I don’t do routines, and I’ve stopped apologising for it along with fifty other parts of my life choices. I’m not falling apart. I just refuse to run my life like a warehouse runs its stock, and when I actually stop and think about that, the more convinced I become that something important lives inside it.

The thing nobody wants to say out loud is that routine was never invented for our benefit. If anything, it was invented to make us manageable, predictable, and extractable. The industrial revolution didn’t just give us factories, it gave us the clock as a boss, and everything since then has been a slow process of getting us to internalise that boss so thoroughly that we do the supervision ourselves, for free, and feel guilty when we stop. I know this because I have felt it too. That small voice telling me I should be more productive isn’t mine, though. It’s the residue of a system that figured out that the cheapest foreman is the one who lives inside the worker’s own skull.

So when I keep my mornings open and I let a Tuesday unspool without a plan, I’m not being chaotic just for the aesthetic of it. I’m keeping a portion of my day that hasn’t been pre-sold. I’m hoarding a little bit of my own time the way someone in a company town might hide coins under the floorboards. It’s a small thing, maybe, but it’s mine. Actually mine. Not allocated to anything or anyone except whatever I happen to notice or want or feel like pursuing in the moment it arrives.

What gets me is how the whole productivity-influencer apparatus has managed to dress up compliance as empowerment. I believe in discipline—genuinely, not performatively—but discipline in the sense of a mind made free by its own training, a clarity that comes from honest engagement with difficulty and mental challenges, not from waking up at five to optimise output for someone else’s margin. The five-a.m. club and habit trackers have taken something real about self-mastery and hollowed it into a scheduling ideology, and the difference matters enormously: one liberates the mind, the other merely makes the body more punctual for capital.

All of it functions as a very elegant way of telling people that systemic precarity is actually a personal scheduling problem. Can’t keep up? Optimise harder. Burned out? Your morning routine wasn’t tight enough. Clearly you didn’t practice enough mindfulness.

I find this cruel because it individualises what is obviously a collective condition. We’re exhausted because we’re doing the work of three people for the compensation of one, and no amount of cold showers at dawn is going to fix that reality. If anything, it’s just going to make us colder and more tired.

I also refuse to collapse who I am into what I produce. That’s what routine ultimately asks of us, though. It asks us to become so optimised and consistently on-brand that we can be slotted into roles without friction, networked and marketed like a product with predictable specs. I’d rather be a little illegible. I’d rather have days I can’t summarise neatly to someone at a dinner party. The self that emerges from structurelessness is messier, sure, but it’s also more honest, more responsive, more alive in the way that matters to me, which is the way where I can still be surprised by my own afternoon.

Now I’m not pretending this isn’t easier for me than for someone pulling double shifts or doing gig work with no floor beneath them. It is easier. I have enough slack in my material conditions to make this choice, and I’m not going to dress that up as something it isn’t. But the desire itself—the desire for a life not run by the stopwatch—isn’t a luxury preference, it’s a universal one, and the fact that most people are denied it and then told it’s their own fault for not optimising hard enough is the part that should make us angry.

What I’m protecting, when I keep my days loose, is the capacity to notice things, to choose in real time, to remember a Wednesday because something actually happened in it rather than because I ticked every box on a list. In a world that treats attention and curiosity as raw material to be harvested or inefficiency to be eliminated, staying open is not laziness. It’s my small, stubborn insistence that I am not yet fully converted into what I produce.