The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business (39 page)

Movements don’t emerge because everyone suddenly decides to face the same direction at once. They rely on social patterns that begin as the habits of friendship, grow through the habits of communities, and are sustained by new habits that change participants’ sense of self.

King saw the power of these habits as early as Montgomery. “I cannot close without giving just a word of caution,” he told a packed church on the night he called off the boycott. There was still almost a decade of protest ahead of him, but the end was in sight. “As we go back to the buses let us be loving enough to turn an enemy into a friend. We must now move from protest to reconciliation..… With this dedication we will be able to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man to the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.”

THE NEUROLOGY OF FREE WILL
Are We Responsible for Our Habits?

The morning the trouble began—years before she realized there was even trouble in the first place—Angie Bachmann was sitting at home, staring at the television, so bored that she was giving serious thought to
reorganizing the silverware drawer.
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Her youngest daughter had started kindergarten a few weeks earlier and her two older daughters were in middle school, their lives filled with friends and activities and gossip their mother couldn’t possibly understand. Her husband, a land surveyor, often left for work at eight and didn’t get home until six. The house was empty except for Bachmann. It was the first time in almost two decades—since she had gotten married at nineteen and pregnant by twenty, and her days had become crowded with packing school lunches, playing princess, and running a family shuttle service—that she felt genuinely alone. In high school, her friends told her she should become a model—she had been that pretty—but when she dropped out and then married a guitar player who eventually got a
real job, she settled on being a mom instead. Now it was ten-thirty in the morning, her three daughters were gone, and Bachmann had resorted—again—to taping a piece of paper over the kitchen clock to stop herself from looking at it every three minutes.

She had no idea what to do next.

That day, she made a deal with herself: If she could make it until noon without going crazy or eating the cake in the fridge, she would leave the house and do something fun. She spent the next ninety minutes trying to figure out what exactly that would be. When the clock hit twelve o’clock, she put on some makeup and a nice dress and drove to a riverboat casino about twenty minutes away from her house. Even at noon on a Thursday, the casino was filled with people doing things besides watching soap operas and folding the laundry. There was a band playing near the entrance. A woman was handing out free cocktails. Bachmann ate shrimp from a buffet. The whole experience felt luxurious, like playing hooky. She made her way to a blackjack table where a dealer patiently explained the rules. When her forty dollars of chips were gone, she glanced at her watch and saw two hours had flown by and she needed to hurry home to pick up her youngest daughter. That night at dinner, for the first time in a month, she had something to talk about besides outguessing a contestant on
The Price Is Right
.

Angie Bachmann’s father was a truck driver who had remade himself, midlife, into a semi-famous songwriter. Her brother had become a songwriter, too, and had won awards. Bachmann, on the other hand, was often introduced by her parents as “the one who became a mom.”

“I always felt like the untalented one,” she told me. “I think I’m smart, and I know I was a good mom. But there wasn’t a lot I could point to and say, that’s why I’m special.”

After that first trip to the casino, Bachmann started going to the riverboat once a week, on Friday afternoons. It was a reward for
making it through empty days, keeping the house clean, staying sane. She knew gambling could lead to trouble, so she set strict rules for herself. No more than one hour at the blackjack table per trip, and she only gambled what was in her wallet. “I considered it kind of like a job,” she told me. “I never left the house before noon, and I was always home in time to pick up my daughter. I was very disciplined.”

And she got good. At first, she could hardly make her money last an hour. Within six months, however, she had picked up enough tricks that she adjusted her rules to allow for two-or three-hour shifts, and she would still have cash in her pocket when she walked away. One afternoon, she sat down at the blackjack table with $80 in her purse and left with $530—enough to buy groceries, pay the phone bill, and put a bit in the rainy day fund. By then, the company that owned the casino—Harrah’s Entertainment—was sending her coupons for free buffets. She would treat the family to dinner on Saturday nights.

The state where Bachmann was gambling, Iowa, had legalized gambling only a few years earlier. Prior to 1989, the state’s lawmakers worried that the temptations of cards and dice might be difficult for some citizens to resist. It was a concern as old as the nation itself. Gambling “is the child of avarice, the brother of iniquity and the father of mischief,” George Washington wrote in 1783. “This is a vice which is productive of every possible evil.… In a word, few gain by this abominable practice,
while thousands are injured.”
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Protecting people from their bad habits—in fact, defining which habits should be considered “bad” in the first place—is a prerogative lawmakers have eagerly seized. Prostitution, gambling, liquor sales on the Sabbath, pornography, usurious loans, sexual relations outside of marriage (or, if your tastes are unusual, within marriage), are all habits that various legislatures have regulated, outlawed, or tried to discourage with strict (and often ineffective) laws.

When Iowa legalized casinos, lawmakers were sufficiently concerned that they limited the activity to riverboats and mandated that no one could wager more than $5 per bet, with a maximum loss of $200 per person per cruise. Within a few years, however, after some of the state’s casinos moved to Mississippi where no-limit gaming was allowed, the Iowa legislature lifted those restrictions. In 2010, the state’s coffers
swelled by more than $269 million from taxes on gambling.
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In 2000, Angie Bachmann’s parents, both longtime smokers, started showing signs of lung disease. She began flying to Tennessee to see them every other week, buying groceries and helping to cook dinner. When she came back home to her husband and daughters, the stretches seemed even lonelier now. Sometimes, the house was empty all day long; it was as if, in her absence, her friends had forgotten to invite her to things and her family had figured out how to get by on their own.

Bachmann was worried about her parents, upset that her husband seemed more interested in his work than her anxieties, and resentful of her kids who didn’t realize she needed them now, after all the sacrifices she had made while they were growing up. But whenever she hit the casino, those tensions would float away. She started going a couple times a week when she wasn’t visiting her parents, and then every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. She still had rules—but she’d been gambling for years by now, and knew the axioms that serious players lived by. She never put down less than $25 a hand and always played two hands at once. “You have better odds at a higher limit table than at a lower limit table,” she told me. “You have to be able to play through the rough patches until your luck turns. I’ve seen people walk in with $150 and win $10,000. I knew I could do this if I followed my rules. I was in control.”
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By then, she didn’t have to think about whether to take another card or double her bet—she acted automatically, just as Eugene Pauly, the amnesiac, had eventually learned to always choose the right cardboard rectangle.

One day in 2000, Bachmann went home from the casino with $6,000—enough to pay rent for two months and wipe out the credit card bills that were piling up by the front door. Another time, she walked away with $2,000. Sometimes she lost, but that was part of the game. Smart gamblers knew you had to go down to go up. Eventually, Harrah’s gave her a line of credit so she wouldn’t have to carry so much cash. Other players sought her out and sat at her table because she knew what she was doing. At the buffet, the hosts would let her go to the front of the line. “I know how to play,” she told me. “I know that sounds like somebody who’s got a problem not recognizing their problem, but the only mistake I made was not quitting. There wasn’t anything wrong with how I played.”

Bachmann’s rules gradually became more flexible as the size of her winnings and losses expanded. One day, she lost $800 in an hour, and then earned $1,200 in forty minutes. Then her luck turned again and she walked away down $4,000. Another time, she lost $3,500 in the morning, earned $5,000 by 1 p.m., and lost another $3,000 in the afternoon. The casino had records of how much she owed and what she’d earned; she’d stopped keeping track herself. Then, one month, she didn’t have enough in her bank account for the electricity bill. She asked her parents for a small loan, and then another. She borrowed $2,000 one month, $2,500 the next. It wasn’t a big deal; they had the money.

Bachmann never had problems with drinking or drugs or overeating. She was a normal mom, with the same highs and lows as everyone else. So the compulsion she felt to gamble—the insistent pull that made her feel distracted or irritable on days when she didn’t visit the casino, the way she found herself thinking about it all the time, the rush she felt on a good run—caught her completely off guard. It was a new sensation, so unexpected that she hardly knew it was a problem until it had taken hold of her life. In retrospect, it seemed like there had been no dividing line. One day it was fun, and the next it was uncontrollable.

By 2001, she was going to the casino every day. She went whenever she fought with her husband or felt unappreciated by her kids. At the tables she was numb and excited, all at once, and her anxieties grew so faint she couldn’t hear them anymore. The high of winning was so immediate. The pain of losing passed so fast.

“You want to be a big shot,” her mother told her when Bachmann called to borrow more money. “You keep gambling because you want the attention.”

That wasn’t it, though. “I just wanted to feel good at something,” she said to me. “This was the only thing I’d ever done where it seemed like I had a skill.”

By the summer of 2001, Bachmann’s debts to Harrah’s hit $20,000. She had been keeping the losses secret from her husband, but when her mother finally cut off the stipends, she broke down
and confessed. They hired a bankruptcy attorney, cut up her credit cards, and sat at the kitchen table to write out a plan for a more austere, responsible life. She took her dresses to a used clothing store and withstood the humiliation of a nineteen-year-old turning down almost all of them because, she said, they were out of style.

Eventually, it started to feel like the worst was over. Finally, she thought, the compulsion was gone.

But, of course, it wasn’t even close to the end. Years later, after she had lost everything and had ruined her life and her husband’s, after she had thrown away hundreds of thousands of dollars and her lawyer had argued before the state’s highest court that Angie Bachmann gambled not by choice, but out of habit, and thus shouldn’t bear culpability for her losses, after she had become an object of scorn on the Internet, where people compared her to Jeffrey Dahmer and parents who abuse their kids, she would wonder: How much responsibility do I actually bear?