Routine and Ritual: Boring or Comforting?

I find really repetitive tasks strangely calming, certain kinds of maths, data processing, solitaire, it's like intellectual dronerock or something.

x-post...

i hate the routine of Christmas, that's why i avoided seeing family on the day last year and didn't really watch any TV. perhaps the routine of ILX has got to me in recent times too.

The routine of ILX... GOD, I MISS IT!!! ::MWAH MWAH MWAH::

the routine of end-of-year lists and lookbacks has waned for me somewhat. i'm still list-mad generally tho.

the routine of bands - recording/touring/recording/make a video/recording/touring/rehab/recording - c/d?

of course this means charts, graphs and colours - and i'll spend so much time and love on that that the actual project itself will just go to the dogs

Then again I work in an office job now that I would resent more if it weren't for the fact it's temporary. I can accept the going-to-work routine if I know it'll have a definite end date, but when I was working jobs full of drudging routine and had no idea how long I'd be stuck in them, the forever aspect of the routine made me feel like my soul was leaching out palpably but gradually into the office/bookstore carpet.

Wake up
Shower
Sit on Net
Feed Self
Sit on Net
Feed Self
Sit on Net
Sleep

I loved the routine of drawing, less the sketching and the coming up with the ideas, but the rest of it, the inking and the filling in of the backgrounds and the lettering. But the sense of fulfillment, at the end, when you see the finished result, you know when it's done, and you have a sense of accomplishment.

With work routines, there's often no connection with what you are doing. And also when you are just a link in a chain, you never get to experience the sense of satisfaction when it's finished.

What do you think about routine?

i knew this would be a kate thread; i'm not sure why.

what i think about routine is that i'm a bit ADD and if i have a job with an established pattern i can do the work pretty much by muscle memory and my brain can daydream as much as it wants. it's very freeing, in a way.

I find really repetitive tasks strangely calming, certain kinds of maths, data processing, solitaire, it's like intellectual dronerock or something.

yup. also see "minimalism."

SAM DON'T YOU SEE THIS MAN DIED OF BOREDOM!! LOOK AT HIS HANDS HE'S BEEN TYPING ON THE INTERNET ALL DAY!

Ken, I heart you. Quincy is old skool CSI. What would Grissom make of my carpal tunnel?

i have a theory that there's a link between ADD and autism -- that people with ADD can often have pretty tunnel-visioned attention spans, they just pay attention to the wrong things. (this describes me to a tee.)

we need routines because we know vague, meta-unstructuredness (like a job where you have to be a "self-starter") presents too much opportunity to fall into bad habits. whereas with data entry, your work practically does itself, and your right brain can have fun thinking about the patterns, the sound of the keystrokes, the people/situations of the data you're entering, etc.

To explicitly make the link to autism, we can return briefly to software engineering. I have often observed (and been caught in) situations where a thinker is trying to maintain his composure, contemplate all aspects of a situation, and find the deep, elegant solution that the "mapper" experience says is always there if only we look for it. The response of packers to this activity is to physically surround the mapper, and set up a barrage of yammering. They change the subject repeatedly in mid-sentence, make false statements, and cite logical fallacies. Their attention span is less than two sentences. Yammering behaviour renders contemplation quite impossible. It's worse than the silly trick of shouting random numbers at a person trying to remember a phone number. Normal tactile self-stimulation that can be observed in most engineers when thinking increases to head rubbing, rocking and so on. The thinker becomes withdrawn and defensive. Eventually the only alternatives are to shout at the yammerers, or flee. I think of yammering behaviour in dopamine self-addiction as analogous to sneezing in viral infections. The problem makes the victim perform behaviours that spread the problem.

One may think that this model might not apply in pre-school children, but I believe a case can be made. From the perspective of a person free of dopamine self-addiction, the world is a rich, beautiful, elegant place. Many mappers develop a certain reverence - love - of the world we see. Our society denies this world in every word and deed, presenting instead a shallow mockery of the reality. For a sufficiently aware child in a society distorted in this specific way, I argue that just acquiring language can be enough to make a child vulnerable to the ambient yammering in society. From there we can get to stress-induced immune weakness as in ADHD. Some years ago there was an hypothesis that autistic children lack sensory filters, and can become overloaded. This seemed to be displaced by claims that autistic children cannot form interpersonal relationships. Yet according to the majority, I can't form relationships because I haven't memorised the correct conversations and so have no social skills. In fact, my relationships (with other aware people) are deeper and more stimulating than I believe the majority can imagine. It does seem to be the case that aware children have a richer sensory experience than "doped" ones.

I also notice a possible link with "savant" abilities, which are found in some autistics, but not exclusively. Again, an example from engineering. I was once asked to look at a system that was doing some pretty subtle analysis of radar data. After looking at the expected and actual results for a while, I was certain that the problem did not lie in the post-processing. The raw data were somehow bogus. I was sufficiently certain that before I started examining the various sub-systems I insisted that we make an awkward climb up to look at the electronics near the dish itself. There was hardly anything near the dish, but wildlife had gnawed through some insulation (we never found out how) and high frequency signals were leaking all over a junction box. I did not have the faintest idea how I knew where the fault lay. If I understand the black art of radar propagation I'm not aware of my understanding. Similar stories are told of star diagnosticians in medicine, who look at a patient, sieze on one "pivot point" (without knowing why their key observation is so important), and make the correct diagnosis in one intuitive leap. The situation is captured in the following exchange between a journalist and an elderly Taoist teacher, which is quite well known in industrial Quality (Deming) circles:

Do you study theories?
Oh yes! Theories are fun.
How do you use them?
When I must act, theories are too slow. To act, I must know.

Perhaps the sensitivity to impression necessary to be able to do this with dates and prime numbers preferentially leaves the mind vulnerable to the kind of "ambient yammering" I'm proposing upsets autistics.

And remember - ADHD children can teach themselves key subjects like mathematics, physics and chemistry in three weeks to the level that schools take three years to accomplish with the children they have ritualised into zombie unawareness - just by reading the books and understanding what they read.

http://www.reciprocality.org/Reciprocality/r0/Day1.html

What is packing? Well, you just stop yourself asking `Why?'. You never really clean up your map of the world, so you don't find many of the underlying patterns that mappers use to `cheat'. You learn slower, because you learn little pockets of knowledge that you can't check all the way through, so lots of little problems crop up. You rarely get to the point where you've got so much of the map sorted out you can just see how the rest of it develops. In thinking-intensive areas like maths and physics, mappers can understand enough to get good GCSE grades in two weeks, while most schools have to spend three years or more bashing the knowledge packets into rote-learned memory, where they sit unexamined because the kids are good and do not daydream. It really isn't a very efficient way to go about things in the Information Age.

Mappers experience learning as an internal process in response to external and self-generated stimuli. Packers experience learning as another task to be performed, usually in a classroom, using appropriate equipment. Particularly in the early years, efficient mapper learning requires internal techniques for exploring conceptual relationships and recognising truths, while efficient packer learning focuses on memorisation skills.

I'd like to think of myself as a mapper, but where does my strange love of routine come from? Usually as a response to chaos. I'm so used to being a Clever Elsa and thinking of the Big Picture that it's almost a relief to distract myself with a highly ritualised behaviour.

it's abstract. you're thinking of the routine as an art, a concept, a drama.

Do you feel that time seems to pass more quickly as you get older?

If so, why? Is it that you've experienced more and so each unit of time feels less as a smaller percentage of your total life so far? Is it the lack of time that you have as you age, with more responsibilities and such?

Lately, even though I'm in quite a happy place overall, I feel really conscious of the cyclical nature of life, or to be more specific, the way life seems to be measured out between the completion of one routine task and the time that passes before it needs to be completed again.

Reflecting on how cyclical things are seems to have become part of the cycle itself. Like for instance I ran out of tea tonight and so new tea will be needed, another bottle of olive oil, toothpaste, hair product, shaving gel, razors. My Oyster card is drained of credit on a different day each week and each time I know that roughly a week's worth of journeys has passed since I drained it the last time.

Months pass between the last episode of a TV season and then it's the first episode of the next season. Things I look forward to are here and then they're replaced by others and then they too are gone. The seasons come and go. I feel sick and well and sick again. Happy and sad.

Haven't read this but:
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51RYF3vbsXL._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_AA278_PIkin4,BottomRight,-65,22_AA300_SH20_OU02_.jpg

it's like it was written for me!

'… full of fascinating, sexy, scientific concepts.' The Times

rowr