I used to think I had strong enough discipline to beat my environment. I don't. The evidence is mine: bring my phone into the bedroom, and I'll always find a reason to reach for it — reading about Buddhism, a programming concept, a podcast with some distinguished engineer. All good reasons on their face. All disturb my sleep and keep my mind in work mode instead of rest mode.
Same pattern after work. I'd tell myself: stop learning at 9 pm, go to bed. One more hour creeps in, then another. Yes, that extra hour makes me more productive. But I pay it back — always. The environment is part of me, and my habits reflect that environment. Self-development books say this constantly. I read it, agreed with it, and still thought I was the exception — that my willpower could override it. I was wrong. This is not a fair game, and I eventually lose to it.
I did try changing the environment: phone further from the bed, hard stop at 9 pm, phone off during work. It didn't last — I got overconfident, decided I didn't need the guardrails anymore, and relapsed.
What's helping me understand why now comes from studying Buddhism seriously over the past three weeks — reading and working through difficult concepts with AI. I used to misread sīla (giới) as a negative constraint, a rule that forces you to fight and suppress your emotions. That's wrong. The reason the Buddha taught not to break sīla — to reduce the chances of breaking it — is that otherwise you spend significant time dwelling on it in your mind, and if your mind is dwelling on it, you can't meditate. If you can't meditate, you don't get to wisdom. That's why it's Giới, Định, Tuệ, in that order — Giới first.
This applies to idle time too. When I have free time, and my mind gets bored, the default reflex is to reach for the phone, the laptop, the digital world. So now, instead of reaching, I ask: what's the simplest thing I can do right now to simplify my current environment, so this bad habit has less room to arise? I keep asking that question and acting on it — again and again — until the environment is shaped enough that the habit is almost impossible to trigger.
It's the same with environment. The point isn't to build a stronger will to resist bad habits once they arise. It's to design the environment so those habits have less chance to arise in the first place.
