Nicaragua, Quantum Mechanics and Other “Solutions” to Habituation
Here I am with Blanca and Jose Sevilla and their daughter in Esteli, Nicaragua, in 1985. After just a month living with the Sevillas, I became habituated to their way of life. When I returned home to Manhattan, it freaked me out, because I had become de-habituated to it. In a week or two, I was taking Manhattan for granted again. And so it goes.
Hoboken, April 18, 2024. Enlightenment, the goal of Buddhism and other spiritual traditions, means different things to different people. To me, it means wallowing in life’s weirdness. That is to say, its infinite improbability and miraculousness, because an infinitely improbable event is a miracle, right? We shouldn’t be here, and yet here we are. Holy shit!
Buddha said desire keeps us from becoming enlightened, but a bigger obstacle, I humbly propose, is habituation. Getting used to things, taking them for granted.
Like desire, habituation makes evolutionary sense. Natural selection designed our brains to spot surprises, especially potential threats or opportunities. Something to flee, fight, fuck, eat. Habituation results from neural algorithms that keep us from wasting energy dwelling on familiar things.
But our innate neural algorithms—which resemble those that compress video and music files--work too well. We get habituated to everything, bad and good. To suffering, injustice and war as well as to beauty, friendship and love. We even get habituated to sex! Or so I hear. We become automatons, zombies, blindly plodding through our days without paying attention.
Paradoxically, habituation can de-habituate us, so familiar things become unfamiliar again. Here’s an example:
In 1985, I was eager to check out Nicaragua’s socialist Sandinista regime, which the Reagan administration opposed. A lefty group based in Boston arranged for me to visit Esteli, a town near Nicaragua’s northern border. I lived for a month with Blanca and Jose Sevilla and their seven kids in a shack scarcely bigger than my Manhattan studio apartment.
We had electricity and running water for an hour or two each day. Blanca cooked on a wood-burning stove. We shit and pissed in an outhouse with no toilet paper, just newspaper. Blanca and Jose slept on one bed and the seven kids on two other mattresses. I slept on a cot.
The Sevilla house was typical of the neighborhood. Life in Esteli shocked me at first, but I quickly got accustomed to it. Habituated. I even got used to hearing faint rat-a-tat-tats at night from skirmishes between Nicaraguan soldiers and U.S.-backed “Contras.”
When I returned to Manhattan, where I lived and worked then, I saw it as if for the first time. I gawked at the skyscrapers, restaurants, shops. At the clean, coiffed men and women strutting up and down sidewalks in unstained suits and shiny shoes.
My shabby studio apartment seemed as luxurious as Versailles. Hot and cold running water whenever I wanted it! Flush toilet, plus toilet paper! Jennifer convertible sleeper-sofa with pillows! Refrigerator stocked with Haagen Dazs and Budweiser! Heaven!
A single month in Esteli had de-habituated me to Manhattan. Within a week or two, I was taking everything for granted again. Television? Hot showers? Cold beer? Women in high heels? Ho hum.
Now, with effort, I can recall how things looked through my de-habituated eyes. I feel grateful for my one-bedroom Hoboken apartment, equipped with microwave oven, flat-screen TV, air-conditioning. I’m a lucky bastard. But enlightenment means being de-habituated to everything, good, bad, humdrum, all the time. Is such a state possible? If so, how?
Because pondering death is time-tested way to appreciate life, I’ve adorned my apartment with tin skeletons and a ceramic skull. My battered old face serves as an even more effective memento mori. But lately, given the decrepitude and death of people I love, reminders of mortality just make me glum.
Meditation and psychedelics are popular de-habituation agents. A 1981 trip blasted away my habituation in a way that almost derailed me; there is such a thing as too much de-habituation. A 2018 silent meditation retreat de-habituated me in a much less violent way. After the retreat, I tried to sustain that chill feeling by meditating every morning, but I gradually became habituated to meditation.
In 2020, I set out to learn quantum mechanics with the math, and that project de-habituated me in ways I didn’t expect. I immersed myself in wave functions, complex numbers, differential equations, matrices. My goal was to familiarize myself with quantum mechanics, even to become habituated to it.
That didn’t happen, not even close. The more I studied quantum mechanics, the stranger it became, and that strangeness seeped into everything around me. My everyday perceptions and thoughts became uncanny.
That quantum effect is fading, I’m slipping back into zombie-hood. You see the pattern?
This portable restroom caught my eye while I was sitting by the Hudson River.
Last summer, just for fun, I began drawing things. Humble things, like chairs, mugs, trash cans, portable restrooms, my feet. Drawing things makes me pay attention to them. Port-a-potties are awesome! Another way to see the weirdness is to write about it, as I am at this moment.
But my favorite de-habituation trick is the simplest. Wherever I am, whatever I’m doing, I pause and pay attention. I can be talking to a philosopher at a “salon.” Careening toward Hoboken on a PATH train. Lying on a gurney in an operating room. Whatever.
I think, Come on, this is fucking weird. Or, This is weird. Or simply, Weird. And if I’m lucky, I glimpse it, I feel it, the wild improbability of our existence. We shouldn’t be here, and yet here we are. Holy shit.
Further Reading:
Is Derealization a Delusion or Insight?
The Upside of Getting Old and Falling on Your Face
Why Time Flies When You’re Old
I wallow in weirdness in my lightly fictionalized stream-of-consciousness memoir Pay Attention: Sex, Death, and Science.