In our house, I’m up first. Do a bit of work. Then Daughter Number Four gets up and demands toast. Then Herself gets up and there’s breakfast, dressing, walking to school. Come back, do a bit more work. Daughters Two and/or Three may appear to ask what day it is, then go back to bed. I shower, head into work. Come home. Dinner. Bit of telly. Bed. Wake up and repeat.
That’s the routine; one that has come to feel acutely routiney over the past two years.
I’m not here to slag off routines; well, not entirely. They are useful, and for children, extremely important. But they can have a deadening effect, a sense that there are countless similar days, stretching off in both directions.
Your self-help book will tell you that a routine can be an inhibiting force in your life. It can engender a fear of change or a swamping ennui that crushes creativity. Jailed within your own habits, you become robot-like.
So, make some changes: but that’s easier said than done. The bins still have to be put out. The clothes don’t iron themselves. We are, to an extent, not trapped so much by routine as responsibility. Change might be nice for you, but it will affect other people.
Game of life
Sometimes, I feel all these things. Occasionally, I feel bored out of my mind with my own life, even though, by any objective measure, my life is pretty good. And anyway, in those moments I couldn’t tell you what is missing or what should be added to my life to make it better: then I feel ashamed and resentful for feeling that way at all.
Sometimes I can get tired with my routine. But other times I value it beyond reason
The resentment comes from my suspicion that discontent is embedded in our culture, and that it’s been that way for decades. The average person, in the course of an average day, is exposed to thousands of adverts. Radio. TV. Online. Newspapers. Buses. Trains. Walls. You are seconds away from the next one. You probably don’t notice the vast majority of them, yet it must have a cumulative effect: there are better things you could have. There’s a better way you could be. A low-level dissatisfaction, nagging you thousands of times a day. Every day of your life.
And along with that discontent is a new thing: a growing sense of uncertainty. Maybe it’s been there all the time, but it only became apparent to me during the pandemic. The unpredictability of the virus has made calculations about when we get back to normal close to impossible. Right now, it feels like we’re just hoping for the best.
Shifting trends
But that uncertainty extends to far more than Covid. There’s climate change and shifting political and economic trends altering the way our world is structured. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to tell what’s true or performative. Everyone accuses everyone else of being dishonest or deluded. The middle ground of reasonableness is hacked away.
A couple of weeks ago an American TV commentator named Candace Owens suggested that the US should invade Australia, on the basis that Covid restrictions there had turned Australians into "an oppressed people suffering under a totalitarian regime". It followed protests outside the Australian consulate in New York aimed at "saving" Australia.
Her comments were notable enough to be widely reported, yet without any gasps of amazement. Bonkers stuff like this has become increasingly mainstream. The factual and the fantastical must be afforded equal weight. Any set of facts can have opposite meanings. The uncertainty isn’t just about the future, but the very nature of reality.
Sometimes I can get tired with my routine. But other times I value it beyond reason. Because it’s a rare day when I don’t think that the world outside has gone completely mad. Routine is a bulwark against that. Routine can’t be misinterpreted or assigned sinister motives. It is a concrete truth, borne of practicality and love. It might be boring, but bore me up.