What's your routine?

It sucks when things don't go your way, but that's how life works right? I spent hours talking to my closest friends last night about how we want our lives to be. Our conversation focused on a common theme present in movies like Office Space, Yes Man, and Fight Club. It's a theme about breaking free of an uneventful cycle that people make their lives. It seems a natural characteristic of human beings to create routines and stick to them, everything becomes easier the more you do it, so why not make life easier by always doing the same thing?

We talked for a long time about how to avoid the endless cycle of boredom that was developed when corporate America began capitalizing on the world to the extent that individuals became irrelevant. People locked into jobs working in tiny cubicles for the entirety of their brief existence in this world.

After two hours of sitting in a dark rubber surfaced playground at a local elementary school I was stuck on the idea that to some extent we all have to routinize our lives. For all of us we have an expectation to fulfill are parents dreams. Our parents sacrificed and worked hard to give us an opportunity to learn and grow at college, and unlike Alexander Supertramp the main character in Into the Wild, we have no compulsion to abandon our parents and their sacrifices. Thus we don't have the freedom to leave our education and our cars and our computers and ipods and cell phones behind and walk into the woods. We are bound by a responsibility to our parents to become somebody. To live in society.

So how do we appease our parents and still find enjoyment? Can we at least be content in this world? We have to accept routines. And our means for enjoyment can come from the ways that we break those routines when we can.

My final thought before the booze and weed flowing in my blood system lured me off to the simple minded place of Royal Donuts was this: so long as we continue to find enjoyment and pleasure from living our lives, repetition and routines are something to live by. For the most part we can live in this society of routines and avoid the pitfalls of Peter Gibbons, Tyler Durden, and Carl Allen. However, when I find that I am no longer satisfied with the routines that are my life, you can come looking for me in the woods. Maybe we will find some tragic ending to life like Mr. Supertramp that will make it all worthwhile.