Thanks to a lifetime of advertising bombardment, we’ve been conditioned to view the routine as hopelessly stultifying. We’ve seen it a thousand times; some frustrated, anonymous, but everyman identifiable white collar drone pours himself the same cup of coffee, gets stuck in the same traffic, and greets the same coworkers with only different colored, plain oxford dress shirts to differentiate one day from another. Then, he looks wistfully out the window of the glass and steel office building. If only we had the daring to try this exciting, new, fizzy soft drink or purchase a new, mid-sized coupe, then we would all be playing rocking electric guitar with a supermodel backing band at the summit of an adventurously rugged rock face that we’d just conquered through sheer will and a few thousand dollars worth of climbing equipment.Rubbish.You know why so much of human civilization has strived for a level of predictability in its daily affairs? Because it is a preferable situation to having a river surge wipe out all the food you were supposed to eat this year. Granted, doing anything repetitively for long enough will get old, but just take a weekend trip or something.Read the news. Just for starters, we inhabit what amounts to one, gigantic floating asylum for violently psychotic primates. Then, just for fun, add in the fact that large amounts of the natural world appear to be engaged in an attempt to physically expel its human tormentors, like someone trying to dislodge some stubborn phlegm. If you can navigate from one day to the next in more or less the same condition as you were in the previous day, you’re in good shape. If you can do this with enough consistency to have a routine, you qualify as a fantastically fortunate individual.So, go ahead and make that same cup of coffee that you do every morning. Enjoy it. Pharmaceutical companies spend good time and money trying to bottle that exact feeling.
Talent | Andrew Ohman
