Good morning.
I only got about four hours of sleep, so if this is brief, or sloppy, please forgive me. I’ll do my best.
It’s Monday again, and after writing and streaming everyday last week, I’m losing interest in both. It’s really hard for me to do the same thing day in and day out for more than a week. I have no idea how people work the same job for 20+ years. It’s crazy to me. I want to say there’s a quote that goes something like, “variety is the spice of life”?
I’ve also read, and heard, that routines can help people with mental health issues since routines provide us with some structure, and that structure helps us feel like we’re on track. Who wants to live their life on a track anyway? Only set in one direction, only making one loop every so often? Not me.
Today, I’d like nothing more than to nap a little, which I will try to do after this and before my stream. I don’t know if I’m going to keep streaming heroes because it seems like there are already several established streamers for that game, but I don’t know what else to stream. I’m doing my best to write everyday this week, but today I don’t feel like I’ve got the juice.
Repeating the same day, over and over again, may give some people comfort, but I think it only gives comfort to non-creative types, likely without hobbies. Honestly, think about it like this. If you got, I don’t know, $3,000 a month, or (despite being revolutionary) lived in a world where we didn’t have money, would you do what you do for work if you didn’t get paid for it? Even if you would, what else would you do, knowing you weren’t a slave for 40+ hours a week?
On the work related subreddits I read, and other sources online, most people who argue for long working hours claim that they wouldn’t do anything else, or that they’d be bored without work. You’re those non-creative types I mentioned, or people who don’t have hobbies. You don’t have an existence outside of that which has been chosen and mandated for you? It’s sad that there isn’t more creativity in our race, since we are so advanced in it, compared to other life on Earth.
It’s sad that we create jobs that robots could do, to satisfy robotic human interests. “Sign these papers so we know our money is being spent the right way.” Well don’t give me the damn money if you don’t trust me to spend it the right way, but if you’ve given it to me and said you trust me to use it right, then fuck off with the meaningless paperwork that stops me from doing the thing you hired me to do. Clocking in-and-out of a job is the worst. They hired you. THEY HIRED YOU. Then they say, nope we don’t trust you, use this machine to tell us when you’re here and not, instead of just agreeing to work 32 hours this week, and actually working 32 hours this week. It’s a weird distrust and disrespect, and it shouldn’t happen to civilized human beings.
Perhaps, if more people had more time to explore their passions, people would find things they truly loved. Perhaps depression and anxiety wouldn’t be so rampant. Perhaps, instead of murdering each other for imaginary numbers in a bank account, we’d actually feel free to pursue happiness in life.
If you weren’t stuck in your daily routine today, what would you do? Read? Write? Make art? Spend more time with your kids? More time with your friends? Your family? Would you take time to invent something new? To learn something new? How much better could you make yourself, and the world, if you didn’t have work today? Maybe you’d sack out and play games all day, but if that makes you happier than working, why don’t you do it more often? Because this world doesn’t care if you’re happy or not.
Routine is one way that the mainstream asserts control over human lives. You can’t go protest if you’re working 40 hours a week, you don’t have the energy or time to organize communities for change. Hell, some people can’t even vote because they work so much, in a country that prides itself on being a Dumbocracy. Yeah, I said Dumbocracy, because voting for leaders is a popularity contest, and that’s a really stupid way to pick someone to make decisions that impact billions of other people. We got told that in elementary school before student council elections, but it feels like no one listened, and I doubt anyone remembers.
Routines are what computer programs execute, over and over again, we are not robots, and as far as we know, we aren’t in a simulation. However, if you play No Man’s Sky, get ready for some mind-fuckery in regards to that, because that games explores some of those themes.
Routines identify you as a cog in the machine that is the world. A machine that manufactures suffering, injustice, inequality, and inhumanity. Do you really want to be a part of that? The machine is broken, it’s doing lots of things that it knows it shouldn’t but no one will turn it off. We can’t turn it off while it’s running all these routines. We can’t stop it, so that we can fix it, because the gears keep turning thanks to all the cogs that are “working as intended”.
I write, so that I can break the machine. I write so that maybe I throw enough cogs out of place that gears begin to grind, and the evil work of the machine as we know it can come to a halt. So I’m tired, I have lots of writing to do for Dungeons and Dragons games, I’m going to keep trying to stream, and create content, things that only help people feel happiness. I’m going to keep writing here nearly daily, because that’s my effort to break other cogs out of their routines that keep the world turning, and into routines that slam on the brakes so that one day, perhaps, we can fix the awful engine we’ve created.
You are not a robot. You do not exist to complete routines. You exist to live, spontaneously, positively, creatively, honestly, and naturally.
