Out of habit: We’d be much better off not doing a lot of the things we do without thinking about them

A couple of weeks ago, I quit smoking, 50-odd years after I had my first cigarette.

It wasn’t a sudden health scare which made me give it up.  It was the belated, the very belated, realisation that it was not just a disgusting, antisocial act, but that it had become a habit, and a very bad one at that.

I realised that I didn’t actually enjoy or like smoking, but I did it, without thinking, because I’d got accustomed to it and did it out of dead habit, like a robot.

So when I gave it up, I felt a sense of liberation, like a load that I’d been carrying for long had been lifted off me.  And it wasn’t just that I no longer had to worry if I was running out of cigarettes, or wondering where I could find a place to smoke without people raising objections.

The sense of freedom I felt was that of a slave who’d suddenly been freed from a tyrannical master.

It’s not just smoking.  Most of us get addicted to some habit or the other, often without knowing it.  Like binge watching TV shows, or eating junk food, or drinking sugary colas.

There are others, less obvious, but far more harmful habits that we unconsciously get into which have nothing to do with smoking, eating, drinking or watching too much TV.

They are the mental habits of negative emotions, like anger, and hate, and fear, and envy, which are often interconnected, each feeding and reinforcing the other.

And these bad emotional habits, which only too often translate into aggression and lethal violence, are spreading dangerously fast, far and wide in the country, with tragic results.

These habits of anger, and hate, and fear pit community against community, caste against caste, creed against creed. Out of habit we do things which are harmful to ourselves and to others.  When we find ourselves doing such things out of habit, we need to get out of habit.