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this week with rooh
the adulting paradox - is there magic in the mundane?
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On repeat 🎧: Strangers by Mt. Joy (on tour)
I've been thinking a lot about what happens after we achieve the things we're supposed to want.
A friend of mine has been relaying his “adulting experiences” week by week after purchasing a new home. What’s striking isn’t the chaos or the overwhelm, but rather the quiet disappointment in his voice. “Is this really it?” he asks. “Just an endless cycle of maintaining this place?” His days have settled into a predictable rhythm: work, home maintenance, sleep, repeat. The house has revealed itself not as an endpoint, but as a beginning—of repairs, responsibilities, and routines that stretch far into the horizon.
It made me realize something we don’t talk about enough: the quiet disappointment that can follow achievement. We spend years climbing toward these adult milestones—career, home, financial stability—only to find they’re not summits at all, but plateaus. And on those plateaus begins a different kind of work. The work of maintenance. The work of routine. The daily acts of upkeep that don’t make for inspiring Instagram posts, but somehow end up consuming our evenings, our weekends, our thoughts.
I wonder if you’ve felt it too—that moment when you look around at the life you’ve built and quietly ask, “Is this really it? Is adulting just maintaining things until retirement?” That unsettling question that feels almost sacrilegious to ask, especially after you’ve checked all the right boxes.
“It's not the way that we've historically thought about meaning in life. It sort of knocks it off its pedestal.”
- Dr. Samantha Heintzelman
So where does that leave us, standing on these plateaus of responsibility, quietly wondering if this is it?
When searching for answers to this “adulting paradox”, I discovered the research of Dr. Samantha Heintzelman, a psychologist at Rutgers University. Her work reveals something counterintuitive: those mundane routines might actually be a source of meaning, not its opposite.
Heintzelman specifically studied the connection between routine and our sense of purpose. In one study, people who reported a stronger preference for routine also reported higher levels of meaning in their lives. In another, she used experience sampling to track people’s day-to-day feelings, and found that moments spent in familiar routines were associated with greater feelings of meaning.
Her findings suggest something quietly radical: meaning doesn’t always come from the big, life-changing events. It can emerge from structure. From coherence. From the repeated rhythms of everyday life.
In other words, the very tasks we often find tedious — the upkeep, the maintenance, the routines — might actually be anchoring us to something deeper.
Try the Pattern Detection exercise:
Find a quiet spot and spend two minutes listing the patterns and regularities in your life — things like your morning routine, walking the same route, regular mealtimes, or weekly calls with family. Dr. Heintzelman’s research shows that simply noticing these patterns can boost your sense of meaning, similar to how participants who viewed photos arranged in seasonal order reported higher levels of meaning than those who saw the same photos in random arrangements.
After you’ve listed a few of your own patterns, take three deep breaths and reflect on how these rhythms quietly shape your days. The simple act of recognizing coherence — rather than dismissing routines as boring — can shift how meaningful they feel.
This week, try creating a simple Meaning Map of your routines.
As Dr. Heintzelman suggests, "mundane" activities like "maintaining a tidy office" or "having weekly team meetings at work” can be significant sources of meaning.
Start by choosing three regular tasks you typically think of as boring adulting tasks. For each one, write down what deeper purpose it might serve. Maybe it’s about creating a sense of sanctuary, expressing care, or nurturing connection.
Place this map somewhere visible as a gentle reminder that meaning often hides in plain sight, woven into the patterns of your days.
And the next time you catch yourself thinking, “Is this all there is?” — let this little map whisper back: Not quite. There’s magic here too.
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