habits of thought
“Chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.”
I used to think that quote referred to obvious things: addiction, routines, discipline. Lately I’ve been wondering if it also applies to the way people think.
Especially around decisions.
As someone who’s pretty indecisive, I think it does. The habit of always searching for the best possible option slowly starts disguising itself as thoughtfulness. You convince yourself you’re just being careful or prudent, but over time the pattern quietly reinforces itself.
After a while, every choice starts branching into more possibilities:
- What if the other option was better?
- What if I committed too early?
- What if I just thought about it a little longer?
The constant urge to optimize.
The feeling that there’s always a better option.
The need to keep every path open for a little longer.
Not because the decisions actually matter that much, but because your brain slowly gets used to treating almost everything like an optimization problem.
The strange thing is that the process initially feels intelligent. But at some point, it starts feeling like a labyrinth where every path leads to more hesitation.
Back when I had just started working as a junior engineer, I participated in a hackathon where I built a tool around organizational decision making. The tool surfaced historical decisions so teams could stop reopening conversations that had already been settled.
For the demo, I framed the entire project around Jeff Bezos’ idea of Type 1 and Type 2 decisions: how most decisions are reversible, but people mistakenly treat everything like a high stakes irreversible choice.
I didn’t end up winning the hackathon, but looking back, the project feels strangely personal now. At the time, I thought I was building something around organizational efficiency. In hindsight, I think I was probably trying to reduce the same decision friction I had internalized, disguised as thoughtfulness.
The strange part is that I didn’t consciously know this while building it. That realization came much later.
And I think that’s what makes habits and thought patterns so difficult to notice. Once they’ve existed long enough, they stop feeling like patterns and start feeling like reality itself.
There’s a line in NF’s Mansion:
“Insidious is blind inception.”
The phrase captures something subtle but important about how these patterns form. They don’t arrive dramatically. They build quietly through repetition until eventually they stop feeling like habits and start feeling like personality.
Even the things you build start reflecting them.