The degree to which our sanity depends on a functioning sociological structure is incredible.
Every human needs to know what to do every day. We have to have a routine because of the same reason animals do.
Dogs are a really good example of this. They like routine. They like to be walked the number of times a day that they're supposed to, and they get quite sick very rapidly if you don't routinize their days.
Children are exactly the same way. Of course, you can overdo it, But still, you need to know approximately when you should get up to be approximately the same every day. You need to know approximately when you're going to eat. You need to know who you're going to eat with, and you need to know where to buy your food.
But one of the things I would like to point out is that if you do the mathematics you are losing a great deal of your time doing repetitive tasks for which you did not plan ahead, and that becomes frustrating.
For example, Most parents only spend 20 minutes per day of one-on-one time with their child while many of them are having problems with putting their child to bed. They were having a fight every night and the reason for that is that people are busy.
It's actually not that easy to parse out 20 minutes of one-on-one, yet add spending like 40 minutes a day fighting with the kid to go to bed. That's not very entertaining you know?
If it happens every day, it's a catastrophe. So doing the math, we'll say five hours a week for the sake of argument just to keep it simple. It's 20 hours a month, 240 hours a year. That's six 40-hour work weeks!
Basically spending a month and a half of work weeks doing absolutely nothing, but having a wretched time fighting with their son trying to get him to go to bed. Horrible right? That's just way too much time, so you need a structure. You need predictability, and you need more of it than you think just to keep you sane!
Perhaps if you're lucky and maybe a bit odd, You can deviate 5% from the norm or 10% from the norm or something like that carefully and cautiously.
As long as the rest of you is all well-ordered in a normative manner, you might be able to get away with that. You might be able to sustain it across time, and people might be able to bear with you if you do it.
Maybe you'll get really lucky and you happen to be creative. But reasonably well put together, people will actually be happy that there's something idiosyncratic and unique about you. But even under those circumstances, often what you want is to have a routine.
It's discipline. It's predictable and bloody well, stick to it. You're going to be way healthier and happier and saner if you do that.
This is one of the things the psychoanalyst got wrong. They overestimated the degree to which Sanity was a consequence of being properly structured internally.
Because from the psychoanalytic point of view you're sort of an ego, and that ego is inside you, of course.
It rests on an unconscious structure, but the purpose of psychoanalysis is to sort out that unconscious structure and the ego on top of it and to make you a fully functioning an autonomous individual.
But there's a problem with that because the reason that you're a fully-functional and autonomous human being isn't that you've organized your psyche.
It's like you smile at people if they're not only behaving properly but behaving in a way that you would like to see them continue to behave. You frown at them if they're not; You ignore them if they're not. You won't cooperate with them. You won't repeat with them.
That's why we face each other and we have emotional displays on our face and we're looking at each other's eyes. We know exactly as much as we can about what's going on with each other.
Given that we don't have immediate access to the contents of their consciousness, to some degree what you're doing with your routine is establishing yourself as a credible, reliable, trustworthy, potentially interesting human being who isn't going to do anything too erratic at any moment.
If they don't have a routine and they get isolated is they start to drift and they drift badly because the world is too complicated for you to keep it organized all by yourself. You just cannot do it.
So we outsource the problem of sanity.
It's very intelligent that we outsource the problem of sanity because Sanity is an impossibly complex problem and so the way that we manage the incredibly complex problem is we have a very large number of brains working simultaneously on the problem all the time. Looking at the big picture, maintaining the daily structure keeps you sane.
