Zero Routine

[Cramulus]

   

I just moved out of ghetto-ass Yonkers, back to Connecticut. Yesterday was my first day of work since the move. 8 AM. The alarm blares and I slap it. And then I laid there. For the last two years, I've been living on the same schedule. Get up in the morning, do all this morning ritual jazz, then go to work. But at this new place, I don't have a routine yet. The body lacks a program for putting on coffee and brushing my teeth and jogging to the train. There is no train. I gotta start from scratch. I found it very liberating. My mental landscape is clear. The body does not miss its autopilot, the one I will be meticulously programming over the next few weeks. I arrived at work with a heightened sense of clarity. I went through my routine day, a little bit more relaxed than usual, then went home. And then...? Thinking For Yourself? what a shmuck I am For me, the reminder of the day is that Thinking For Yourself and self awareness are also products of what you physically do with your body. Consciousness isn't just in the mind. Your awareness is spread out over everything your mind touches. Change the context and you change the mind. Or at least give it an opportunity to escape those rituals, the architecture of routine, which we love so dearly. Best, Cramulus

[LMNO]

[AFK]

I hate being stuck in my routine.  Yet, it seems necessary so that my daughter makes the bus, and that my wife and I make it to work by 8 AM.  Many times I can almost watch myself, outside of my body, machinating and moving like a machine.  I can almost see the rods and gears attached to my arms, as I put my lunch together, as I put my daughter's lunch together, as I get breakfast ready... 

Everything done around more or less the same time.  Oh, it's 6:10, time to pour the Trix Cereal.  Now it's 6:30, snuggle time with the wife.  6:50, LWHN needs to get dressed and I need to start the coffee machine.  7:10, time to get in the car and go, go, go....

Sometimes I will be a "maverick" and do things 5 minutes earlier, or later, but it is just a shell game I'm playing.  The routine is still the same.  I hate having to be robotic but I feel like there is no other option that will yield the necessary results. 

And when I finally do retire at 75, the kids long gone from the house....I will still have the routine.  It's 7 AM, time for the purple pill...

[Captain Utopia]

It's hard to resist the path of least resistance.

So I don't try. I let the rods and gears attached to my arms crunch away and pay as little attention to it as possible, it frees time to think. Rote conversations are another opportunity that life frequently provides, to autopilot while plotting other more fun thoughts. Sometimes there are surprises in the form of "I agreed to WHAT, now?" - but isn't that a small price to pay to be master of my attention?

And what do I spend all this freed up time thinking upon? About how I could break out of these routines, any time I please. About how the perfect moment has not arrived yet, and about how I need to make my escape plan just that little bit more complex and time-consuming, to utterly succeed. And don't bother counting the years as they scream by.

But now that I write it down, I see that I'm a god-damn idiot. Yet my illusion is so comforting, and I see no viable alternative, so I'm just going to choose to forget these doubts and rest back in its comforting embrace just as soon as I hit "post"...

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

The routine is efficient. Autopilot saves work, and is generally more or less about as good as being self-aware from the perspective of someone whose main goal is survival. If the routine was not useful, it would not be so universal.

In situations when the routine is DANGEROUS, we get kicked out of it by our autonomic nervous system and stuck into fight or flight mode, which is (if you are a soldier, a police officer, trained in martial arts, or something I haven't mentioned) probably yet another programmed routine, but one that requires less thought. In situations when a change of routine is necessary, we do change it -- obviously Cram didn't go to the nonexistent train, and even if he did, he couldn't ride it because it doesn't exist.

The routine isn't bad -- this is my point. It's not great either, but there is nothing WRONG with having one. It becomes a problem when we cannot break from it under any circumstances without major problems -- rather than immediately realizing that we can sleep in a bit, take the bus rather than the train, etc., we get up at the normal time and go looking for the train station only to realize after ten or fifteen minutes that we are in a different city.

[Captain Utopia]

The routine isn't bad -- this is my point. It's not great either, but there is nothing WRONG with having one. It becomes a problem when we cannot break from it under any circumstances without major problems -- rather than immediately realizing that we can sleep in a bit, take the bus rather than the train, etc., we get up at the normal time and go looking for the train station only to realize after ten or fifteen minutes that we are in a different city.

If hating the fact you follow routine makes you less likely to become psychologically dependent upon it, then of course there is something WRONG with having a routine.

But keep hating yourself for following it because god damn we need more widgets.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

You needn't hate your routine; you just need to remember that it isn't the only (or best) one. Same way that it doesn't help to hate your BIP. You have one, and it can be useful if you use it effectively.

[The Johnny]

For me,
the reminder of the day
is that Thinking For Yourself and self awareness are also products of what you physically do with your body. Consciousness isn't just in the mind. Your awareness is spread out over everything your mind touches. Change the context and you change the mind. Or at least give it an opportunity to escape those rituals, the architecture of routine, which we love so dearly.

Moving to a new apartment or house (city or country too) at first was a way that shook me up and it wasnt by my choice... but now that i can make some decisions, ive enjoyed the habit of changing where i live every 6 months to year and a half.

This is helpful in the sense that one doesnt stagnate and has reevaluate time-management.

On another angle: "routine" can be interpreted as a set of categories of time-usage... and those categories can be either very narrow or as wide as the universe.

Your routine could be "get ready", "do something productive" and  "have fun/ relax" througought the day, and those are sufficiently ambiguous "tasks" that it doesnt become constraint.

"Get ready" could range from putting anything at hand that is on the floor currently... or it could mean to get all dressed up... doing something productive could be work or stuyding, or could also be cleaning the disaster zone known as your home... having fun can be as varying as having a 12 day nap to going out to wherever...

The ambiguity of routine is what makes it tolerable, id say.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I like routine. A good one keeps me productive in a way I approve of. A bad one can be broken.