsically worth it however patently absurd this may seem from a utilitarian standpoint.
In my view, this is the only way one can successfully build habits. He starts out as a reasonable utilitarian concerned first and foremost about the consequences of behavior. He decides one day that going to the effort of building a certain habit would be worth it in order to gain the expected benefits. When the time comes to actually practice the habit, however, he has to convince himself doing so is worth it regardless of the cost-benefit ratio. He has to throw off his utilitarianism and pull on his faith and refuse to let his philosophical inconsistency bother him too much. Only by faithfully practicing the habit day in and day out can he achieve habituation and reap the benefits.
As aforementioned, James Clear convincingly argues frequency of habit practice matters far more than quality in the habituation process. The more often you practice a habit, the more likely it is to become automatic. And the more automatic a habit is, the greater the benefits and the lesser the costs. But all this hinges on whether one can conclude practicing the habit is worth it in the now. The costs and benefits of practicing a habit depend on the emotionally influential circumstances of the current moment and, as such, produce variable outputs about the worth-it-ness of the habit practice. If you are going to reap the rewards of habituation, you must ignore such figures entirely and decide, based on nothing, that practicing the habit is worth it. You must have faith.
*I admittedly do horrible violence to the great theologian’s theory of faith by appropriating it in the way I do here. If he were alive today and somehow came across this post, I have no doubt he would rhetorically obliterate me in his characteristically satirical yet profound way. That said, I do not claim he would agree with my argument. Also, and this is true, Kierkegaard is super dead and he can suck it.