Melt into Routine

Sunday I do my laundry, because Sunday is laundry day. It really isn’t an event; it doesn’t even take all day. It was though, at one time, an event. I did think about doing laundry. I planned my weekend around it, the hour and a half that it takes me to do laundry. I thought about when I could go to the gym, when I could do schoolwork, when I could play videogames, when I could eat my lunch, my breakfast and how all that activity would coalesce around the hour and a half that I needed to do my laundry. I would get nervous about my laundry. “Will there be open machines?” I would wonder. “Will I have enough quarters?” I would ask.

Surely this is not pleasurable. Obviously this is not exciting. But, for whatever reason, doing my laundry, more specifically planning the activity of doing my laundry, was amusing to me. I could occupy a good twenty to thirty minutes of my Friday nights – when I tend to plan and structure my weekend activities like a tweaking Obsessive-Compulsive – thinking about what time I would have to leave my room with my laundry basket, enter the elevator and make my way to the laundry room.

Then, after a few years of conditioning, a few years of horrible habituation, this amusement disappeared. The novelty of this responsibility blended into the monotony of my daily routine.

I have what amounts to a morbid curiosity into psychology. Human behavior and the study of it is ceaselessly interesting. But I always seem to stumble across things like this.

Have you ever watched a toddler walk? A three year old who recently learned how to propel himself forward with nothing more than his own two feet seems to experience some kind of unearthly, irrepressible joy unmatched by any human experience. These kids literally laugh with each chaotic bound that they take. Their bouncing faces, jerking to and fro, cannot stop smiling.

Then watch their parents. Eyes forward and faces unchanged, these older, wiser humans roll forward with a mechanical certainty. There is no chaos, only perfectly timed, joyless, heel-to-toe stepwise motion.

And what’s the difference? Sure, the parents have seen the harsh realities of the world around them, understood them and ultimately accepted them. The positive affect of the toddler was slowly eroded by a jaded, utilitarian cynicism in which the only two aspects of life worth discussing are death and taxes. But that isn’t all of it.

Humans have an incredible ability to adapt. It’s what got us through millions of years of evolution. Any challenge, any hardship was addressed, solved and overcome. The difficulties were moved past. But, in that process of adaptation, even the good things, the exciting things, the entertaining things, are worth adapting to. Even happiness must find a static equilibrium. It’s why lottery winners are no happier than the rest of us. It’s why stunning Hollywood stars get divorced. It’s why Southern Californians are somehow able to complain about the weather. It’s how New Yorkers can still be bored.

It’s why even the wondrous and majestic phenomenon of bipedal walking, a phenomenon virtually unique to humans and our close relatives, somehow becomes routine. Even the tiny amusement I found in planning my laundry schedule became mundane.

The foods we relish, the activities we enjoy, the people we love, these things don’t lose their luster. They don’t suddenly become unappealing or dull. We just get used to them. It’s us. It’s us. We are the problem. We get used to the new thing, be it pleasurable or non; we package it up; we find a place for it in our routine. And we do this for no other reason than that we are human beings and this seems to be what human beings are predisposed to do.

The solution is simple: run from routine. Are the covers on your bed too warm, too stifling? Rip them off and let the winter air invigorate your body! Get out of bed and seek adventure in the cold.

But there are problems. The first is that, being the adaptable being that you are, you may even be able to acclimate yourself to that previously invigorating cold air. The excitement disappears simply because you get used to it. Can’t even seeking out adventure become yet another monotonous routine?

The second is that, well, the warm bed is pretty nice. That’s why you were in it in the first place. And, well, it’s pretty hard to get out of that nice, warm bed, even with an enticing adventure laid out ahead of you.

Can there be a balance? Maybe the bed exists so that we can fully enjoy the cold breeze, and the breeze exists so that we can survive the bed without succumbing to suicide out of boredom. And that’s life? That’s happiness? Finding some mathematical balance between monotony and excitement, just enough of the exciting stuff to keep us from going mental from the monotony of it all, but not too much because we might soon find it to be boring.

A hurricane is coming to my city over the next few days. I’ll be the one sitting outside on the park bench, watching trees bend in the gusts and soaking in the adventure.