In a famous experiment, students were asked to take a lemon home and get used to it. Three days later they were able to single out "their" lemon from a pile of rather similar. They seemed to be tied. Is this the true meaning of love, bonding, coupling? We have simply transferred to other people, animals or objects used to?
Habit forming in humans is reflexive. We change ourselves and our environment to provide maximum comfort and well-being achieved. It is the effort that goes into these adaptive processes that forms a habit. The custom is to prevent us from constant experimenting and risk taking. The greater our well being, the better we can function and the longer we survive.
Actually, if we used something or someone – we get used to us. The object of the habit we see a part of our history, all the time and effort we had put into it. It is an encapsulated version of our actions, intentions, feelings and reactions. It's a reflection that a part of us, which formed the habit in the first place. Hence the feeling of comfort: we really feel comfortable with us even through the mediation of our ordinary objects.
For this reason we tend to confuse habits with identity. When asked who they are, most people resort to communicating their habits. They describe their work, their loved ones, their pets, their hobbies or their material possessions. But, certainly, not all of these no identity! They do not change remove. They are habits, and they make people comfortable and relaxed. But they are not part of one's own identity in the truest and deepest sense.
Yet it is this simple mechanism of deception that keeps people together. A mother feels that her offspring are part of their identity because they are so accustomed to their well-being depends on their existence and availability. Thus, any threat to their children from it is perceived as a threat to her own self. Your reaction is so strong and durable and can be triggered again and again.
The truth is, of course, that their children are a part of their identity in a superficial way. They will remove her to another person, but only in the shallow, phenomenological sense of the word. Their deep, true identity is not to change as a result. Children do sometimes die, and the mother did not live longer, essentially unchanged.
But what is this kernel of identity that I am referring? This immutable entity who we are and what we are and what, supposedly, not affected by the death of our loved ones? What can resist the dismantling of habits that die hard?
It is our personality. These heavy, loosely interconnected, interacting, pattern of reactions to our changing environment. Like the brain, it is difficult to define or detect. As the soul, many believe that it does not exist, that it is a fictitious convention.
But we know we have a personality. We feel, we experience it. Sometimes encourages us to do things – at other times prevents us from doing it. It can be supple or rigid, benign or malignant, open or closed. Its strength lies in its looseness. It is able to combine and recombine and permute in hundreds of unforeseeable ways. It's metamorphoses and the constancy of these changes is what gives us a sense of identity.
Actually, if the person staring at the point of incapacity, will change in response to shifting circumstances – we say that it is disordered. It has a personality disorder, if you replace the habits of their own identity. Such a person identifies himself with his environment, taking behavioral disorders, emotional and cognitive cues exclusively from it. His inner world is, so to speak, vacated, his true self is only an appearance.
Such a person is incapable of loving and living. He is incapable of love, because love one another must first love themselves. And in the absence of a self that is impossible. And in the long term, he is unable to live because life is a fight against multiple targets, a striving, a drive for something. In other words: life is change. Those who can not change, can not live.
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