Why I'm not a habits person

I’ll confess up front: I’m not a habits person. I find it enormously hard to jump from one equilibrium valley to the next. When I manage it, something fundamental has shifted along the way. I’m not the same person anymore.

I’ve been wary of the habits literature for years because of that. Many of its techniques are valid within their context, but the underlying model strikes me as wrong. It treats the habit as a part that gets installed into any machine, when each machine has a topography that decides which parts fit and which don’t.

I’ll try to explain it in physical language, because that’s the language I think most clearly in for this kind of thing.

The landscape of equilibria

Imagine your current life as a ball in a valley. The ball is your state: what you do during the day, where you put your energy, who you spend time with, what consumes your attention. The valley is stable because any small perturbation returns to the bottom. If you eat worse one day, tomorrow you’ll be back to more or less the same. If you have a chaotic week, in two weeks you’ll be back on your baseline rhythm.

Around that valley there are crests. Beyond the crests, other valleys: other stable states of the same person in a different configuration. To reach one of those other valleys you have to clear the crest. And this is where almost everyone gets it wrong: the books give instructions to push the ball uphill. The instructions work while you push. When you stop, the ball comes back to the valley. A kind of thermodynamic gravity.

The underlying error is to assume the landscape is flat and the valleys are wherever you want them to be. They aren’t. They’re where the topography of the self + environment system puts them. Some valleys you’d like to reach simply don’t exist in your current configuration. For them to exist, the topography has to change. And that requires something a lot more serious than willpower.

Cataclysm or current

There are two known ways to change the topography.

One is the cataclysm. An event large enough to reconfigure the whole system: leaving a job, ending a relationship, moving country, going through an illness, losing someone. Something that remakes the landscape because it changes the components of the environment in one blow. After the cataclysm, valleys that didn’t exist before appear, and valleys that seemed immovable disappear. The ball rolls on its own to a new place.

The other way is more subtle. It’s waiting for the current to shift and letting yourself be carried to the new valley. Instead of pushing the ball uphill, you slowly reshape the topography until the ball rolls on its own to where you want it to be. You don’t row against the current; you row with it, until the current leaves you in a different river.

Sometimes you don’t even need to row. Just drift until the right current finds you.

Motivation as GPS

A useful inversion I’ve made over the years is to think of motivation less as fuel and more as GPS. It tells you where, it doesn’t push you.

When motivation is persistent and comes back even if you ignore it, it’s pointing to a stable valley that does exist in your landscape and that you haven’t reached yet. When it evaporates the moment you get distracted, it was probably pointing to a crest — a place you could pass through but not settle in.

The operational consequence is uncomfortable: if your motivation is genuine, you’re going to end up moving toward that valley, with techniques or without them. And if it isn’t genuine, no technique is going to keep you there.

Resonance

There’s a physical phenomenon that captures fairly well what happens when you find the right valley: resonance. When a system tunes into a frequency that was already latent in it, the amplitude grows on its own. No need to inject more energy. Finding the frequency is enough.

I’ve been working on Metha since 2018. The intensity I’ve worked with on it has gone up and down throughout these years. There have been seasons where my productivity was too much and the system threw itself out of balance. There have been seasons where I barely moved anything. And there have been seasons where productivity was explosive without forcing anything, where I’d solve in a week things that in another period would have taken months.

When I look back, my willpower doesn’t seem to have had much to do with the difference between those seasons. What correlates with the explosive ones is having been tuned into something: the environment, my own state, a piece of the puzzle that clicked. Resonance.

The only thing that has remained constant is that I haven’t been able to leave the project. I see it as life work. Even if Metha fails, I couldn’t stop looking for ways to fundamentally improve the speed of scientific discovery, especially in health, which is the most important thing for everyone — selfishly for me, but also for those I love and for those I don’t. Calling it discipline would be pretentious. It’s simpler than that: it’s a valley the ball fell into a long time ago, and from there it hasn’t been hard to stay.

When people look at those who have transformed the world in some concrete way and ask where they got the strength from, they’re measuring in the wrong unit. They’d entered resonance with a valley that existed in their system, and from there energy comes out by itself. Willpower is just what gets seen from outside.

The topography is not neutral

There’s one last piece, more uncomfortable. The topography of the self + environment system doesn’t form itself. It’s increasingly designed.

The world we’re heading toward, the one that can already be discerned and is very Huxley-flavoured, is trying to collapse the landscape to a single valley. The aim of the design seems to be to reshape the topography so we can’t get out of the box and find our own current, because that current is where the projects emerge that can challenge the established power.

I don’t think they’re going to manage to contain the flow. They’re only going to make it narrower. And the pressure of the people who do find the way through will be more uncontainable. But at the same time, being one of those people will get harder. The dam will generate enormous stability inside which one can simply drift, and recognising the exit from within that stability will become increasingly rare.

Here I’ll concede something to the habits books. In a world whose topography is being designed to keep you in a single valley, you have to do something active: vibrate, touch the edges, perturb. Not to row against the current — that remains exhausting and almost always useless — but to keep testing the waters. Understand the cage. Know the shape of the valley you’re in before you can recognise the crest leading to a different place.

Closing

This is the only thing that has worked for me, looking back: accepting that I’m not a habits person in the usual sense, and putting my energy into perturbing the landscape until the valleys my system can actually hold start to appear.

Understand the cage. Find the current. And then, rowing comes for free.