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Comment by globular-toast | Hacker News Reader

> If you really wanted to do that habit or get rid of a habit, you just would.

This is ridiculously naïve. You seem to be completely forgetting the existence of addiction.

> One example is how easy it is for 99% of women to quit social drinking when they get pregnant.

Because they weren't addicted to drinking, like most healthy people.

Do you think a single fat person wants to be fat? It's uncomfortable, inconvenient and embarrassing; nobody wants it, and they know exactly what causes it. The reason more than half of our population is overweight is they are addicted to food and our society not only enables it but encourages and reinforces it. They can't "just stop".

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I think about when I quit smoking. I failed several times because I didn't really want to quit smoking. But then, when I really had had enough of smoking, and actually wanted to quit, addiction was in the way. I failed a couple of times because the consequences of stopping were so severe (headaches, anxiety, fatigue). Then I added a non-rewarding nicotine replacement (patches) to prevent the withdrawal symptoms, and suddenly quitting was manageable.

You can't just quit food, though.

Most people aren't addicted to bad habits. Thats why I said 99% of people. Alcoholism, real alcoholism, is not actually that common.

...and you seem to have quickly conflated habit with *addiction*.

It could be a valid point to bring up, but being combative/aggressive with it doesn't benefit the conversation. You could word it as something "perhaps some people need to question if something is a bad habit, or if they are addicted...", rather than calling parent 'ridiculously naive'

This seems a semantic carving of the discussion to match the argument though.

> Person 1: Just stop it. Want harder.

> Person 2: I can't.

> Person 1: Well, you have an addiction then, not just a bad habit; my point was about habits.

If we grant this: then the great-grandparent's response fails to inform us of anything beyond merely how we choose to define words. The advice works until it doesn't, which is tautologically true but not useful.

You seem to have taken the message 'want harder' from the original comment.

I took the original comment as question if you actually want the habit or are just doing it out of social or self pressure, or just for the sake of 'that seems like a good thing'.

Emphasising that you are free to drop habits, rather than pressuring yourself to achieve something that you might not really want.

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