Breaking the Habit: Why We Need New Experiences to Feel Alive Again

We often say we want change, a new idea, a new place, a new version of ourselves. Yet when the opportunity appears, most people retreat to the comfort of repetition. We go to the same cafés, talk to the same people, do the same things, and then wonder why life feels uninteresting.

It’s not that nothing new exists. It’s that we’ve become conditioned to stay within what feels familiar.

Habits are not only behaviors, they are mental structures. They shape how we perceive, feel, and decide what’s worth attention. Over time, they harden into invisible walls. Creativity, curiosity, and emotional openness fade behind them, replaced by a quiet sameness that feels safe but sterile.

The Architecture of Routine

Routine is comforting, that’s why it’s dangerous.Neuroscience tells us that repetition saves energy. The more we do something, the less the brain has to work; the path between thought and action becomes automatic. That’s how habits are formed, and how awareness begins to fade.

The philosopher Byung-Chul Han argues that in late modernity, this repetition has become systemic. In The Burnout Society, he writes that individuals are no longer oppressed by external authority, but by self-imposed compulsion. We keep doing, producing, and performing not because we are forced to, but because we have internalized the need to be efficient and active (1). The result is a culture where life feels busy but not alive.

Similarly, Henri Lefebvre, in Critique of Everyday Life, warned that the routines of modern society domesticate the imagination. Everyday life becomes organized around consumption and productivity; what once felt spontaneous becomes managed (2). The rhythm of life loses texture, and so does perception.

Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu adds another layer: habits are not just personal, they are social. His concept of habitus describes how our preferences, routines, and even desires are shaped by cultural conditions (3). We think we are choosing freely, but our choices often echo the structures we were born into.

Taken together, these thinkers describe a kind of invisible architecture; a design of daily life that keeps people within familiar patterns while convincing them they are exercising freedom. We scroll because it feels like agency. We repeat because it feels like comfort.

But comfort, unchecked, becomes containment. The same patterns that keep us safe also keep us from renewal. Art, culture, and new experiences matter precisely because they interrupt this architecture. They create moments of friction where the habitual self loosens its grip where we are momentarily reminded that life can still surprise us.

Art as a Disruption

Art’s value lies not only in its beauty or technique, or even meaning alone, but in its power to interrupt. It unsettles perception, inviting us to see, and feel, differently. A painting, a performance, or a piece of music can momentarily dismantle the routine logic of everyday life.

When people attend an exhibition, a concert, or a workshop, they often say, “I didn’t expect to feel this way.” That is precisely the point. Art creates experiences that aren’t pre-programmed by habit. It teaches us to tolerate ambiguity, to sense before we explain, to remain open to being moved.

Spaces like Hangar Culture Space are designed to provoke that kind of encounter, not as entertainment, but as renewal. They bring people together to experience something unfamiliar, to share moments of genuine attention. In a world organized by routine, that act of showing up becomes radical.

The Habit of Complaining

We often complain that “there’s nothing to do,” or “nothing new happens here.” But the problem is rarely the absence of opportunity, it’s our resistance to engage with it.

Sociologists describe this as learned inertia: the tendency to underestimate the value of experiences outside our comfort zone (4). We want inspiration without effort, community without participation, change without discomfort.

Culture doesn’t work like that. Community is not built by passive attendance but by participation, by the willingness to be challenged and transformed by what we encounter.

Finding Purpose Through Participation

People who engage with art and cultural activities often report feeling more connected, more confident, and more expressive. Psychologists link this to expressive engagement, activities that help people articulate emotions that language alone cannot hold (5).

That’s why participation in cultural life should never be seen as optional or luxurious. It is a form of psychological and social nourishment. Through creative engagement, individuals rediscover agency, they stop being mere consumers of life and start becoming participants in it.

The first step toward renewal is deceptively simple: break the habit.Go somewhere new. Join a workshop. Listen to a performance you don’t yet understand.

Because what people call “boredom” is often just repetition, and what they call “change” is only waiting for the world to move first.

Culture teaches us that we are the ones who must move.

References

1. Han, B.-C. (2010). The Burnout Society.

2. Lefebvre, H. (1947). Critique of Everyday Life.

3. Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste.

4. Seligman, M. (1975). Helplessness: On Depression, Development, and Death.

5. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.w: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.