Defending the Routine

Everyday life is boring and uneventful: people follow their well-worn paths and make little progress through small and safe steps, avoiding risks and anything that is out of the ordinary for them.   And as dull and boring as it seems, we are creatures of habit – and like being creatures of habit.  We will defend our humdrum lives against the incursion of anything that might change the status quo.

While we seek to minimize risk, we do not seek to eliminate it entirely.  We recognize, at times, there is a need to take unusual risks to make unusual progress.  It is not always acceptable to continue along the path of small and safe steps – but instead to take a calculated risk where there is a chance of loss but the potential to make greater than normal progress.

This is not something that most people seek to do often – an unusual level of risk is not part of daily life, and it is not sustainable.   Take any risk often enough, and the odds of failure will eventually play out: the risk-taker will lose, and if he has staked too much upon the chance, his loss will leave him unable to continue to take chances.   He will be physically, financially, or psychologically crippled and forced to change his habits to return to the mundane, until such time (if ever) he is able to recover the ability to step outside of the safe and the usual again.

And while there is an attraction to risk, our appetite for actually participating in a risky proposition is actually quite small.  We often satisfy our desire for risk indirectly – literature, film, spectator sports, and even history provide the vicarious thrill of seeing someone else take risks, attempting to empathize with the risk-taker rather than stepping into the actual role.  

For most people, most of the time, entertainment and fantasy is the extent to which they will engage in risky action.   For the armchair quarterback, his daily life is not at all affected by whether his favored team won the match – though he finds emotional rewards in witnessing this simulacrum of action.   Even if he has placed a bet on the game, it’s seldom enough that winning or losing will make a difference in his life afterward.

This considered, attempts to modify behavior in a significant way – to cajole an individual into deviating from his usual practice – is a very difficult proposition, and the prospects of success are limited if the consequences of gain or loss are significant.