A Cure for the Monotony of Relationships and Everyday Life

Wake up. Workout. Shower. Make the coffee. Eat. Check email. Work. Eat. Family time. TV. Go to bed. Repeat.

Sound familiar? There's word for this feeling: monotony.

It's an experience we’ve heard a lot of people talking about lately.

Couples with kids describe trudging through the never-ending logistics of school drop-offs, trombone lesson pick-ups, shopping, cooking, cleaning, and peace-making the latest extended family conflict.

Couples without kids describe the unnerving feeling that each day feels like a copy-paste of the one before.

We’ve been feeling it too. After a long Thanksgiving break, that first Monday morning hit us hard. The fun of unstructured time disappeared only to be replaced by the familiar grind of work, dishes, and calendar invites.

So we’ve found ourselves wondering:

Is there a way out of monotony?

One answer is to reject domestic life altogether. Sell your house, quit your job, and become one of those digital nomad couples that moves from one exciting adventure to the next the moment life gets dull.

For most of us, however, this strategy is a nonstarter. It requires giving up friends, security, and family. And it often fails on its own terms. When you turn every day into a chase for novelty, the chase itself eventually becomes tedious, tired, and—ironically—boring.

So here are two more modest strategies for navigating the monotony of domestic life. 

1. Little Novelty

Here’s one way to handle the tasks and to-dos of everyday life: allow your ordinary habits to run the show.

Do the laundry. Write the emails. Go to the meetings. Make the dinners. Scroll, sleep, repeat—without thinking twice about it.

The virtue of this approach is that it’s easy. You don’t have to think hard or do anything different. The problem is that it keeps you stuck in monotony. In fact, living this way is the source of monotony.

Here’s a better way. We call it little novelty. The idea is to infuse the boring, predictable parts of everyday life with small bursts of newness.

The kind of novelty we’re talking about here isn’t the “rafting the Grand Canyon” or “scuba diving in the British Virgin Islands” kind. That’s big novelty. 

We’re talking about little novelty.

Little novelty looks like:

• Working for a couple hours from your local coffee shop instead of at your usual desk
• Taking a call while walking outside instead of sitting in a meeting room
• Ditching the last hour of fake-productivity at work so you and your partner can grab a drink together

It’s the practice of sprinkling micro-moments of novelty into the middle of your ordinary life.

To try this yourself, do this:

For the next week, create one micro-moment of novelty each day.

Nothing huge. Just one tiny change that makes the day feel a bit less copy-paste.

2. Happy Boredom

Novelty is great. But it’s also a trap. You can become so obsessed with chasing the next new thing that you stop appreciating the very life you already have.

That’s why the practice of ordinary novelty pairs perfectly with a second practice we call happy boredom.

Happy boredom is the art of appreciating—rather than resisting—the humdrum parts of an ordinary day.

The gateway to this state is gratitude. By focusing on what we already have, instead of what we wish we had, the ordinary list of everyday tasks can become a source of quiet contentment rather than low-level frustration.

To experience this for yourself, here’s all you have to do:

Next time you feel bored by the mundane experience of shopping, texting, working, cleaning, or waiting in line, shift your attention to gratitude.

Identify one specific thing in your current situation that you’re grateful. Maybe it’s:

• Your partner
• Your kids
• An upcoming vacation
• Your financial stability
• The warmth of the afternoon sun

The goal here isn’t to get rid of monotony. That’s never going to happen.

The goal is to turn monotony into happy boredom—a softer, kinder experience of everyday life where you’re allowed to feel both:

• “This is a kind of boring,” and
• “Wow, I’m lucky to be here for it.”