Justin Whitmel Earley

much of what is fundamentally shaping our existence is happening unconsciously.

This is really useful in general, but it has downsides. First, if we’re acting out a bad habit—one that reinforces an addiction, perpetuates a harmful pattern of thought, or encourages mindless submission to a technology that is designed to attract our attention and sell it to the advertisers—we don’t have much power to fight back.

As philosopher James K. A. Smith argues in his book You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit, the habits we play out day after day are not tangential to our worship but actually central to it.