Have you ever had a spouse who drinks too much? Have you nagged at them, left leaflets that highlight the health issues related to drinking, guarded their shopping trips, tried to appeal to their sense of parenthood by crying about their impact on the children, maybe even poured a bottle or hundred down the drain? If you haven’t, maybe you have a friend or a family member who you’ve watched doing this – or at any rate, seen a couple of movies or read some statistics about alcoholism. In any case, put yourself into the shoes of that spouse, either from experience or through imagination.
Now, substitute the spouse with a sustainability researcher.
Despite all the knowledge about the health issues related to drinking, or data about environmental degradation, there is no change in action. Despite the emotional pleas to think about the children – either in one household or the ones representing the future generations – no change. Despite the restrictions posed by the watchful eye in a shopping mall or the regulations by the political decision makers, nothing changes. Can humans change?
Yes, we can. I am an alcoholic who has not had a drink in 17 years, 6 months and four days. Not because of suddenly getting more information, not because of anyone’s nagging or sudden burst of conscience, not because of a miraculous shift in values, nor because of any restrictions, rules or anyone’s watchfulness. How did it then happen? Is it applicable in the wider context of environmental calamities?
How do we make decisions?
We are used to thinking that changes in actions are preceded by decisions, and decisions are preceded by processing information: first, we learn and then we choose to act differently. However, decades of decision-making research in psychology, neurology, economics, management and organization studies all agree on one thing: this is not the case. (For a popular book sized overview summarizing many of this research, see “Thinking, fast and slow” by Daniel Kahneman. For a more socially constructive perspective, find my favorite academic book, “The social psychology of organizing” by Karl Weick)
First of all, the decisions we actually recognize making represent only a minuscule portion of all the decisions we daily make. Secondly, instead of new knowledge shaping anew what we think, what we already “know” predominantly shapes the new knowledge to fit our preconceptions. And thirdly, in addition to rational thought, our actions are driven by instincts, emotions, routines, assumptions and a multitude of social forces.
To understand decisions, we must first take a look at how our brains function. While they consume as much as 20% of our daily energy consumption, they are the most effective energy saving machines ever to materialize. As they govern everything we do, from autonomous systems to controlled but automated actions and deliberate reflections, they have needed to evolve into something very efficient – otherwise the discrepancy between the physical size of them and their energy need would have seriously hindered the survival of our species.
Deliberate thinking consumes most energy (yes, you can lose weight by playing chess!), so our brains have developed a number of ways that limit the amount of actual witting thinking they need to do. Depending on research, we make a staggering 10 000 – 30 000 decisions a day, of which we maybe recognize a few hundred, maybe a few thousand. We don’t need to think which foot to put forward when we walk, or how to align the fork so that it finds the mouth. As automation is so effective in saving cognitive energy, we have developed the superpower of routinizing as much of our daily decisions as possible: when you’re in a grocery store after a normal workday, stressed out by the need to feed the kids, do you really consider each item you buy, or does your shopping bag end up containing mostly the very same stuff it always contains?
Our ability to routinize non-essential things is a genuine superpower: the more we can achieve without thinking, the more energy we have left to ponder what actually requires deliberate thought. There’s a story about Steve Jobs: his wardrobe held only jeans and black shirts so that he would not need to waste any cognitive energy in deciding what to wear any given day. Regardless of the veracity of the story, it highlights well the fact that all that the humanity has been able to innovate was built on our ability to not waste energy in deliberately choosing each and every element of the repeating actions that carry us through a normal day.
These shortcuts are called heuristics, and they can lead to decision-making biases. The internet is full of definitions and lists (for example the cognitive bias codex) of them, often highlighted as problematic, something to rid ourselves of. However, it is like Alfred Whitehead famously pointed out:
“It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking about what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.”
So, while we should pay attention and try to avoid at least the most recognizable biases in our decision-making, the very mechanism responsible for them is ultimately the enabler of any higher achievements we humans have ever made. Therefore, instead of trying to swim against the tide and trying to increase the percentage of reflective decision-making we do, we should pay more attention to the quality of routines underpinning our every day.
“It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking about what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.” – Alfred Whitehead
The mechanism of routinization
There are various mechanisms through which our routines solidify, the main component however being repetition. Anyone who has ever practiced an instrument or a specific sport knows that the only way to become fluent, is to continue doing the same thing until it becomes automated. The repetition of an action creates patterns in our brains, which strengthen the more they are used. The existing patterns in our brains are also essential to any new learning, as we can only learn such things that fit something that already exists in our brains – new information can only latch on to something that already has made an imprint in our brains.
This mechanism accounts not only for beneficial learning, but also for heuristics and biases: the new information cannot change the brain patterns but is instead changed into a pattern that our brains recognize. Sometimes we have thus deepened our knowledge, but sometimes we have merely changed the information to fit our pre-existing mental models. Without a relevant mental model, a pattern, a constellation of neurons and synapses, no new knowledge can find a place to attach to in our brains. We can never learn anything completely alien to us, instead, we learn through assimilation and association, which require something to which a novel thing can be associated or assimilated.
The pre-existing patterns are sticky. If your normal after work routine consists of making a sandwich, sitting down on the couch and watching an episode from Netflix, it takes a heroic effort to persist in changing that routine into an evening jog. However, if you are more persistent than the mighty existing patterns, after a few months of struggling you find that the idea of couch-surfing feels foreign – at least until you catch a flu, fall back into the old routine and find it comfortably familiar.
The types of routines you end up developing throughout your life are never only up to you, but are grounded in what is considered normal in the social spheres you live in, the values, assumptions, embedded routines and institutions surrounding you. Some are shaped early in childhood, some by friends and families. Some derive from your culture, the society in which you live, and some are shaped by the norms of your professional and other identity building circles. The routines both build on what you consider normal, and strengthen your sense of that normal, make your normal so normal that you don’t even understand that it is just one alternative of many different normals lived around you or across the globe.
Living abroad highlights this nicely: suddenly the normal is something completely different. Suddenly everything is much more difficult and you find yourself tired after each day even if your explicit tasks were much lighter than home. That illustrates the power of routines: when you can take much for granted, you have more energy for the things that require reflection, but when the routines don’t work in the new setting (or for example in the throes of the Covid-19 scare), you need to use a lot more cognitive energy just to get through the mundane part of each day.
Witting or unwitting?
The problem with the current approach to environmental transformation is the fact that it predominantly relies on the decisions made in the reflective part of the brain, the energy-hogging deliberate and conscious thinking-system. However, we live in a society, which has for the past 150 years been built on such individual and collective routines that uphold a normal that destroys the environment. This means that even if we could use all of the energy that we can afford for witting decisions to make reflective choices about environmentally sustainable living, the routinized part of our brain, accounting for more than 95% of our daily decisions is still pushing us to conform to the normal that is shaped in a way that destroys our planet.
Not only are we not capable of considering each of our consciously made decisions from the perspective of its environmental impact, the effort is futile as long as all of our unwitting decisions, the backbone of our daily lives, makes us equate normal with the type of living that overconsumes our planet. It’s not a question of values or ethics, it’s simply a question of how our brains function: we can wittingly deeply abhor the types of values that unwittingly create our normal. Routinization, normalization of whatever way we live is the strongest driver of our actions.
In the long run, the only solution for our species is to create a societal system where just living normally does not destroy the planet. In the short term, we need to at least acknowledge the power of routines, the normal, and start to find ways to challenge them.
A drunkard’s perspective
When I drank, my normal consisted of myriad ways in which alcohol could be made a part of each day. Funnily, the Oxford dictionary actually defines “drunkard” as a person who is habitually drunk, hitting the nail on the head. All my habits pivoted around the drink – and the need to hide the fact. As with all of us, also my alcoholism developed gradually, with repetition, each year strengthening the brain patterns – practice makes perfect, regardless of what is being perfected.
It was not about lack of information, either about the risks of alcoholism, the negative health effects of ethanol or the unwanted impacts of drinking to me or the ones near me – my dad was also an alcoholic, so knowledge abounded. It was not a question of values (I despised drunks, myself included), nor of external restrictions (there’s nothing as clever as a monitored drunk). Fortunately, I did not have kids when I still drank, but had I had them, they would have made no difference despite the love I have for them. Nagging was unpleasant but ineffective, raging or crying just gave me an excuse to go and have a drink – after all, hadn’t I paid the price so why wouldn’t I reap the reward!
To my mind, this bears a striking resemblance to the reception of environmental warnings: everyone knows that nature is essential to us and that we are destroying it. There are always loopholes to regulation, when the urge to make profit is overwhelming. Everyone loves nature, and despises the killers of the rare freshwater pearl mussels, yet votes for leaders who unquestioningly promote uncaring forest industry as a corner stone of public economy. We all care deeply for the future generations, and shake off the inconvenient facts heard in the seminar as we browse the supermarket and buy plastic toys made in China for our kids.
So, if data, information, knowledge or even wisdom is not enough to create change, what is? For me (and the other non-drinking alcoholics I know), it was up to two things: a crack and a new take on old routines.
The crack
Fundamentally, a crack is an internal phenomenon, but it can sometimes be triggered by an outside force or event. A crack is a powerful enough moment, where the old routines and habits are suspended just enough for the cracked person to glimpse the situation anew. The Covid-19 triggered one globally – for external reasons many of us were unable to carry out the day relying on the old routines. Instead, we needed to suddenly stop. Then we used our superpower and created new routines that sustained us throughout the acute period.
A saying we old drunks often use when we encounter a lamenting spouse is “they have not yet found their bottom”. The best advice we can give to the spouse is to just keep on pouring the booze: a drunk has to drink enough to find their own personal bottom (unfortunately, the fact that we only have the one planet makes this less than a perfect advice to sustainability promoters). If they are lucky, they find it before their body or mind is too wrecked, but there is no speeding up the process, or helping it from outside. Hitting the bottom, experiencing the crack is something profoundly personal. The crack is like an epiphany, like an unveiling of the miserable reality normally blurred by self-denial.
The crack can sometimes be triggered by a notable external event, like getting fired or divorced, but it can equally well be triggered by something so tiny as to be unrecognizable afterwards, a word here, a reflection in a mirror there. Mine was of the more unremarkable category: I woke up (with a hangover as was typical, and a broken leg, which was not) and suddenly realized that I was an alcoholic. REALLY realized it for the first time. Of course I “knew” that I drank too much, “knew” that I had a problem, but as rationalization is among the many gifts of an alcoholic driven to self-deception, that knowledge bore little relevance to my actual life. Instead, that type of knowledge evidences itself daily when we think about how “everyone” “knows” about the looming environmental calamities.
The one thing about cracks is their fleeting nature: we cannot bear to look at the murky reality too long. The crack is but an opening, only the first key to change. The second key is finding a way to keep the crack open and using it to spur a change in action, routines.
New old routines
Think about the routines you developed to sustain your daily life during the most acute period of the Covid-19 crisis. Do you still keep them up, or have you gone back to the old ones? Most likely the basic shape of your routines is similar to the pre-corona routines, but maybe with some new spices picked up from the crisis routines. This is how the routines evolve – they build on the strongest patterns established in our brains, add to them some new elements (some emerging from the changes in internal preferences, some driven by external forces, e.g. the social spheres one finds oneself in) shaped to fit the familiar ones, and thus gradually transform, most often without any deliberate choices to shape them.
The only way to utilize the crack for realizing change in actions, is to tie the epiphany to such routines that at the same time utilize the established patterns, but with the one notable change of, in the case of an alcoholic, not drinking. We humans don’t tolerate vacuum too well, which means that just stopping to do something is never a viable long-term option. So, for the drunk, the secret is to find such new routines that are similar enough to the old ones that they can be upheld, but different enough to not enable drinking. And start finding them when the crack is open.
I was lucky. When I had my epiphany, I knew what to do, who to ask for help: I called my dad, a sober alcoholic. Living in a different city, he gave me a phone number of a lady he knew from AA. She took me to my first meeting on that very same day, before the crack had closed. In AA I found many ways to shape my old routines to fit a life without alcohol, insights I happily share with anyone asking, but not of essence to this blog, already a marathon read.
An AA for the cracked environmentalists?
The problem with the sustainability promotion we, the enlightened now have, is the lack of any such source of insights that could be used to transform the old routines into ones that do not destroy nature. If we manage to trigger a crack in a listener at a seminar, or if they have an epiphany while walking in a forest, there is no-one to call for help in shaping the new routines. All we tend to provide are lists of things not-to-do, which create a vacuum. As we cannot live in a vacuum, for the lack of any source of insights about the ways to shape the familiar routines into more sustainable ones, the crack closes and the routines gravitate back to the old normal.
As one of the key elements of sustaining any routine is the setting in which it makes sense, this means also that a lone person striving to change their routines faces not only the internal battle against the familiar, but also the external pressures arising from the social spheres they find themselves in. In most contexts, anyone pointing out the utter craziness of the Black Friday campaigns, Christmas junk, any supermarket selection is themselves labeled crazy – or at least an undesirable outcast.
A bit like a Finn who does not drink. For an alcoholic, the AA is not only a source of insights about how to go about creating non-drinking routines, but also provides an empowering setting, where everyone shares the same issues and battles. For the first two years this aspect of AA was crucial to me: after all, all the coolest guys from the bar were there, drinking liters of coffee and having interesting discussions, laughing about same weird mundane things, sharing the experiences, stories, successes and, yes, sometimes, the failures.
Where the first key to change, the crack, is something no-one can deliberately make happen in another human as it is an internal event, there is much we sustainability researchers could do to develop the second key: a community that could act as a source of insights about how to go about shaping the routines, specific to each person, into something more sustainable, and a source of comfort, sharing and belonging.
Such a community would also be needed to actually come up with such routines that could be executed in the society we now live in. Where the novel routines of a sober alcoholic have been in development since the beginning of AA in 1935 and thus include a number of useful insights applicable in many contexts and life situations, there is very little knowledge about the types of routines that could uphold a sustainable life in the diverse contexts and situations of contemporary western societies. We have lists of clues and actions, but the deep personal understanding and reflections of how they could be applied in “normal” life is missing. We should engage in the types of discussions shared in an AA circle to together try to find what types of routines work, what’s problematic and how to persist in tricky situations in order to be able to help people who crack under the environmental reality.
Instead, we act as the bitter spouse, nagging, piling information atop information, finding more and more detailed proof about what is already known in the vain belief that knowledge could ever change anyone’s actions. Sometimes, at best, we may trigger a crack, but then we should be equipped with means to catch and support the person falling through it.
Or at least someone should be. Who?
