The chains of habit

 “The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they’re too heavy to be broken.”

              -Warren Buffett

The punchy aphorism most memorably used by Warren Buffett in recent years is often attributed to Samuel Johnson. The pithy expression does not appear to be directly from the pen of the great Johnson, but rather it likely finds its origin in the ideas developed in Johnson’s allegory “The Vision of Theodore.”

In the story, the allegorical figure Habit chains unsuspecting people. The Quote Investigator includes a passage from Johnson’s fable that reads:

It was the peculiar artifice of Habit not to suffer her power to be felt at first. Those whom she led, she had the address of appearing only to attend, but was continually doubling her chains upon her companions; which were so slender in themselves, and so silently fastened, that while the attention was engaged by other objects, they were not easily perceived. Each link grew tighter as it had been longer worn, and when, by continual additions, they became so heavy as to be felt, they were very frequently too strong to be broken.

Clearly, though Johnson may not have come up with expression favored by Buffett, his evocative image of Habit chaining people too ignorant to recognize their bondage until they cannot escape.

There is a strange quirk in human nature that the young tend to view themselves as invincible, eyeing a middle-aged caffeine and tobacco addict with pity, assuming such vices will not entrap them. Yet, without knowing the individual, accumulating choices that separate the young purist from the world-weary user, the young cannot avoid the vices of the old.

Temperance and purity is a tempting means of seeming to side-step the question entirely, but human society is so enmeshed with other people’s habits and ways of living that such uncompromising methods rarely breed success. How, then, can we live in the world and not become trapped by habits we don’t want?

One approach is to consider in every vicious habit not what is there but rather what is not. After all, evil is a privation, a good lacking some ordering principle or necessary component. Oftentimes, a form of vice is a substitute for human communion, rational activity, or eternal principle. It would be naïve to think that we can simply vanquish poor habits with good intentions, but we can go a long way to establishing good habits in children by drowning bad habits in a “sea of good.” With attention to the rhythms of the day with buttresses of cleanliness, order, and meaning built through positive habits, the wiles of allegorical Habit hold so much less sway.

Good habits, ultimately, can be called good because they reach toward the priority and find their source in it. All human activity that strives for order in chaos, truth in unknowing, and peace in uncertainty aims in the same direction. There is, undoubtedly, a hierarchy of all possible habits, but we can confidently assign value judgements to them. Thus, habits can be chains that hold us back or steps on the path ever onward and upward. For the child raised in good habits, the inevitable storms of life will be more easily weathered with habitual patterns of behavior that orient.

The quotidian signposts of daily life indicated by our daily habits is one of the most compelling reasons some mothers choose to spend their days with their children. Ways of being are transmitted not by whiteboard diagrams and analytical discussion but by daily observation and practice. Children, those maddeningly persistent imitators, observe everything the adults around them do. A mother’s role, then, has been accurately described as living “the ordinary everydayness of just being there.” Teaching habits cannot be accomplished by proxy or by theory but is carried out by living.

Buffett’s expression of the ideas so well illustrated by Johnson captures the insidious nature of habits that control so much of our life whether or not we recognize them. Attempting to stamp out vice or avoid it through a kind of abstinence seems unlikely to break those heavy links forged so secretly in plain view. Rather, fostering the habituation of order, honesty, and realism can act as a prophylactic against poor habits. To discourage vice, enhance virtue.

A mother, the emotional mediator and source of a young child, is uniquely positioned to transmit habits, simply by sharing her life.