If you haven't had Belvita breakfast cookies, you have probably had Biscoff cookies, which are similar. These are a classic airline snack. You've probably had one along with a Coke with ice in a plastic cup, and thought to yourself, 'these cookies suck.' That is a fair assessment.
I'm not talking about Biscoff, though. Those are Belvita breakfast cookie's sweeter counterpart. I'm talking about Belvita because they are more subtle in flavor, less texturally satisfying, and thinner/more brittle.
I mentioned in an earlier post that I was looking for a hybrid job due to overwhelming loneliness and a growing, antisocial alienation from the activities of daily living. I found one. It's good. So as to not dox myself, I won't reveal too much about my company (some people have emailed me with accurate guesses about where I live and what jobs I've applied to in the past, which was a good sign I've been a bit too loose with the specifics of my life lol).
The important thing, though, is that this company is public and therefore considerably more 'buttoned-up' than the high-risk, freewheeling, dopamine-laden startups I've worked at in the past. It's an immensely welcome change, even if there are times I miss obscenely extravagant offsites, staying at luxury hotels for run-of-the-mill tradeshows, and free ginger and turmeric immunity shots at the breakfast bar.
The floor plan of my office is basically glass doors along the perimeter with private offices for executives and cubicles throughout for the rest of us. Highly normcore. No bean bag chairs or wooden backlit risers.
It's also business casual. The last time I was in office I was 25 years old. I wore band t-shirts and dickies and vans to work. Everybody did. Later, with fully remote companies, everybody on the All Hands call wore hoodies. This is, of course, typical of tech.
Now, each morning that I go into work, I take a dress shirt down from above my closet, where I hung it the night before so I could steam it. I put on a leather belt that matches my dress shoes. I feel like Gus from Breaking Bad, meticulous and impeccable.
On days I go into the office, my morning routine goes like this:
- 5:30 am: wake up, quick shower
- Floss/brush teeth/comb hair/deodorant
- Get dressed in pleated shirt and pants, grab a quarter zip in case any interior building I may encounter during the day is a little chilly
- Kiss wife & son on their respective foreheads while they sleep
- Head downstairs, grab my backpack, which was loaded up the night before with whatever I may need, head out into the damp & still cool morning air
- Drive to train station listening to Dave Brubeck, looking at the full trees and the empty blue road, stop patiently at stop lights
- Park, stand on the train platform listening to birds. The sun is high. Nod at other passengers. Load my train ticket into my digital wallet.
- Find a seat on the train and open my laptop. Skim hacker news & private message boards for interesting ideas. Tinker in a file of poems or blogs I'm working on.
- An hour later, in the city, file off the train. Buy a hot black coffee at the train station.
- Walk through the throngs of people (and occasional pigeons) about a mile through the city waiting for my coffee to cool and listening to jazz through headphones. Look at billboards and building facades, miss my little boy (already!), wonder what wife is doing, feel sad about whatever bad news I saw on Reddit that morning, feel unworthy of my life, worry about climate change, try to think about something else.
- Approach the impossibly tall black glass that is my office building. Badge in. A dozen or so floors later, step off the elevator and swing into the day: say hi to coworkers, settle into my cubicle, plug into monitors, sip coffee, gradually get subsumed by unstoppable vibrancy of caffeine high, and we're off to the races.
My weekdays now are defined by subtle and somewhat delicate little joys. If they were an object, they would be made of paper. My morning routine is an example of this. Finding an empty bench on the train so I can sit alone by the window is a small joy, and so is making it to work without a coffee stain on my shirt, and so are the birds high above the train platform, engaged in their city of singing, and so is seeing that I did, indeed, remember to pack my headphones in my backpack the night before and so can listen to jazz on my walk.
The most satisfying joy of my day, though, happens at exactly 3pm each afternoon I'm in office. I go to the open kitchen area and I make a cup of blueberry herbal tea. I grab a small yellow packet of Belvita breakfast cookies. I go back to my desk and I listen to lofi beats to study/relax to (2018 version so as to avoid AI music) and dip my Belvita cookies in the tea and drink the tea as slow as I can. There are 4 brittle little cookies in the pack, which is typically just enough to make it through the tea. I usually finish both the pack and the cup of tea at about the same time. Extremely satisfying lol.
This, for me, is a Miyazakian ritual. It makes me feel calm and focused, and like I have freedom to 'move about the cabin' creatively. It is how I do good work. In one of the documentaries about him, the documentarian follows Miyazaki around for years. His days are punctuated by cups of coffee and tea at strict intervals, cigarettes, ironed sweater vests, empty time for deep thinking, placing a bench outside his office for passersby each day, and most notably, when he arrives at his office at 10 am alone, he opens all the windows in the building and says good morning to the ghosts who live there.
For me lately, small subtle rituals and sources of pleasure and joy like this are an antidote to the firehose of cracked out dopamine we're constantly being pelted with.
We know the bright colors on our phones and the sounds our notifications make and short form video and fast food and hyperconvenience etc are making us irritable, impatient, shallow, desperate, reactive, polarized, anxious, frantic, suspicious comfort-addicts. It is hard to just stop. I still Doordash stuff some nights when I get home late and everybody's too tired to think about what to make.
But taking comfort in activities that deliver small drips of dopamine slowly instead of a truckload of it instantly is helping me a lot, I think. I have to try to pay attention and be still and feel the calm and pleasure that comes from the things I do to feel good in a day.
During my lunch break, instead of staring blissed out and slackjawed at the slot machine of my phone watching reels, I jot stuff down in a little black notebook in the lounge area of my office without headphones on. It seems good.
On Mondays and Fridays I don't go into the office, and so far it's been way harder not to be on my phone/on Reddit/read HN comments all day/etc. So, I'm still working on building some kind of comforting routine into my non in-office days.
I think it's because, when I'm in office, in addition to all these small comforts, I also have to do a bunch of stuff I don't want to do: wake up really early, wait in various lines, make small talk, sit upright in my office chair all day, muddle through traffic, etc. These exercises in slight discomfort tolerance throughout the day increases my defense against going full vegetable on my phone as often IMO.
The routine I create for my WFH days will have both comforting and slightly 'uncomfortable' rituals. (Ex: make tea at 3pm at home but also do some pain in the ass house-related task during lunch, probably yard work). In the absence of 'true' balance in the post-inconvenience society, I'll have to intentionally create it.