For good or bad, we default back to what feels most familiar to us

By David McElroy · November 22, 2018

I eat too much each Thanksgiving and I did it again this year. I’m stuffed this evening and I feel as though I could pass out and sleep until tomorrow.

It’s uncomfortable, but there’s something vaguely comforting about it, too. Since I do this every year — always with plenty of turkey and dressing and gravy — there’s something familiar about this. So there’s a paradoxical way in which this slight physical discomfort and drowsy feeling bring me emotional comfort.

It feels good because it feels normal. Something in me is vaguely satisfied with the discomfort because it feels like what I expect.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about this tendency to be attracted to what feels normal to us. I’ve concluded that this inner mechanism sometimes gives us what we need and other times leaves us stuck in situations that are unhealthy for us — but it’s hard for us to tell which is which, because all we know is that staying in this comfort zone feels right.

That can lead us into celebrating healthy traditions with people we love. But it can also lead us to keep ourselves trapped in places we don’t need to be, simply because something dysfunctional and unhealthy can feel so right — because it’s all we know.

It makes sense that we are programmed — at a deep level of our genes — to keep doing things in whatever way has allowed us to survive in the past. Especially in the years when making a slightly wrong decision could mean death for us — and our entire family or tribe — there was a huge advantage in doing things the same way that had worked before. So it’s easy to understand why our history rewarded those who stuck to familiar ways of doing things.

Although that practice might have allowed us to survive, it also left us unwilling to take certain chances. It left us with a tendency to repeat what seemed normal to us even when doing so was destructive in some other way. But as long as it allowed those people to survive, nature rewarded those genes by allowing them to reproduce, while the risk-takers sometimes did well — and other times got wiped out.

Doing things the safe way was the path which was most likely to be rewarded by the genetic lottery.

This tendency to stick with whatever we know even leads us to lie to ourselves. We say we want originality — and we say we want the love and joy that part of our mind fantasizes about — but what we are drawn to is a formula. We become accustomed to certain things in our lives, and we find ourselves gravitating back toward the patterns we know.

This is why formulaic movies and television shows are so successful. We are drawn to the formula that we know — and we can actually be outraged when the pattern changes. I’ve recently been rewatching every episode of the Columbo detective series which starred Peter Falk. If you’ve ever seen that old show, you know the formula. There’s a pattern by which the clever and self-effacing detective outwits smart and powerful murderers.

But in the later episodes of the show, the producers and writers had a couple of episodes that completely broke the formula. The homicide detective whose methods we know so well is suddenly going undercover and carrying a gun. Parts of the 90-minute episode seem more like an action drama. It felt completely wrong. I hated it.

The writing for the episode was fine. The acting was fine. Everything about it was done quite well. It’s simply that it didn’t follow the long-established formula that we expect from Columbo. It might have been a good movie for another character, but my mind rebelled at it being Columbo. I wanted what I was familiar with.

We do the same things in the rest of our lives. We are drawn to relationships that mirror the ones we’ve already had or the ones we’ve already seen modeled for us, even if we consider them to be something other than what we really want.

If we’ve grown up with dysfunctional relationships modeled for us, we might consciously want better and more healthy relationships, but we end up being drawn to relationships that are dysfunctional. Why? Because those unconsciously feel normal to us. Even if we can’t explain it, we stick with abuse or dysfunction — all because we’ve grown accustomed to this unhappiness. We then make excuses to stick with this unhappy familiar pattern.

I’ve seen myself slip into such patterns in various parts of my life. I’ve stayed in dysfunctional relationships longer than I should have, simply because something about it seemed comfortable. I’ve stayed in job situations far longer than I should have, long after I knew I needed to move on and do something I cared about more.

When you’re in the middle of your decision-making, it can be hard to tell the difference between being prudent and simply finding excuses to stay with what you already know. I’m certainly good at justifying the safe choice — staying in my comfort zone — and I’ll bet you do the same thing, even if you lie to yourself about it.

I have some things I desperately need to break out of right now. There are some things in my career about which I’ve allowed autopilot — taking the easy and obvious route — to keep me from taking obvious and necessary chances. There are some changes I need to make in my living situation. What started as a smart short-term solution can easily turn into a permanent quagmire just because it’s easy to stay. And I have to force myself to quit loving where I’m not going to get anything in return. Unfortunately, I know how to live with a broken heart — so I end up accepting rejection and misery as normal.

In the Hebrew book of wisdom that we call Proverbs, there’s a verse which says, “A fool doing some stupid thing a second time is like a dog going back to its vomit.” (Proverbs 26:11, Good News Translation.) It’s a graphic comparison, but it’s similar to what our lives are full of. We keep doing stupid things time after time — returning to mistakes which part of us knows are vomit, metaphorically — but we do it because it feels familiar. And that makes it seem normal.

It requires a lot of courage to reject this instinct for staying with what feels normal. Some people are never able to find that courage, so they keep going through the same patterns of mistakes over and over and over. Others find ways to break free and make wiser choices.

I’ve always prided myself on thinking independently and being willing to turn from my mistakes, but sometimes I fool myself.

Tonight, I’m stuffed with Thanksgiving food, mostly because this is a lifelong habit. It’s probably not a terrible habit. It’s not one that’s going to keep me from being what I need to be.

But there are other things about which I have been fooling myself — or at least trying — and those are the areas where I need to change. I get tired of constantly realizing the ways in which I need to change, but I guess it’s better than the alternative of not even knowing.

In some key ways, I have to step out of my comfort zone. It’s difficult, though, because some of those things I need to do don’t fit my patterns, so they don’t feel normal.

In so many ways, I’m like that dog who keeps coming back to the same old vomit.

Share on Social Networks

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

Related Posts