Over the weekend, I took a trip to Manhattan. Not very unusual for a Stevens student, but it was on this particular trip that I took a lot of public transportation. I went from PATH to subway to another subway and then all the way back again. Overall, I spent nearly two hours in the NYC public transportation system (I counted). The more time I spent in the cramped, smelly areas, the more I realized how just plain awful they are. I mean, they were fine for when they were built. But compared to the amazing strides that New York City has made technology-wise, it really feels like public transportation has remained stuck in the past. They’re dirty, messy, rickety, and probably should’ve been replaced years ago. How can there be a holographic elevator in the Freedom Tower, but we’re still riding the same decrepit subways that are just barely holding on? The biggest answer is inconvenience, but I think the more interesting reason is something we can all relate to: habit.
The easy answer as to why no one has bothered to update the subway system in New York is that there are too many people who use it. People rely on it every day to get to work and school, so it’s not like you can just shut it down for a month to refurbish it. But still, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this is most likely a representation of a larger picture, something much bigger than just an old subway system. I think this concept of getting stuck in a rut is a pretty good representation of the bad habits we all fall into.
Everyone has something that they do regularly that they’re not proud of. I’d hedge a bet that most people would admit to spending way too much time on Netflix or scrolling through Instagram or procrastinating homework. We know they’re bad for us, we know they’re wrong, but we keep doing them. They’ve become so ingrained into our lives that it seems virtually impossible to overcome them. I’ve heard that it takes 66 days for a new behavior to become a habit, and if we’ve been doing something our whole lives, then it’s been a lot longer than two months. Like the NYC public transportation system, we’ve gotten to the point where we rely on things so much that we feel there’s no chance of change. But that’s not true.
Lucky for us, although it may be virtually impossible to refurbish the city’s public transportation, it’s not impossible for us to work on ourselves. We don’t need to completely stop our lives to make small changes. The first step is identifying what bad habits we’ve gotten ourselves into and brainstorm small ways to slowly push them back out of our lives. It’s important to understand, though, that we may not need to get rid of them completely. Moderation is key, so a guilty pleasure is fine in small doses. But we have to be careful that some bad habits don’t completely overwhelm us to the point of running us off the rails (see my pun?). So while the NYC subway system is probably not going to get fixed anytime soon, that doesn’t mean the same is true about our lives.
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