On Habit Alain De Botton Gopnik Analysis

Are mental map helping people? In the essay “On Habit” by Alain de Botton and “Possible World: Why Do Children Pretend?” by Alison Gopnik, both of the authors indicate that humans develop mental maps to organize knowledge of the location and characteristics of the environment to get going experience. Gopnik writes that once people have mental maps in their mind they can find shorter and more convenient routes they could have taken. Using mental maps to organize experience help people be efficient, because it offers people direct information and solutions. However, de Botton ‘s idea is that how people feel when they walk on the street is much important than how fast they can be their destination. He suggests that people should forget their everyday surroundings from their memory, and try to absorb new things in

The characteristics of environment might change. People should follow up with their mental map. Furthermore, doing so help people avoid being habituated with their mental map and ignore beautiful and interesting things around them. After following Xavier de Maistre’s bedroom journey, de Botton writes that people can make the effort to look at things at the familiar world as something new and interesting. “We meet people who have crossed deserts, floated on icecaps and cut their way through jungles----and yet in whose souls we would search in vain for evidence of what they have witnessed. Dressed in pink and blue pajamas, satisfied within the confines of his own bedroom, Xavier de Maistre was gently nudging us to try, before taking off for distant hemispheres, to notice what we have already seen” (de Botton 65). People will automatically impose “grid of interest” when walking shortcut which they are greatly familiar with. They admire lives far away from them and don’t have the mindset to organize their experience at the familiar world. With the creation of traveling mindset