What do smoking and cleaning have in common?

There are four possible effects a habit can have on someone’s preferences that I would like to distinguish. For convenience I have labelled them appreciation, satisfaction, dependency and addiction. For my purposes, appreciation is where you gradually achieve a higher level of welfare doing something the more that you do it. Likely examples would be meditation or watching a lengthy TV series. Satisfaction is where an activity leaves you sated, and therefore better off even if you stop doing it. Pleasant investments in yourself, such as studying something you enjoy, could be an example of this. Dependency is where the gain from doing a fixed amount of something delivers a lower welfare boost over time, with the (net) benefit possibly falling to zero or going negative. Most drugs show some level of dependency. Finally, addiction is when the more you do something, the worse off you will be if you stop doing it. A lot of drugs also have this effect, as do other things you get ‘used to,’ like exercising or having money to spend. These are all shown on the figure below. Many habits exhibit two of these effects or affect different people in different ways.

I have found this framework to be helpful in clarifying my thinking about which habits I should and should not take up.

We should be enthusiastic to accumulate habits that are characterised by appreciation and satisfaction. The stronger the effect the better. Dependency is undesirable, but you can still be better off from the habit if the effect isn’t too strong. Intense dependency is no good because eventually you will end up gaining nothing or losing from the habit. Addiction is not a problem so long as you will always want and be able to continue with the habit. If you will eventually stop, due to dependency, cost or unavailability, addiction will hurt you.

Appreciation and satisfaction combined is the ideal because you win out whether you continue the habit or not.

Addiction on top of serious dependency is the worst case because you will eventually be worse off whether you continue or not. These are the most problematic habits.

Appreciation and addiction together is fine, so long as you don’t expect to have to give up the habit for some reason. If you will, it will be a judgement call as to the initial gain and expected loss later on.

Satisfaction and dependency isn’t perfect but you can’t lose out overall. Even if dependency means you no longer gain from continuing the activity, you will continue to gain for having done it in the past.

The matrix below puts the above into a colourful tabular format.

The hard challenge is knowing which habits have which effects and with what intensity, but this framework at least allows you to ask the right questions and know what to do when you get the answers. It also makes it easy to understand and categorise the claims other people make about their habits.

For instance, someone who thinks it is worth ‘getting into’ fine food might claim that fine food is about appreciation. Someone like me who is skeptical of fine food, might think it is actually about dependency and/or addiction. I have in fact been going out of my way to buy cheap clothes, food, wine and beer lately in order to see if any dependency I currently have gradually disappears. If so I will be able to save money buying cheap goods for the rest of my life and be no worse off. I’ll let you know how it goes.

What got me thinking about all this was cleaning up my house on the weekend. I am skeptical of cleaning, beyond that required to stay organised and avoid disease, for the same reason most people are nervous about drug habits. People differ enormously in how much cleanliness they expect. When someone catches the ‘cleanliness bug’, I doubt they are left any better off than someone with low expectations. They could easily be worse off if they have to incur the cost of cleaning just to maintain their original level of well-being. That is to say, I think cleaning exhibits strong dependency and addiction. Amirite?