I'm reading a book on habituation right now. The premise is that we need to dishabituate ourselves to our lives to really notice them.
You've experienced the sensation. You are used to everything and everyone around you but if you travel and come back you see it through fresh eyes. Or if you give someone a tour of your house you notice things that have faded away into the background. If your spouse has to leave town for awhile when they come back you see them through new eyes.
It's also a meditation practice. Imagine you lose something important to you. Your spouse. Your house. Your car. You pets. Really imagine it. What would you feel like? What difference would it make in your life? Now realize that you haven't lost it. How great do you feel?
It's part of practicing gratitude. Often when I'm doing the public posts for gratitude I will preface it with something like, small gratitude, or basic gratitude. But we often just take things for granted that are actually really great things.
We have to dishabituate ourselves to them to notice them again.
And it's really easy to get habituated to things. Like really easy.
Anyone who has been in a terrible job situation, or romantic situation, or living situation knows this. Sometimes it takes a real jolt to break you out and to even get you to notice that what you are dealing with isn't normal or okay.
I've talked about working at the car dealership when I first went back to work after having Katie. When I would leave work I would get in the car at the end of the day, pull out onto Lomas and scream for the three blocks to the highway onramp. Just full on scream. Letting out all of the pent up frustration from the day before I picked her up. Great coping mechanism, I thought.
And when people would leave and come back a few months later to grab lunch we would all say, "oh my gosh you look great!" and they did. Skin looked better. Eyes were brighter. Shoulders weren't resting next to their ears. But it wasn't until I left myself that I realized...oh wait...it wasn't normal to feel that way at work.
Which looking back seems like the most obvious thing ever, but we had all become used to the conditions. We had habituated to terrible treatment and work conditions. And even if we thought it was terrible we all made various excuses as to why we couldn't change. For me it was I was back in the workforce for the first time in three years. Who else was going to hire me? I am a Gen X kid of Silent Generation parents so I was raised with the work ethic of put your head down and do the job. If it was fun they wouldn't call it work, and that's why they pay you to show up.
Thank goodness Millenials and Gen Z have dropped that you owe your employer all of your joy mentality.
Reading this book has made me really notice things like that. The things I have stopped noticing. Or the things that seem normal now that I know wouldn't have been considered normal a few years ago.
Politically the Trump years have gotten us all habituated to conspiracy theories in a new way. Like all of his constant talk about election rigging, and bringing Qanon to the forefront. Repeating stories like "They're eating the dogs" during a national broadcast. It's not normal. But we've sort of stopped noticing that it's not normal.
For instance...
There was another assassination attempt yesterday. The guy didn't get a shot off. Secret service shot at him, he ran away, but the cops were right there to pick him up. And my reaction was...hunh. How did he know when Trump was going to be golfing that day? Why wouldn't the Secret Service clear the whole area around the course when he decides to golf? How in the world did the Trump team have a fundraising email ready to go minutes after the attempt? I mean...it's all a little suspicious right?
And what about the last attempt? That's still weird right? Supposedly his ear was shot, he wore that GIANT bandage all through the convention and then the next week it was fine? Two weeks to recover from a gunshot? I'm over 20 years younger than he is and I take a month to recover from any sort of cut now. And that's just the initial healing, I scar now over the smallest wounds. And cartilage never grows back. If you lose part of your ear, you lose part of your ear. It's just gone. And wouldn't he make a big show of that? The man who said he always wanted a Purple Heart? Wouldn't he show off a wound to look brave?
And why aren't the two people who were shot and survived featured at all of his rallies? And why don't they open each one with a moment of silence for the man who actually died? I mean we haven't heard him talk about it at all except one night at the convention and then when Kamala Harris was eating his lunch during the debate and he screamed about taking a bullet to the head because of her.
Wouldn't that be his go to all the time?
Why isn't he talking about it? Why didn't he release the medical records about the injury? Why don't we have a thousand Zapruder films of the shooting? I mean, so many people must have been recording his speech right? Why don't we even have diagrams as to where all of the people who were shot or injured with shrapnel were standing?
I'm just asking questions...
See? We've normalized conspiracy theories. And not trusting anything you hear. Or even see. We've become habituated to it.
I'm not sure what it will take to dishabituate all of us. What it would take to be shocked when you hear that someone was set up in a sniper's nest to take a shot at a former president. Instead of thinking, well he's down in the polls so why not go back to the assassination attempt well. I'm not saying it was all a set up...but....
I've been habituated to conspiracy theories being the norm.
I'd like to get back to being shocked about things instead of taking them in "of course" stride.
Or not even being shocked, but maybe things like that not happening? How great would that be?
But for now I'm trying to pay attention. To not just take things as normal or not even notice things. I'm doing what I can to not just let things that are not normal seem normal. I'm trying to pay attention.
And I'm checking and double checking my voter registration and ready to vote for normal in 2024.
But the good kind of normal. Not the we've all gotten used to this weirdness and now it seems normal.
Go Blue.
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