How to Dissolve Cultural Boundaries and Escape Programmed Habits

What led to you reading this article? What experiences and decisions brought you here? Which major events make up your days, weeks, and months? How repetitive is your experience of reality on these different scales?

It’s no secret that many of us live very structured, repetitive lives. This style of habitual activity is built into our culture. We go to work or school, we do what is expected of us, and then we leave. Many of us live according to a schedule. Even if you yourself built that schedule, it leaves you immersed in a bubble of habit, keeping you in line with a generally repetitive day to day experience.

What can be done to pull yourself out of habitual modes of living? In order to escape a repetitive structure, you need to introduce novelty into your day. Novelty is the opposite of habit, it is experiences and occurrences which are new, complex, unknown, and outside the boundaries of ordinary habitual reality. By introducing novelty into your life you are pushing up against the walls of habitual experience. Habitual experience is like being trapped inside a giant rubber-band ball. When you push against the walls of the ball they push back, trying their best to keep you within the already established modes of experience.