What Self-Optimisers Get Wrong About Habit

Liberating order from the grindset

The other day I was out running with the dog, on a familiar route, on a day I usually go running, and it hit me that my everyday life has become remarkably structured. I have some form of flexible pattern not just for exercise but a ton of other practical aspects of life, and most of them are deliberately cultivated: forms that I’ve settled on iteratively, over time, as both sustainable and sustaining.

This put me in mind of a frantic-sounding note I saw a little while ago on the Substack website, from a young woman who sounds as though she’s in the early stages of a burnout:

The poster, Olive, sets herself against “routine” because, to her, it connotes “productivity” and self-optimisation: the managerial-capitalist automation of human life through scheduling, ordered to maximum efficiency. From this she seems to have concluded that the only possible path of escape is to oppose routine as such.

Even looking at the calendar Olive has shared, I can see why she’s freaking out. It made me feel panicky and it’s not even my schedule! I’ve tried programming myself that tightly, and while maybe there people who can live that way for extended periods of time, I was not one of them. But from boring middle age, and my very structured life, my message to Olive is this: you’re not being unreasonable to want to mutiny against that degree of insanely oppressive structure. In your shoes I’d want to burn everything down as well. But you’re mistaken that the problem is routine as such: the problem is routine plus grindset.

Routine itself is good, actually. It’s better than good: for those who enjoy thinking, and especially for those inclined to living poetically, it’s the enabling condition for having the space and energy to do so. For this group in particular, too, it’s one of the main ways, other than scrolling toward the divine, that you can cultivate pattern recognition as a cognitive mode in its own right. But to grok this you have to liberate routine from the hell of grindset, and the pay-to-play programmes of self-optimisation gurus, and re-order it to its proper purpose: mental freedom, and (optionally) contemplating the divine order.