I’ve been working from home, on a computer, for 12 years now, and the autonomy my job affords has allowed me to sand all the rough edges from my routines. By most measures, I’m a model of health, efficiency and productivity. I spend every morning in undistracted, email-free “deep work”, and I long ago purged social media from my life. I maintain a steady sleep-wake schedule, exercise daily and home-cook most of my meals using whole foods. I’m married with children. I have friends, and I spend time with them. I travel and read books. None of this has allowed me, at 41, to avoid the gradual onset of mid-life melancholy, which I’ve come to believe is a consequence of my overly routinised way of life. I don’t think I have the wrong habits; I think I have too many of them. And they are suffocating me.
We have been living through the great reformation of personal optimisation. Bestsellers such as Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit and James Clear’s Atomic Habits preach the gospel of endless routine refinement. Improve your processes, these books argue, and a superior life product will be your reward — as though existence were no different from a Toyota assembly plant. Caught up in the self-improvement zeitgeist these books have helped foster, I believed that if I could perfect my routines — economising and optimising until all the parts of my life fit tidily into Marie Kondo-approved bins — contentment and prosperity would follow. And prosperity has followed. I have much to be thankful for. Still, something’s missing.
These days, every hour of my week feels programmed and all my thoughts scripted. Now I will work. Now I will relax. Now I will play soccer with my kids or watch Netflix or worry about my investments. The inertia of yesterday, and the day before, and the thousand days before that, has become a Newtonian force directing what I will do and think and feel (and not feel) next. The aperture of my experience has collapsed to a pinpoint. If my life had a soundtrack, it would be the eerie, propulsive thrum of Radiohead’s “Everything In Its Right Place”. I’m not depressed. “Stuck in a rut” feels closer to the truth, only this rut is so deep I can’t see over its sides. I think about that Beat lyric from “Mirror In The Bathroom” — “Drift gently into mental illness” — and imagine myself suspended in air, tethered to a balloon filled with my habits, floating towards trouble.
It seems to me that the life I’ve been living for more than a decade now — a life of homebound computer work, days gravid with routine and rendered mostly indistinguishable from one another by tech-abetted monotony — is where our species is headed. As some commentators pointed out at the time, pandemic lockdowns actualised trends that had been gaining momentum for years. Suddenly we were all living a life of remote work and home-delivered everything, spared the frictions and unpredictability of interpersonal contact, padded on all sides by our screens. I remember a comedian joking at the time that if the coronavirus were sentient, it might puzzle over our distress and ask, “But I thought this is what you wanted?” The lockdowns ended. Life returned to “normal”. But I don’t think our collective trajectory much changed.
Among my good friends, fully half now work from home. Few of them have been at it as long as I have, but I notice routine accreting on them like a second skin. When we talk or text, it’s usually about the same things and at the same times of day. Like me, they all seem to have a Truman Show-ish sense that something is off, that some essential aspect of life is missing or not sufficiently represented. I see them itching in their second skin, and I notice the ways they’re trying to slough it off. A couple have become exercise junkies. One has sworn off alcohol, another caffeine. One spent a week at an ayahuasca retreat in Peru, and one has started coaching his kids’ baseball and hockey teams, activities that get him out of the house six evenings a week. “If I didn’t have that,” he told me, “I’d blow my brains out.”
Midlife crises are nothing new, of course. It occurs to me that we’re all just walking, self-involved clichés. But I’ve been feeling off for quite a while now — since my mid-thirties, which is pretty young to encounter the drag of my middle years. It seems I’m part of a trend. Longitudinal surveys of Americans in their thirties have turned up steadily rising levels of despair that long preceded the pandemic and that cut across all the usual ethnic, rich-poor, urban-rural divides. There are doubtless many explanations for this, and they’re not mutually exclusive. There’s the plateauing of upward mobility. There are climate concerns and our many political and sociocultural ructions. But I wonder if routine overload — supported by our increasingly isolated, screen-suffused lifestyles — isn’t an under-appreciated contributor.
I have two brothers. One is an architect, and one is a data analyst. Like me, there was a time when they both worked in offices, commuting and mixing with colleagues and generally immersing themselves in the world’s activity. But now, like me, both work from home on computers. The products of our labours are very different, but in the eyes of that ever-handy alien looking down at us from space, the three of us all do the same thing. We rise and drink our coffee and maybe get a little exercise. We wash ourselves and put on our jeans and button-ups, and then we yoke ourselves to our screens. We don’t really mind the yoke because it is familiar, and there is safety and comfort in what we know.
“Routines make people feel at ease,” Judith Schomaker, an assistant professor in neuropsychology at Leiden University in the Netherlands, told me. “They’re a solid, safe base that we can return to and that make us feel comfortable.” Schomaker is a self-described “novelty researcher”, which is why I wanted to talk with her. In her lab, she explores how the brain responds to new experiences, and how these are beneficial — even essential — to our mental stability and cognitive functioning. Call it our novelty imperative. “Novelty is stimulating, and your brain needs this kind of stimulation to create new connections and remain flexible and healthy,” she said.
The more we talked, the more I began to think of new and challenging experiences as a sort of neurocognitive yoga, stretching and unstiffening the mind’s limbs. Schomaker pointed out that the older we get, the less explorative and more routine-oriented we tend to become, and that this may contribute to age-related memory loss and, potentially, the other cognitive deficits of old age. “We find that older adults who score high on measures of novelty seeking and openness to new experiences have higher cognitive reserve, which may protect them from age-related cognitive decline,” she said.
The prospect of routine-induced brain drain is incentive enough to spice things up. But what I’ve been feeling seems less like a weakening of my brain’s big muscles, or some other problem that would show up on an fMRI machine. It feels like ennui.
I look back on the past few years of my life, and I think some instinctual part of me recognised what was happening and began prodding me to do something about it. I’ve tried meditation. I’ve tried taking cold showers. Both provided a spark, but soon they were just two more elements of my routine, regulars added to my daily habit line-up. In 2021, my wife and I decided to uproot ourselves from Detroit and move overseas. We came up with a lot of sound, well-reasoned explanations for this decampment, but I think it boiled down to a post-lockdown spirit of YOLO.
We chose Freiburg, a university city in south-west Germany, because we’d spent time there and knew some people. My wife enrolled in a master’s programme at the university and is now working towards her doctorate. Her entire life has changed. But for me, despite all that is different, much remains the same. I still work alone on a computer eight hours a day. The chatter around me in coffee shops has changed, but the bulk of my time follows the same old script. I may have left my stuff back in Detroit, but I brought my routines with me.
Recently, I mentioned what I was feeling to a thoughtful buddy of mine. Gabe is a 44-year-old Canadian expat who trained to be a psychologist but now works as a tour guide. He’s living the least regimented, most spontaneous life of anyone I know. I mentioned some of the research I was looking into on routines and novelty, and he directed me away from modern neuroscience and towards philosophy, specifically the work of Martin Heidegger. Heidegger, I was amused to learn, lived right here in Freiburg. I was less amused to learn that, apart from being one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century, he was also a Nazi sympathiser.
I found Heidegger’s writings on habit instructive. He described the “everydayness” of routines, and how they can pull us away from more meaningful modes of existence. His work led me to the writings of Saint Augustine, who, almost 2,000 years earlier, expressed a bleaker view of habits. Those “miserable burdens”, he called them, that shackle us and prevent us from living a richer, more fulfilling life. He wrote of “the violence of habit by which even the unwilling mind is dragged down and held”.
While couched in less poetical language, I heard something similar when I spoke with Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, a professor of neuroscience and chair in humanistic psychology at the University of Southern California. “Novel experiences are really fundamental to the way we conceptualise ourselves,” she told me. “The memories they foster and our reflections on those memories over time become sources of meaning and purpose and self-understanding.” In essence, she told me that fresh experiences — especially when encountered alongside other people — don’t just keep the mind sharp; they give life heft and texture. They give us something worth holding on to.
As proof, she pointed out the flattening of time that many people experienced in the wake of pandemic lockdowns. While those dark days may have trudged along slowly while we were living them, many of us looked back on them afterward and felt as though the months had slipped by in a swift, monotonous blur.
This time-flattening phenomenon came up again when I met with Marc Wittmann, a psychologist and research fellow at the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health, located here in Freiburg. Wittmann has written books about how people perceive time’s passage. He pointed out that, as a rule, the rote and routine is unmemorable, and this unmemorableness truncates our retrospective sense of time. New experiences do just the opposite. “The classic example is you spend a weekend with friends in a novel place — let’s say you go to Paris — and then you get home Sunday night and think, wow, it feels like I’ve been away for so long,” he told me. “How we experience time is really all about memory, and memory is fundamentally built around novelty and changing experiences.”
The more I read and the more people I spoke with, the more I began to regard novelty as a kind of existential tonic. Without it, our interest in the world withers and we turn our attention inward, where all neuroses lurk.
Not long ago, my wife came home with an old edition of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. Flipping through it, I found its back pages contained an ad for a series of “Every-Day Help” handbooks, produced by the Walter Scott Publishing Co. of London. Along with titles like How to Do Business and Alcohol: Its Use and Abuse, one of the offerings was “Change” as a Mental Restorative. A little online digging revealed a Lancet paper of the same title, written by the same person and published in 1880.
The paper’s author, an English physician named Joseph Mortimer-Granville, described a human being’s need for novelty as axiomatic, but he argued that a simple change of scenery or habit was insufficient. To restore a flagging mind (or spirit), he wrote, a person must shift from “aimless automatic routine to activity with a purpose and an end”. Find something from your past that excites or challenges you — an old ambition, or even a prior embarrassment or failure — and take it up again, he counselled. Change your routines in a way that reconnects you with some lost or abandoned part of yourself. This struck me as better advice — truer — than the usual recommendations to try mindfulness or gardening or “forest bathing”.
It’s now 9pm on a Tuesday. Normally, I’d be spending this weeknight either watching TV or listening to a podcast. But tonight I’m working on the draft of a screenplay. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do but never have because it seemed like a waste of time, the odds of success too remote. Now I look at the enterprise differently. I’ve made other changes as well, most of them attempts to vary the rhythms of my day. I try to approach my work in new ways. I meet friends in unfamiliar places. These are tepid acts of anarchy against my old regime. I’m not bungee jumping on acid. (Not yet anyway.) Still, I am invigorated. The colours of my world are brighter, the products of my mind less predictable. I feel a bit like a prisoner who jostles the door of his cell and finds it was never locked.
It strikes me that engagement with one’s life, like any relationship, requires ongoing cultivation. It requires effort. The lesson, I think, isn’t that we need pack our days with new experiences, forcing ourselves to swim continually into unfamiliar waters. All the researchers I spoke with stressed the need for balance between the novel and the familiar. It’s that balance I lost and, hopefully, am beginning to find again. It occurs to me that in every language I know, “to be” is an irregular verb.
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