"Routine" is often seen as boring. Imagine Mr. M, an office worker who works Monday to Friday, returns home with little time for a hobby that barely progresses, meets friends on Fridays, and by the weekend, his laundry basket overflows along with dishes in the sink and countless household chores and life burdens. Each day passes in this way until years have flown by. Mr. M wonders, "Why is life so boring? I face the same things every day in a routine with nothing challenging or exciting at all."
The word "routine," meaning "repeated habitual actions," first appeared in 1792. It evolved from the word "route," which originally described regular paths used for daily transport by animals, gradually expanding from peddler deliveries to daily milk and newspaper routes. "Routine" thus came to mean activities we repeat daily at set times, encompassing not only menial or household chores but also regular work.
Certainly, doing everything as a routine is considered boring. Even physically, we feel bored because without encountering anything exciting, dopamine is not released to make us alert or thrilled. Human survival instincts naturally crave novelty to find new shelters and food sources. However, modern humans have changed drastically: we have homes, food, and medicine. Our survival instincts have diminished since technology, culture, and work became integral to life cycles, dating back to civilization’s start after the Stone Age when hunting was no longer necessary.
Since humans developed civilization and culture, the concept of routine has arisen through various terms and phenomena, such as the Buddhist cycle of rebirth or Western ideas of cyclical existence where everything repeats like the rising and setting sun.
But how can life feel meaningful if everything repeats without a clear purpose?
We cannot avoid the story of "Sisyphus," king of Ephyra or Corinth. After exposing Zeus’s abduction of Aegina to the river god Asopus, Sisyphus was punished by Zeus with immortality and the endless task of pushing a massive boulder uphill. Each time it reached the summit, it rolled back down to be pushed up again. In reality, immortality is a terrifying curse because being immortal makes all our actions feel even more meaningless.
The story of Sisyphus has become a humorous meme among philosophy students, but the pathos of Sisyphus has also spread on social media because many feel they share his fate. People liken life to pushing a giant boulder uphill only to have it fall again, much like household chores, work, or life itself.
Sisyphus is central to Albert Camus’s existentialist essay "The Myth of Sisyphus," which addresses life’s search for meaning. Camus focused on suicide as a key philosophical problem: deciding whether life is worth living is a profound human question because we crave goals and meaning while the world remains indifferent and silent.
Camus argued we should not commit suicide if we see life as meaningless, calling it cowardly and a superficial solution. He also rejected the "leap of faith" into religion, belief systems, or afterlife ideas, considering them irrational illusions embraced only to comfort ourselves.
Camus proposed facing the meaningless universe head-on, accepting there is no grand purpose, yet still living inspired. We should not flee reality but rebel against it through how we live, like Sisyphus accepting his fate to push the rock eternally. Hence, the famous phrase: "The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy." Though the world is chaotic, it is not worthless. We can create life’s meaning through resilience, inspiration, and determination not to surrender to despair.
Like social media memes say, our lives truly resemble Sisyphus’s. Working 9 to 5, waking up, enduring traffic, doing everything as if clearing items from a box only to have it fill again, is like pushing a heavy boulder up a mountain only to watch it fall again. But instead of being defeated, we can change our perspective on monotonous routines.
Not everything we do needs to have meaning. When we stop craving meaning, our expectations fade, and we become happier.
Every cycle has moments when the rock rolls back to the start. Do not use these times to worry about the next push. During lunch breaks, commutes, or before sleep, do not waste time thinking or complaining about upcoming work.
Resist with positive energy. Do not treat our routines as mere monotony. Some days we are at our best, working unusually well or showing positivity even in traffic. We do these not for rewards but to prove our spirit is unbroken.
Focus on what lies ahead, on the struggle before us. Happiness comes from action, not results.
Routine guarantees humans need not constantly seek novelty because we already have a safe space. That safety is what humans have longed for and is deeply rooted in survival instincts. Therefore, all repetition and monotony are not boring or meaningless but may be happiness we have yet to recognize.