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Routine, consistency, and the inevitability of failure

I think most of my post descriptions are meta so why break the streak of it now

17 Dec 2024

I wonder how many times I’ll open a blog post acknowledging the large gap since I last posted. At least this time it serves as a framing device for an article! So yeah, hey it’s been a whille since I wrote anything that wasn’t my vows. I got busy with getting married, but more than that, it’s because I fell out of the routine of writing and lost all momentum I had with it.

I think I’m at my best whenever I’m trying to maintain some kind of structure or routine. My diet’s always best when I set aside the time to meal prep, I made the most amount of progress at the gym when I was following my programs instead of just kinda doing whatever, and I wrote the most when I set a routine about when and what I wanted to write about.

The routine helps with motivation - it’s the inciting factor that I can rely on without something flimsy like inspiration. It’s cool to be inspired but brother I don’t have my own bard, I am not getting that consistently inspired enough to make sure I want to do all the cool things I think of.

Routine also builds consistency, which feels like it’s the same thing but totally isn’t and I’m not just saying that because I came up with this post title first. Routine is the ritual of it all, consistency is repeatedly doing the ritual. Consistency is how you get better at what you’re doing. Going to the gym three times a week is how I built muscle, I probably could have done it following any other program but having them there helped remove a lot of of the unknown “what will I do if I go there anyway” side of things.

When I’m consistently writing, I can feel myself getting better at it. I come up with new ideas, I find new words to describe things, I create new ways to structure the posts. When I’m not consistent, I can still write but my skills plateau, or even worse, degrade. Look at the second sentence of this paragraph, I said new three times instead of mixing it up with a novel or an alternative!

With the power of routine and consistency on my side, I am the greatest I can be, so all I have to do is just maintain that, right? Alas, it’s not that simple. The routine may lose effectiveness, but for me, it’s far more likely that something happens which breaks the consistency side of things. For whatever reason, that momentum halts and I stop doing something. I never know what it’ll be, but I know it’ll happen. This is the inevitability of failure.

Failure is rough. It makes me want to give up because if I’ve lost my routine or my consistency, why bother even continuing? Sure it’s been great for the past weeks/months/years I’ve been doing what I’ve been doing, but now it’s over and I’ll never get the magic back. I know I’m being dramatic, but that’s how it feels in the moment. Or, how it felt before I decided to embrace it as part of the cycle.

Learning to accept failure as an inevitability feels self defeating, but I’ve found that it’s comforting in a weird way. I know that I will eventually lose my streak. It has happened before and it’ll happen again but it just means I have to start again. This too is part of the routine. I can’t lie and say I’m super sage about it all and that I take failure in stride. I’m still liable to wallow in self-pity about it and bemoan the fates that led me astray. However, I am a lot quicker to bounce back from it and that’s something I can be proud of.

I know I’m going to be opening a post talking about the gap since the last one again at some point. Maybe that’s not failure after all. Maybe that’s the most consistent routine I’ll ever have when it comes to writing. And that’s okay by me (mostly).