A Forced Break in a Common Decision Pattern
In Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson about the original lexicographer and wit, Boswell recounts trying to get Johnson to travel. He asks Johnson if he would like to see Dublin; Johnson says no. Then Boswell probes: “Is not the Giant’s Causeway worth seeing?” Johnson replied, “Worth seeing? Yes. But not worth going to see.” That’s a difference the pandemic highlighted.
The saying “culture eats strategy for breakfast” acknowledges the power of culture without saying what culture is. Culture isn’t a statement about beliefs or values; culture is what we do. Not just what we do but what we routinely do.
Our default choices, the ones we make routinely without thinking about them, define our culture.
These choices aren’t so much responses to, or driven by, our wants. They are primarily a reflection of the decision environment we are in and the routine choices of others in that environment.
At the personal level, these default choices are more than just “what I do;” they are doing something to me, too. They are shaping what I want; they are shaping me.
The reason my set of default choices have this “shaping” power is that embedded in these routine decisions is a story about value; a narrative about what “the good life” looks like, and about how to have a sense of well-being and a life well-lived.
I’m actually absorbing the values in this story simply by practicing its daily routine decisions. I’m mimicking the choices I’m surrounded by and the “value story” those choices imply.
The pandemic caused radical changes in many people’s daily choice patterns – it changed their culture.
Understanding how we are shaped by our daily default choices allows us to look differently at the normal, almost monotonous, day-to-day culture of routines we are immersed in: we can see ways these choices may be molding our definition of the good life and creating our values rather than reflecting them. We can see how our habits are training us to pursue this story of “the good life.”
That is a gift of the WFH forced break caused for many by the pandemic: it broke the “culture” of routine, day-to-day habits, and made the story about the “good life” embedded in those routines easier to see.
Working from home showed (for some) how their daily default choices – the logistics of going to a joint workplace daily – were shaping their life values in ways that weren’t as attractive when those decisions were segregated out and highlighted. When “going to work” was no longer embedded implicitly in a daily culture, there was the realization that culture had never been explicitly chosen. It was a culture that “happened” to them, that was accepted rather than selected. It was the default culture of the job they took or the career they chose.
Most of our decisions, professional and personal, are the result of habit, so they seem benign. But embedded in those habits are values, sometimes values that have not been chosen but mimic the routine choices of our environment. Thinking clearly about personal choices, especially the “default” ones, is challenging.
A forced change in routine is also a forced change in culture; that’s a prompt to notice our routine for what it is: a story about “the good life” that isn’t necessarily an expression of our values but, instead, is shaping them.
Part of the reason that “getting people back to work” has been slow isn’t just the inconvenience; going to work is now counterculture for many who established a new set of “routine choices” that reflect a new story of what “the good life” looks like that is more compelling. As Johnson might have said, they noticed that there’s a difference between a job “worth doing” and a job “worth going to do.”