People will retain certain habits through changing circumstances. For example, if they once enjoyed sitting on their porch in the country, they may find themselves drawn to sitting on the steps by the sidewalk outside their low-income housing complex. The scenery has changed, but the behavior remains. Consistency in behavior tempers destabilization with an assuring quality, anchoring a vessel in the midst of choppy seas by linking it temporally to calmer waters.

Adherence to habit can hardly be considered without extending an invitation to the eternal debate regarding free will. The concept of will power presumes free will exists, and is usually invoked relative to bad habits one should seek to shed, but when the habit is innocuous or beneficial will power rarely is mentioned. Could it be, instead, that the habit is the entity that possesses and exerts its will? Does performing, or failing to perform, the habit depend on the outcome of an arm-wrestling match between will powers?

Such a characterization presumes the participants (the habit and the vehicle of its expression) are in disagreement, but I find it more likely, on an energy expenditure basis, that the two are in agreement. Even if they were not initially aligned, the passage of time implied by the concept of habit supports the notion that the defeated party first is resigned to their defeat and then comes to agree with the victorious party for the sake of conserving energy for more thoughtful expenditure elsewhere. A further mechanism encouraging eventual alignment is the habitual exercise of the behavior: a manifestation of the principle that a lie becomes a truth to those for whom it’s sufficiently repeated. Finally, alignment can be forced through semantics, where resisting any habit can be construed as obliging the habit of resisting the former.