The Underrated and Overrated Series: 3 - THE ROUTINE

“Routine” is in many countries -including the U.S.- almost a bad word. It represents something dangerous that can ruin relationships, destroy dreams and waste lives. Even the strongest love can fade away as a result of long-term exposure to the R-Word.

The association between routine and unhappiness is widespread and largely encouraged by the media. How many times have we read or seen the story of the decent but dull guy who lives a routinary life that makes him miserable, cranky, obsessive-compulsive and destined to die alone; until one day, an energetic and adventurous girl comes to liberate him from his monotony, making him feel alive for the first time and transforming him in a better and happier person? A routinary life -they teach us- is unfulfilled, lonely, unexciting… sad.

One thing is true about all those Hollywood stories. Routine may be one of the biggest contributors to depression and life-long unhappiness in the developed world. But that’s not because routine is a natural source of suffering that we should try to minimize; quite the opposite. Our daily routine should be by far the biggest source of enjoyment in our lives. The problem is that routine is way underrated, so people don’t pay enough attention to it.

When I read holiday letters, those state of the union addresses for families that Americans enjoy mailing along with portraits of their kids and dogs around Christmas time, I always notice how focused on special events they are. It’s all about the special vacation the family had in Hawaii, the special birthday party the kids enjoyed so much, or the special Thanksgiving Day dinner that Grandma attended. As a result, the letter that was supposed to describe a year in the life of Family X, ends up describing only 10 or 20 extraordinary days.

This is understandable because the authors may believe that only exceptional events constitute interesting news for their audience. But, as a reader who actually wants to know how my friends and their families are doing, I wish people would focus more on their normal days, their average moments, their real life. For example, I would like to receive holiday letters titled “A regular day in the life of Family X during 2008”. That would tell me a lot more about how they are really doing.

Our special days may constitute the headline news for friends and acquaintances, but they don’t really represent our life or our level of happiness. Our average day does. Happiness, as I see it, requires either an unbelievable amount of good luck, or a life-long commitment of time and energy to improve our average day. And only 5% of our average day is made of special occasions, the other 95% is just plain routine.

The day I realized all this I woke up with a slight back pain. Some deformed coil springs in my old, cheap mattress were to blame. This wasn’t unusual, but the pain was never bad and I had bigger problems in mi life, so getting rid of this minor annoyance was not a priority for me. On this particular morning, however, I woke up wiser, or at least less stupid and instead of letting the backache fade away with my morning coffee, I jumped out of bed and said to myself (I think I actually said it out loud):

–What the hell am I doing? I spend 8 hours per day, one third of my life, lying on this damn bed!--

I had no money whatsoever, since the Nasdaq had imploded a few months before, but on the afternoon of that same day I used my emergency credit card to buy the best mattress and box spring I could find in the Pittsburgh market.

Constantly improving our average day certainly means big ticket items like finding the right person to share your life with, or choosing the right career path; but also means promoting those little things that make us happy on a daily basis and getting rid of repetitive annoyances, even if individually they seem insignificant.

For many people, however, is a lot easier to make sacrifices aimed at special occasions than routinary stuff.

A few months ago, I realized that I didn’t like the computer monitor I had at work. It was a 17-inch bulky, low resolution CRT. So I requested a new larger one. When the bank refused to pay for it, I immediately went to Amazon and ordered a fancy 24-inch HP LCD anyway.

Since then, almost everyone who passes by my desk stops immediately and stares at the device. They are usually impressed with the size, the clarity of the image and the way it fits several documents at the same time. Everyone one wants one too. So I tell them:

-It makes all the sense of the world. You spend at least 6 hours a day looking at that thing! You should get one too!-

They totally agree. After a couple of minutes they get all excited and are ready to go wherever they have to go to make the request. Then I tell them:

-I paid for it you know?-

After that, it usually takes them no more than ten seconds to lose all the excitement, and get back to work. I know a lot of these workmates are willing to spend hundreds or thousands in a fancy grill to be used only during summer weekends. But a monitor for the office for daily use? Forget about it!

Our life can’t be just summer weekends, so our goal shouldn’t be to get rid of the routine in our life, but to use most of our energy, our resources and our time to constantly improve it. We will never be able to perfect it. Circumstances will keep changing and our routine will have to be adjusted accordingly.

But this is a worthwhile and rewarding effort. When I look back at the last year of of my life, if you ask me which specific days contributed more to my overall satisfaction, I guess I could answer it was the New Year’s Eve I enjoyed in Barcelona, or the four nights I spent in Florence, or the day I visited a spa in the hotsprings near Padua. But I would be lying. Those days may have been good and in intense, but in the overall picture, they don’t add too much.

The right answer is probably the forty eight Sundays I didn’t spend in Europe, the normal ones. The Sundays I spent most likely at my condo in Shadyside, alone or not, drinking Spanish wine, listening to Bach, eating 8 oz top sirloins from Omaha Steaks and reading the New York Times... those repetitive, simple and almost perfect moments that many would call “routine”.