I have a weird niche. I adore posts from social media that are supposed to be funny, but if dissected and maybe thought about a little longer than appropriate, actually hide some kind of a deep philosophical message or a concept. I like the idea that small things can contain big truths that not a lot of people search for. The most recent post I saw and I really enjoyed was this one.

I just realized I could let the shower warm up before stepping in
by u/What_Is_EET in CasualConversation

BTW this post took me such a long time to find, because I didn’t remember specific keywords from the post, just the general story. I found out that AI tools can be used as a really effective fuzzy web searchers. Really cool stuff 😄

This post is really interesting. A guy hates showering his whole life, because the first few seconds the water is always freezing. He has a girl over and she asks him a really simple question. “Why don’t you wait for it to warm up?”. He thinks about it and does not really have an answer.

That’s it. A very simple story about a not realizing something very simple. Yet I just couldn’t get it out of my head for some time, and it always randomly pops up. It is so interesting to me. For the purpose of my not-so-empirical analysis, let’s call this guy Pete.

Now Pete isn’t a dumb guy. But somehow, something so basic like waiting for warm water completely escaped him for years. It was such an embedded concept for him that he doesn’t consciously think about it anymore. He just kept doing it, because he didn’t know anything else. He always hated showers; that is just how it was. This may be an artifact from his childhood, ingrained into him by his parents.

I couldn’t find any coined term which would umbrella this situation. I wanted to call this phenomenon a “dogmatic habit”, a behavior done without questioning it or considering alternatives. It implies the habit is inherited. I was happy with this for a while. But eventually I realized it missed the mark. “Dogmatic” implies rigidity—something difficult to change or let go of. But in Pete’s case, once someone points it out, he changes. Instantly. There’s no resistance. Also, while Pete’s habit might have been inherited, that’s not always the case. So I wanted a term with broader reach. I like to never needlessly limit what can be generalized.

I was searching for a more appropriate adjective to use. I found that “an unexamined habit” felt right. It highlights that the habit has never been subjected to critical thought. It may or may not be improved when person is challenged to think about the habit critically; in that moment, it could become the dogmatic habit mentioned before. To define it rigorously: an unexamined habit is an automatic behavioral pattern that a person performs without critically assessing it.

I really like that the name also relates to the most famous quote of the OG philosopher, Socrates. He said:

The unexamined life is not worth living

Of course, he meant this in a much grander, existential sense. But it can pretty much be applied here. Socrates believed that the ultimate purpose of being human is to seek wisdom and improve one’s soul. One needs to critically think about our own life, since to not do so is to fail at being human. This is a little bit too intense for my use-case here, but still.

The lesson I feel I got from this little research I’ve done on a long Saturday and from thinking about a funny post on Reddit, is that we all have our own “cold showers”—dozens of unexamined habits worth exploring, you may find a lot about yourself you didn’t know and you may even improve your life, like Pete. In a grandiose way of philosophers and in the name of generalizing - question everything all the time, and in this questioning do not forget to question yourself. To question is to think and to think is to live.