Alain De Botton On Habit Analysis

Humans are born to have the freedom to decide what they should focus their existence on. Their goals will often created unique experiences around the world while they are working on them. In the essay “On Habit”, Alain de Botton uses his own experience to demonstrate how a mundane world in human's mind can become very interesting. It can be difficult to imagine how to perform this change when humans exist in a society where competitions and stereotypes are present since these competitions and stereotypes often cause humans to neglect the details of the world around them. This negligence of details can cause their experiences to be narrow-minded. To avoid this negligence, humans can change their own attitude, mindset, or consciousness to change

their experiences of the world around them.
The habituation of humans in a place undermines the consciousness and experience of humans.

In de Botton's essay, the London that de Botton sees after returning from Barbados is unimpressive. The London he’s always known, in his eyes, appeared to be a very uninteresting place. De Botton said “I felt despair to be home. I felt there could be few worse place on earth than the one I had been fated to spend my existence in” (59). De Botton’s experience shows how when humans live in a place for a long time, they will get tired of it and think it is boring. On the other hand, when people travel to a new places, they will open their eyes and focus on details they have never noticed before; they will consider everything they see and encounter as interesting. Human often compares their experiences in places familiar to them with places they have never seen before. That is the reason why de Botton says there are probably no places worse than the one he lives in. It is true that people have never seen parts of the world before, and so many new locations would be interesting, but that doesn’t change how humans fall into a habit of taking their hometowns for granted. De Botton describes how human will start to feel bored by their mundane neighborhoods by saying how human “have discovered everything interesting about a neighborhood” (62). This reason for this behavior is actually caused by human narrowing their own perspective the world. De Botton uses the term “grid of interest” to

describe how our consciousness became a habit of focusing “primary goals” (63). The world imposes a grid of interest onto people's consciousness and makes them digress from all the other information around them. This grid of interest will aim people's attention to information that only assists the people in their pursuit of achievement.
The world and human consciousness have no connection at all; human cannot change how the world operates, but human can change the experience they have in the world. When de Botton return home from his trip, he said “when we are in a good mood and it is sunny, it is tempting to impute a connection between what happens inside and outside of us, but the appearance of London on my return was a reminder of the indifference of the world to any of the events unfolding in the lives of its inhabitants” (59). De Botton uses the word indifference to describe how the world has absolutely no connection with human consciousness. Humans lie to themselves thinking there is a connection between what they are thinking and the world, but the reality is that no matter what “events” are happening or how hard humans are working during their lifetime, the universe does not care at all about what the human consciousness are. Human cannot change how the world operates with their consciousness and action, but human can change their experience during their lifetime by changing their own mindset and consciousness. Humans often just focus on their daily routine and falls into the habit of imposing a grid of interest on their perspective of the world; they would not consider the world around them as anything other than a tunnel that leads them to the goal they want to achieve. In de Botton’s essay, he shows how he changes his own consciousness can change his experience of the world when he states “[he] forced [himself] to obey a peculiar kind of mental command: to look around [him] as though [he] had never been in this place before. And slowly, [his] travels began to bear fruit” (63). De botton uses the word “travel” to represent human experiencing a place as if they have never been to the place before. When human have this way of thinking, they will be able to digress away from their daily goals that keeps them from focusing all the details around them. As a result, de Botton succeeds in forcing this change in his mindset because he said his travel “bear fruit”. This shows how human can also perform this change to have the similar experience and feeling that de Botton was able to encounter.
Even when humans are able to change their own consciousness to view the world differently, only a few people do so because it is difficult to eliminate the bias and stereotypes that exist in this society.

These bias and stereotypes exists because one’s consciousness can impact another. De Botton states that human “temper [their] curiosity to fit in with the expectation of others” (64). The expectation that de Botton describes will be the bias and stereotypes that people creates. These expectation can be as small as simple dislike of something or an opinion of something. People will then start to be impact by other people’s expectation and unconsciously put their consciousness into those expectation. These phenomenon only exists when there are more than one person present in a space. Therefore, De Botton propose this solution of “traveling alone” to prevent from being influenced by other’s consciousness and beliefs. However, since most human don’t live their lives individually, getting away alone and putting the bias behind is a very difficult task. In fact, even if the people are by themselves, it is difficult to change their consciousness. When de Botton tries to change his consciousness to view the world differently, he said “[he] tried to reverse the process of habituation, to disassociate my surroundings from the uses I had found for them until then” (63). Habituation is the form adaptation when humans start to decrease response to the the objects they see after several

repeat encounters. During the process of habituation, human will neglect the details of the objects they encounter except for the objects’ functions because anything other than the functions have no meaning to the goals that humans try to achieve. Conversely, to reverse the process of habituation, humans have to force themselves to increase the level of response to the objects around them and focuses other details that they neglect. This behavior can be analogized as a person biking the same as or opposite direction from the wind. Biking with the wind is always easier than biking against the wind. Similar to the process of habituation, it is much easier to fall into a habit than to getting rid of the habit. It is not because human have no ability to do so, it is just this task requires high amount of concentration and determination for human to achieve.
As the society shaped and set our perspective towards the world, changing our attitude, mindset and consciousness will allow human to change their experiences and expectations around the world. Although that might seem to be a troublesome effort and only a few people are willing to do it, trying to look at places that one always encounter in a different will allow he or she to appreciate details that he or she never pay attention to. Having these new experiences can be interesting as human often falls into a habit of seeing everything as ordinary and mundane. These experiences can open people's eyes and allow them to improve their knowledge about the world.