What feels natural is often just what you learned early enough to stop questioning.
Habits begin long before we ever recognise them. Before awareness, before choice, before anything resembling discipline. They grow out of emotional patterns formed in childhood, in years where the mind has no labels for what it feels.
Some habits come from watching the adults around us. Some from absorbing the atmosphere of a home. Some from figuring out how to stay safe in a world we did not understand yet.
People with a strong work ethic often grew up in homes where effort was presented as normal. People who drift often learned that drifting was safer than being seen failing.
What feels familiar becomes what feels right, even if it never truly served us.
For a long time I believed habits came from motivation or willpower.
Later, I understood that a large part of them was inherited long before I knew the word for inheritance.
My father is a funny, intelligent, gentle man. He is warm and bookish, curious about everything, the kind of person who looks at the world with a quiet sense of wonder.
At the same time he moves slowly through life, almost drifting. He never pushes. He rarely promotes himself. He was raised to be humble and careful and polite, and he followed that instruction so consistently that it shaped his whole personality. He is a quiet man who has always lived more in books than in action.
One year for his birthday, I drew him the way I saw him.
A sloth hanging from a pile of books, flipping through pages as if he might find the cause of his dissatisfaction somewhere inside them. A peace sign behind him, because he has never raised his voice at anyone. An unfinished puzzle in the background, because he has spent his life trying to piece himself together.
He laughed as soon as he saw it. He understood exactly what I meant. There was no cruelty in it, only accuracy. He even hung the drawing where guests would see it.
It was a moment of recognition, a man looking at a mirror and not turning away.
Much later I realised the drawing was not only about him. It was also about what I had absorbed from him without either of us noticing. He taught me curiosity and gentleness, gifts I am grateful for.
But he also taught me escape. Not escape through action, but escape through thought. Drifting into books, games, information, videos, anything that allowed the mind to stay busy while the harder feelings remained untouched. Consuming instead of confronting. Thinking instead of feeling.
Those patterns became habits before I had a conscious memory of forming them.
Even now, I drift to YouTube without noticing. Even now, I fall into information as comfort when something heavier is stirring underneath.
But awareness changes the entire equation. When the drifting begins, a small question appears. What is being avoided right now. Not to shame myself. Not to punish. Just to look honestly for a moment.
That moment is a vote for a different future.
Every habit is a vote cast in advance. Tiny decisions repeated often enough to shape the direction of a life. Some votes are inherited. Some are chosen.
The work is not to fight habits or glorify them. The work is to understand where they came from, so the next vote is cast with open eyes.
The hardest habits to change are the ones that once protected you.