Automaticity

09 Jan 2025

In the past few months I experienced two large changes to my life after years of relative stability: I started a new job in a new role, and my family lost a loved one. Each has affected me in numerous unforeseen ways, but a common throughline in both is interrupting the automaticity of daily life.

Automaticity

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

– David Foster Wallace, Kenyon College Commencement Speech (2005)

In short, automaticity is mental autopilot. It’s how you can do the dishes while reflecting on your day or commute home for an hour without thinking through each turn. There is a lot of value in being able to optimize away the cognitive load of repetitive actions, but this is an indiscriminate process. If you’re not careful, you may find yourself on autopilot while sharing a conversation with your partner. Much has been written on the importance of mindfulness to fight that danger of being mentally absent when you want to be present and I’m not going to rehash it here. The more interesting phenomenon to me is the danger of allowing undesired patterns to fade from awareness by becoming automated.

Patterns

I worked at a previous company for nearly a decade. Although I worked in a handful of different roles with different teams over the years, I had my identity and approach to work largely figured out. I knew how to approach tasks, how my day would unfold, how the organizational focus would shift throughout the year. I grew professionally a great deal through these years, but that trajectory took the form of punctuated equilibrium wherein things were generally stagnant except when occasionally disrupted by a period of intense change precipitated by some contextual shift (team change, global pandemic, company priorities, etc). I rarely put conscious thought into how I approached work, what goals I personally wanted to accomplish, or how to do so.

My personal life can be fitted to the same template. There have been periods of upheaval, but the majority of my time has been relative stability in daily patterns and relationships that developed organically without much forethought or conscious shaping. Layered atop that stability is my battle with depression. Stability and stagnation differ only by context and there are many times when the predictability of my days feels more stifling than comforting. Patterns like my morning routine often leave me feeling unable to meet the day, but they’ve become ingrained to the point that I feel more like a passenger on this ride than the driver.

Perspective

Suddenly, through the haze of a busy schedule, perspective strikes. That product launch that felt so important at the time is unceremoniously excised from my daily life alongside the years of institutional knowledge I painstakingly compiled. My oft-reviled routine that had seen me through so many depressed mornings is swiftly and unquestioningly interrupted by a hospital visit.

Familiar routine is replaced by questions: How do I do this? Is this even what I want to do? What kind of life do I want to live? What would that look like?

Asking these questions recruits more hope than dread. I realize I have far more power here than I’ve been exercising. I’m graced with health, financial means, and incredibly compassionate family and friends. Questions still outweigh answers, but even asking these questions feels like a victory.