Have you ever noticed how similar our lives have started to look? Ask ten people about their daily routines, and chances are that most of their answers will sound remarkably familiar. We wake up, go to work, exercise, learn something new, maintain relationships, set goals, and go to sleep, only to repeat the same cycle the following day. Somewhere along the way, even the mundane aspects of life have become things to optimise. We are no longer simply living; we are constantly trying to become better at living, almost as though an ordinary life is something we need to apologise for.
For the longest time, beings lived relatively autonomous lives, and as everything evolved, the nature of beings and the way they looked at things changed too. Now, having an ordinary routine almost feels like a rarity because everyone seems to have goals across every aspect of life. And I mean every aspect. You have to be good at your job, have an impressive fitness routine, maintain relationships, develop hobbies, travel, read, learn new skills, and somehow make all of it look effortless. If you’re not the greatest at all of these things, you might just fall behind.
The deciding parameter was never really the choice itself. It was the race you had to run to qualify for an Olympics that nobody had even announced yet. Having a routine is discipline, while being flexible is now termed going with the flow. Even our attempts at escaping structure have somehow acquired a structure of their own. We have become so occupied with doing things the right way that I sometimes wonder if we’ve forgotten to ask ourselves whether we wanted to do them in the first place. The pressure to succeed, improve, and keep up with everyone else has become so familiar that questioning it almost feels like falling behind. We spend so much time trying to build a better life that we rarely stop to wonder what a life worth living actually looks like.
If you cannot have a conversation without mentioning your job, your skills, your routines, or something you’re currently trying to achieve, most conversations begin to feel like déjà vu. The names and faces change, but the stories remain remarkably similar. Perhaps this is why I find conversations with people who have relatively mundane lives so intriguing. Not because they have achieved less, but because their lives leave room for things that don’t necessarily need to lead somewhere. That’s where some of the most curious rabbit holes begin, in thoughts that have no immediate purpose and questions that don’t need to be answered by the end of the conversation.
It reminds me of a question Raj Shamani asks on his podcast, something along the lines of, if someone is hearing you for the first time, why should they listen to you? I find the question interesting because the answers often have very little to do with the job someone does. And perhaps that says something about us. There is a person beyond the designation, the achievements, and the carefully assembled résumé, but how often do we make an effort to discover them? If I take away your job title, your income, your accomplishments, and the things you’re working towards, what would you tell me about yourself? More importantly, what would you want to know about me?
Often, when we try to know someone, we end up asking the same set of questions. What do you do? What are your hobbies? What are your plans? Where have you travelled? What are you working towards? There is nothing inherently wrong with these questions, but somewhere along the way, getting to know someone has become a repetitive questionnaire rather than an exploration of another mind. We ask questions to establish familiarity, but rarely stay long enough to discover unfamiliarity. And if you begin gauging conversations closely, you’ll notice how often people are simply exchanging information rather than perspectives. We know what the other person does, what they like, and what they believe, but how often do we leave a conversation having discovered a way of looking at life that we had never considered before?
The coexistence of two different beliefs almost seems to have become an impossible task. We enter conversations with opinions already formed, waiting for our turn to defend them rather than being curious enough to question them. The humans who were once curious, intriguing beings seem to have become walking collections of trends, borrowed thoughts, and stories that have been told so many times that we no longer question where they originated. Authenticity, it seems, is dying a rather sweet death. Sweet because most of us don’t even realise it’s happening.
Another thing I’ve noticed is how eager people are to tell their side of a story. The moment someone begins speaking, we’re already preparing our response, searching for a similar experience of our own, or waiting for the smallest opening to bring the conversation back to us. The adrenaline rush of discovering another person’s mind, of understanding how they arrived at a particular thought, almost feels like a centuries-old practice we’ve collectively forgotten. We want to be heard, understood, and validated, but how many of us are genuinely interested in doing the same for someone else?
And when a mind doesn’t move in the same direction as the room, we often find a convenient label for it. Loner. Introvert. Difficult. As though, in a room full of dots, choosing to be an exclamation mark is some kind of social offence. We have become so accustomed to fitting into patterns that anything outside them begins to look like a flaw.
Perhaps we’ve suffocated ourselves with the need to be perfect. Our flaws are no longer simply hidden; they are concealed beneath carefully constructed versions of ourselves that we have learnt to present to the world. We want to appear emotionally mature, intellectually sound, physically fit, professionally successful, and socially desirable. We want to be the kind of people who have their lives figured out, even when most of us are just trying to make sense of the next few days. Sometimes, it genuinely feels as though there is one soul travelling through all these bodies, repeating the same thoughts, following the same routines, and chasing the same definitions of a life well lived.
Of course, life needs change. We cannot remain the same person forever, nor should we. But somewhere within all that change, there ought to be something that makes you distinctly you. Not your preferences borrowed from people you admire, not your ambitions inherited from the environment you grew up in, and not your opinions assembled from whatever the world currently considers intelligent. Something that exists because you have spent enough time with yourself to discover what you actually think, feel, and believe.
The Shadow Self: The Parts of Us We Pretend Aren’t There
Hold conversations as though they are rabbit holes and there is no particular destination you need to reach. Stop defending your beliefs long enough to examine them. Ask questions whose answers you might not particularly enjoy. Allow someone to disagree with you without immediately treating it as a challenge to your intelligence or character. You might discover that changing your mind is not a sign of weakness, and that being wrong can sometimes be a far more interesting experience than being right.
And while you begin stripping away these layers, you might discover something slightly unsettling: there isn’t as much of you in your thoughts as you once believed. Your beliefs, your responses, your routines, and even your idea of success may have originated somewhere outside you. You picked them up from your family, your surroundings, the people you admired, and the world you grew up trying to understand. This doesn’t necessarily make them wrong. It simply makes them worth examining. There is a difference between choosing something because you believe in it and following it because you’ve never considered an alternative.
I’m not suggesting that we stop following trends, abandon our routines, or isolate ourselves from the world. Not everyone has the privilege of that kind of isolation, and not everyone wants it. Humans are social animals, and money, work, relationships, and survival will continue to shape the way we live. Unless you have generational wealth, intend to renounce worldly life, or have somehow discovered a way to exist without participating in society, my dear friend, I have nothing but good wishes for you.But perhaps we can begin by questioning how much of our lives we choose and how much we simply inherit without noticing.
Most human interactions, after all, are not entirely a matter of choice. We interact because our jobs require it, because society expects it, because we need to earn money, because relationships need maintenance, and because survival often means participating in systems we didn’t create. We meet people, exchange pleasantries, discuss our lives, and return to our routines. And there is nothing inherently wrong with any of that.
But living a life and merely existing in one are two separate things. You can have a calendar full of plans, a routine that runs like clockwork, and a list of achievements that keeps growing, yet still have very little to say about what it actually feels like to be you. You can spend years doing everything you’re supposed to do without ever becoming particularly curious about why you’re doing it.
Perhaps the mundane is not the absence of an interesting life. Perhaps it is the space in which an interesting life becomes possible. A conversation that serves no purpose, a thought that leads nowhere, an afternoon that produces nothing worth documenting, or a belief you finally allow yourself to question. Maybe these are the things that make us more than the sum of our routines.
And perhaps, in a world so occupied with becoming somebody, there is something quietly radical about allowing yourself the time to discover who you already are.
P.S. The next time someone asks you what you do, try telling them something that has absolutely nothing to do with it. Tell them about a strange thought you had in the shower, a completely useless fact you can’t stop thinking about, or a rabbit hole you accidentally fell into at 2 a.m. Who knows? You might finally have a conversation that doesn’t feel like a job interview in disguise.
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