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Comment by olau | Hacker News Reader

Some years ago I bought a little pamphlet with a few mental exercises by Rudolf Steiner, known for the Waldorf school system.

One of them was about building a habit. You find a small meaningless thing to do, it must have no purpose at all, and then you do it once every day for as long as it takes to become a habit, probably a month or two. E.g. you could fill a glass with water and throw it out.

I did the exercise (I would kneel for a few seconds when taking a bath) for a couple of months, and I think it worked for me. I've recently used the same tactic to build a useful habit.

Now building a new habit is not necessarily the same as changing an old habit.

I also found out that kneeling changed my perspective. I could think about a situation with some level of tension, kneel, and then my perspective on the same situation would be more humble and appreciative. YMMV.

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What's the benefit of building a useless habit instead of a useful one?

Meditational focus.

My guess is that you get practice in habit-building that can be applied to useful habits. Sort of like having students do exercises that have solutions in the back of the textbook. It's not the solution that's needed, it's the practice.

I can see why; doing something useless requires conscious thought / effort. Doing something you want to do / achieve / change is, controversially, difficult because you think you can rely on just you "wanting it", that is, innate motivation. But that's usually not the case, especially not if it's something that causes discomfort at first (like going to the gym) or if it means giving up or cutting back on something pleasurable (mmm, donuts).

But intentionally doing something that you don't do normally, something you don't want to do, something that doesn't give you any kind of dopamine feedback can help you practice forming habits, practice self-discipline, etc. It's an interesting experiment.

Taking out the emotion. Since the genesis of this discussion was "lifting weights", why uselessly lift weights instead of doing useful work like moving sacks of grain from point A to point B?

"If habit is a muscle that can be developed...", then being detached from the simple, useless habit being formed is good practice for being able to apply it to a productive or important situation.

The purpose is to focus on the process of building the habit by exercise of will. Having the habit be something that is useless makes the daily repetition an expression of pure will, rather than e.g. a sense of obligation or desire for a certain outcome.

learn for a fact that you can change

Just FYI: Rudolf Steiner was a pusher of pseudoscientific nonsense. He was anti-vax and his views on race were problematic, to say the least. He was a fervent German nationalist and a critic of Einstein's theory of relativity. I could go on, but you get the idea.

More importantly in a modern context, I know that Waldorf schools seem harmless, but they are religious "Anthroposophy" schools at their core.

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