The mundanity trap
Consistency produces dividends. It also represses sentience.
“At a certain age — there comes a time when life largely consists of having meals with old friends who are passing through town.”
— Gabrielle Zevin in “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow”
Consistency has long been heralded as a foundational virtue of man; a trait that pinpoints purpose and unlocks goals.
And yet over time, I’ve come to see its more threatening side. As a conduit to complacency, a barrier to change. Or worse, a ticket to mundanity.
In the novel “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow,” Gabrielle Zevin winks at the trappings of middle age. How rudimentary plans that revolve around “getting together” over dinner require weeks, if not months, notice. How friends slowly evaporate from the equation, replaced first by a spouse, and later by offspring.
Weddings have a funereal aspect to them in this regard, in that they can mark the transition in which a life diffused among a broad circle of people is ceremoniously winnowed down to one.
“I forgot how young you are,” Dov tells Sadie in T&T&T. “You’re still at the age where you mistake your friends and your colleagues for family.”
“When you have children, you’ll never be able to worry about a friend as much again.”
A natural corollary of life’s maturation is regimentation. Process is what allows the hours afforded to be efficiently governed.
In the popular book “Atomic Habits,” author James Clear emphasizes the importance of systems over goals. While goals provide you direction; your system is what enables the progress.
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s saying that the journey is paramount to the destination has cemented into modern day self-help catechism.
The Monday morning spin class, followed by the Starbucks run to tee up the first Zoom meeting before a push through email bleeds into lunch, which has been scrupulously meal-prepped in order to make your weekly 2 p.m.
The kids are dropped off by the nanny at 5, so dinner must plate before 7 to get them tucked in by 9 to allow for a final round of email and gratuitous scrolling as the clock turns 11.
Memorial Day in the Hamptons again? Booked. Our favorite french bistro on the bay? Resy’d for six at 8. The Monday night commute back? As tedious as remembered.
Double cleanse. Retinol. Moisturize. Bed.
Wake up. Work out. Make money. Repeat.
The journey?
“It’s all just a cycle of violence and defeat,” quips a hedge fund manager in the HBO show, “Industry. Its writers did not heed Emerson’s ethos.
Routines make sense and often produce dividends.
But as I’ve been trudging through my own series of systems and methods, however haphazardly, I’ve been nagged by the sense that they’re innately incarcerating.
That an obsession with routine constrains chance, discovery and excitement. That I should be seeking to find ways to break routine, with intention.
The options to sever the cycle are infinite. The opportunities, realistically are few — if you care about keeping your world intact.
The purchase of the six-figure sports car, the midlife career switch, the illicit affair: