why we really are creatures of habit about two thirds of the time

Yes, we run mostly on autopilot. We more or less have to.

You’ve no doubt heard the phrase that humans are creatures of habit. Once we settle on a certain routine or way of doing things, we tend to stick to it. Constantly interrupt our attempts to establish a routine and we’ll get frustrated and upset. We do a whole lot of things on autopilot and that’s how we tend to like it. How many things, exactly? According to a new study, about two in three of our daily activities are not dictated by an active choice in the matter.

Unfortunately, this is going to be taken a very certain way by a group of philosophers and scientists who believe that we, as a species and as living organisms, have no free will and are just meat automatons with the delusion of active choice. If we don’t even have a voice in 65% of our actions, shouldn’t the rest be suspect too?

There are two ways to tackle this, the physiological and the philosophical, and given a study to sink our teeth into, let’s start with the former. There’s a very good reason why not everything we do needs to have input from us, and if it does, it would drive us up a wall in no time flat. That reason has to do with the evolution and structure of our brain, specifically how it allocates its very significant power requirements.

Having developed over billions of years, our brains are a mishmash of both optimized and efficient cortices, and jury-rigged neural cobwebs, making attempts to study it as a single, purpose-built entity doomed to failure. Meanwhile, we lead busy lives, every day filled with things to do just to make sure we’re upright, fed, and intact, much less all the more abstract tasks and concepts thrown at us during the day.

how not to bankrupt our energy budget

Just imagine if we had to carefully process every path through our home, every bite we eat, every drink we take, or calculate every motion. We’d be completely spent by lunch. Likewise, we can override our automatic actions if we so choose, but if we do that too much, like deny ourselves food despite clearly being hungry, or a nap even though we are exhausted, and our brains need to clean up all the byproducts of our cognition, our instincts need a way to make up sleep and eat.

So, yeah, we may not be in full and complete control of what happens to us every last waking moment of our lives, but neither do we need to be. It’s a huge waste for that to be the case, both energetically and mentally. Energy better spent on the third of tasks which do require us to plan, make active decisions, and follow through on them.

Fine, so what about the philosophical ramifications of us working mostly on autopilot? There are countless studies showing how irrational and easily influenced we can be if we just go about our day, and every decision we do make is driven by the choices our environment gives us, our upbringing, our genetics, and our hormones. Where exactly is the free will there?

But this is very much a spherical chicken in a vacuum argument which relies entirely on determinism, the idea that ultimately, everything in the universe will happen how it was supposed to happen by the laws of physics. Kind of like the theological “we’re all pawns of God’s will” except with cosmology and chemistry, which is a problem since this determinism doesn’t seem to exist in the universe as we understand it. There is a constant tug of uncertainty at the fundamental layers of reality.

how would you define free will?

Just because your choices aren’t infinite, free of consequences, equally easy to make, and can’t be predicted based on who you are and how you view the world around you, doesn’t mean that you have no free will. And just because we can explain the reasons behind certain choices, no matter how counter-intuitive or weird, doesn’t mean that a choice wasn’t made and consequences weren’t triggered.

Even the most predictable, boring people whose routine has been the same for many decades go off the beaten path once in a while, and trying to explain their deviations by brain chemistry, or mood, or phase of the Moon, or I don’t know, asparagus being in tardigrade — or whatever it is that people into astrology say — is simply retroactive motivated reasoning to prove an existing assumption that we are all meat automatons who deceive ourselves into thinking the universe gives us any choice in our lives.

In short, our mind does a pretty decent job of not overwhelming us with unnecessary, mundane decisions and preserving mental bandwidth — for which we pay a chemical tax in the form of malformed tau proteins polluting our brains until we can clear them out — for much more important things like creativity, long term planning, and focusing on tasks that need multiple high level skills.

And we should probably feel relieved that this is how we managed to evolve since the alternative is either perpetual exhaustion or losing our capacity for abstract cognition since our bodies simply wouldn’t have enough energy to sustain it without lowering our chances of survival or lifespans early enough in our species’ development to put us at a much higher risk of extinction.

See: Rebar, A. L., et al. (2025) How habitual is everyday life? An ecological momentary assessment study. Psychology & Health, 1–26, DOI: 10.1080/08870446.2025.2561149