Routine

I’m traveling this week. This means daily tasks, such as writing to this blog, are more difficult and have to be more deliberately approached. I’m driven by routine, as a general matter, and predictability and structure is helpful to create discipline. Discipline fosters predictability and progress. It enables introspection, optimization and planning and solving complex problems over long time horizons.

(As an aside, as I think about my year of creation, having dedicated creating time on a daily basis is the only input that’s “worked” thus far to beget creativity.)

However I’ve noticed that routine also begets stagnation and rot.

From a productivity standpoint, staying home in San Francisco and structuring my day the same way and seeing the same people, I continue to make progress along one axis - for example one development path, or validating one project idea - but breaking out of the perspective of that axis is much more difficult.

From a motivational standpoint, routine also runs the risk of begetting engine stall, cruising or slowing pace without an odometer to know the precise degree and timing of change in pace. One of my flaws is that I have a tendency to shut down in the face of adversity - to put my head down and power through difficulty and solve problems on my own. Routine is the trickster devil which invisibly reinforces this flaw. Sitting in my living room, staring at problems, looking at the world in a one dimensional way, I am wont to settle into framings of myself (and my willpower) vs the problem. A sort of one versus one framing of reality, as though I were in an epic duel against some cosmic force called “whatever I’m thinking about at that time,” rather than being able to take the real perspective that our reality is a chaotic marketplace in which any number of problems exist and any variation of approaches and any set of prospective allies and foes exist within the unknown fog of war.

Routine and disruption exist in tension with one another. Maybe the right way to think about it is that routine helps achieve local maxima optimizations but only disruption and external stimulation (from new locales, people, experiences) make it possible to break out of a local region and set me up for a higher peak to aim.

It’s ironic that when I’m home and in my routine I am aversive to the thought of breaking routine and avoid it as much as possible. “But the cost. And the time.”

But once I hit the road, in most instances, on my return I’m reinvigorated, have a new thread to tug on, or have had the space to realize the thread I was following is but a false siren song.

I’ve been in a headspace of stagnation the last few weeks. Having recently finished the second version of my Hotshot project, which somehow grew to be the only object of my year of creation in Q1, I’ve come to a place I’ve learned to dread: having completed something and achieved a difficult thing I now feel empty and sad.

This is not the way things are supposed to be, I think. People are supposed to feel happy and fulfilled when they accomplish a goal. They are supposed to feel more happy and more fulfilled proportionally to how difficult and ambitious the goal is. This is not the way that I am. I feel empty, sad and lost having accomplished a thing.

I was an avid reader as a child, and one of my favorites was Mary Stewart’s Merlin Trilogy. A thing Merlin says many times, not quite this way, I can’t exactly remember, is something like “you can’t demand the message from the Gods, all you can do is bare your chest and put yourself in the path of their arrow.”

Maybe this trip is coming at the perfect time. Here I am, naked and exposed. May I be violently shaken and thrown off course and see a new higher mountain the peak of which I cannot even see. Until then I’ll keep trudging along in my daily practice.