Harry Warren wrote the musical hit "You're Getting To Be A Habit With Me" the same year the Great Depression hit its lowest point, the same March I was born, and exactly 50 years after philosopher William James wrote: "Ninety-nine hundredths of our activity is purely automatic. Life is nothing but a mass of habits." Big year, 1931...!
I doubt there's any significance to these co-incidents, except to say all three of us are still around. Well, in James' case, he's not but his psychological principle is. Our habits dominate our thinking. Even long after they make any good sense. A few familiar ones:
* Habitual labels -- Democrats get us into wars, Republicans keep us out; Catholics vote their faith; WASPs vote their pocketbook -- hardly fit today's society if indeed they ever did
* Another habit is to assume we have entered an age of more workers than jobs. In fact, demographers project the world's supply of working-age people will soon be shrinking
* A favorite habit of politicians is to portray small businesses as the main engine of job growth. In fact, although 90% of our companies are small businesses, their combined enterprises account for less than a fifth of all US jobs
* Ask any gambler and they will habitually reassure you about a hot hand. However, reading statistical experts like Daniel Kahneman, they prove that "while collections of random events do behave in a highly regular fashion, any causal explanations of these events are inevitably wrong." Betting a hunch rarely earns the player a bunch at the end of the night
* One more habit that was popular back when I was born. Expect Italian babies to have dark eyes like their mothers. I have blue. But before you scandalously start wondering about that, Dad was one of those princely blue-eyed Sicilians. So everything checks out
Of course everything here is totally open to debate, because you see, if Quantum Mechanics is right -- hell, we don't even know which parallel universe you and I are in! Right, Harry...?
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