 While habits incorporate purposes and socially meaningful ideas, they operate beneath the actor’s consciousness. Once people have learned how to achieve some purpose through habit or skill, they no longer need to tend to what they are doing. Habits, by receding from awareness, conserve people’s reflective resources, make their activity fluid, and enable them to reliably produce results in stable environments. People’s habits embody their characters (HNC 33–43, 50–2).