You aren’t alone
I gather from experience that the answer is “yes,” at least for most people.
But it isn’t for me.
Before I go further, let me state that not everything in life needs to be interesting. Life is full of necessary things whose necessity is not lessened by their banality or their tediousness. You need to brush your teeth, do the laundry, and wash the dishes (actually, there was a period in my life where I didn’t do dishes, but that is for another day).
When it comes to creativity, my biggest lesson is that routines produce results. If you don’t have a routine, a process, you are suffering unto yourself a great handicap, one which you are likely to never overcome to any satisfactory success. The stereotype of the passionate, absent-minded artist who is steered by his whims and operates at the behest of a mythic muse is mostly (though not entirely) fantasy. The artists that you already respect know how to work. The ones you meet underachieving in their seventh year of undergraduate art school do not.
You need to be the former, not the latter. However, many people who think of themselves as creative or artistic are terrified of, or have great disdain for, routines and consistency. Perhaps they are drawn to the arts because they think it will get them to escape from the tyranny of routines (being inspired by the myth of the passionate artist-medium). There is a fear in the artist’s mind, including my own, of boredom, of repetition, of what is soulful being turned into the grey goo of modern workaday life by a daily grind.
But it does not have to be that way.
Routines actually create a massive opportunity for variety if you know how to use them. A well-executed artistic process can produce infinite variety, and the lessons of the artist can spill over into other domains.
For example, consider exercise. For it to produce its benefits, it needs to be performed regularly, but it doesn’t have to be the same type of exercise every single day. The “sameness” that matters is the routine of doing it every day, but you can achieve that goal in a myriad of ways. You can run on a treadmill (or run backwards) while watching a new TV show. You can ride your bike on a different path every day. You can alter your weight-lifting routine in each session. Many exercise programs rely on this reality not only to keep clients interested, but to increase the effect of the exercise itself by keeping a steady supply of novel stimulus within what is a very consistent routine.
Diet is another example. You eat at the same time every day, but you don’t usually eat the same things.
One of the things I love about writing is that it’s different every time I do it. If I write a thousand words per day, that’s one thousand new words I get to write. The only repetition is that I do it every day. I don’t write the same book over and over; I get to create new things every day, every month, and every year. The novelty is constant, but for that to take place, I have to consistently make time to do it.
Music is a little more difficult. A large part of learning in the music realm involves repetition, not just routine. A difficult passage must be played and played many times over in order to learn the proper fingerings and interpretation, and to know them well enough that they can be performed live under stress. This, truthfully, was one of the reasons I stopped playing classical guitar more than ten years ago. I had to practice the same music over and over again, because it was the music I would get requests for, and I had to do maintenance on it. I made an effort to learn new music all the time and tried to work it into my sets, but after ten years, the interesting part of practice was crowded out by the boring part.
It wasn’t the routine; it was the content.
Even so, I probably could have avoided burnout by refusing to play the standard repertoire. 90% or more of the audiences I played for didn’t care about what songs I played. They liked the sound of the Spanish guitar. The few who requested something like “Requerdos” could have stood to be told “no” (and they probably would not have been disappointed in any event). Now, revisiting solo guitar in a new context as I have the last month or two, I can understand that. The toxic “scene” of classical guitar is safely ignored because they aren’t the ones listening and enjoying.
But even the normally repetitive things in practice can be interesting. Scales can seem quite boring until you challenge yourself to do them in new ways or at new speeds, or, as I often made my students do to their chagrin, you can use them to improvise. That’s the wonderful thing about Jazz—it’s never the same, and by design. For the listener who wants novelty, or for the player who craves the energy of a new musical conversation, Jazz provides in spades. Unfortunately, listeners these days don’t usually like novelty, but that’s a different problem from the one of routine that I’ve discussed elsewhere in depth.
If you are approaching any routine with dread, usually of boredom, you need to change your outlook. Your routines are an opportunity to do something new every day. How are you going to lift weights? What scenes do you get to write today? What key are you going to master? Even for something boring like the dishes, you can listen to something new while doing the task.
Make sure you are giving yourself the time to have those new experiences. Vacations are great, but there is plenty of novelty at home, too.
For my patrons – you can get exclusive books and music on Patreon. My current focus is a “major” guitar work in four movements in a new style with the ethos of “third stream.” Thanks for supporting me! Also, you can check out my previous music on Bandcamp or listen for free on YouTube.