About
Certain Habits is the personal website of Matt Anderson. I work in marketing and strategy. I read widely, think a lot, and am fascinated by interdisciplinary learning and high-level skill acquisition.
Beyond having a place online to stick the random things I make or thoughts I have, this site has no plan or purpose. It’s point of view is strictly personal. It’s genre is nothing if not interdisciplinary.
Why “Certain Habits?” The title is a phrase from a quotation I stumbled across when writing a paper in college. It referred to “the certain habits of order” that enable a free people to maintain its civilization. Other authors contrasted those “certain habits” with the “noise and inexplicable dumb show” of “publick clamour” that precedes mob rule.
I love the vibrant public life of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The public-spiritedness, faith in ideas, decency of character and full-throated debate discredit the political correctness that corrupts today’s public square.
That said, “certain habits” isn’t meant as a political statement. It’s a phrase that has a much broader meaning to me.
I believe that we can’t be authentically who we really are unless we are who we are out of habit. If we’re always winging it, inventing who we are in this or that place and time, then our identity is a mirage. We never truly own who we are. Who we are owes more to situation and whimsy than intrinsic identity. And yes, that includes habits of thought.
To the extent that this blog reflects who I am, it will be a collection of certain habits. Habits of inquiry, curiosity, research, expression, and interest, among others.