Old Habits Die Hard

The longer you do something, the harder it is to stop doing it.  Routine and habits become engrained.  Breaking that down can be very hard not just because of willpower, but because of the lack of imagination when it comes to thinking of what to do instead.  If you've ever played a game, discovered a new TV show, or a book, and got obsessed with it, to the point where it becomes the only thing you do for some time, then you have likely experienced that moment when it comes to an end and you step away from it and think "what did I do before this?" and felt confusion.

This happens to me quite a bit, for the simple reason when I discover something new I tend to dive right in and try to find out anything and everything I can about it.  I watch every episode, back to back if I can or as often as I can until I get to the end.  I spend hours playing a game, or I read a book page after page, chapter after chapter, telling myself "One more chapter then I'll stop" until I am either too tired to keep reading or I make it to the end.

When that obsession breaks however and you have to actually think what else you can do now that you don't have that fixation taking up so much of your time, the first place I usually end up going to is the comfort of my old habits.  I listen to old podcasts, or to certain online radio stations mainly Electronic Dance Music [EDM], or I watch other TV shows or Movies that I've seen a thousand times before.

In an ideal world, you wouldn't return to such comfort, instead you would continue to experience things that are new.  The main obstacle to that as I have mentioned before is the issue of content discovery and how it can actually be very difficult.  Having a world of choice doesn't always make it easy to choose, in fact too many choices can make it a lot hard to choose at all.  When one experience comes to an end, we would ideally like to continue the discovery of new things, for example when one book comes to an end then you would want another either by the same author, or in the same genre, but with enough variation that it doesn't become monotonous.

Breaking old habits can be difficult.  Even when we want to do so consciously, the reason those habits took hold and became so prevalent in our lives is often the fact that they are the path of least resistance, i.e. they are the easiest choices to make or the default or fall-back choices that we can make.  Perhaps then the best way to tackle this would be to create a list when you are in the mindset to make decisions, save it, and refer to it in the future when you are in the mindset where it is difficult to choose.  You could argue this is the reason people create bucket lists, because they don't know in the moment what they want to achieve in life, so they make a list over time and refer to it when they can't think what to do.