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.