It’s 8 a.m. and my phone alarms sound like regret. I blink once and it’s 8:07. Twice, and I’m halfway through my toothpaste existential crisis. Thrice, and I’m pretending to check emails while actually watching a girl on TikTok clean her sink with the passion of a woman avenging her ancestors. It’s fine. Everything’s fine. Except, everything’s the same. Am I living in a loop like my songs on Spotify?
Every morning is this unholy remix of déjà vu and denial. I swear even the universe is tired of rendering new frames for my life, it’s just copy-pasting Monday until the simulation server crashes. There’s always the same coffee mug with the chip that looks like Australia, the same playlist that has somehow started to sound like background noise for a fever dream, and the same feeling in my chest that whispers, wasn’t I just here?
It’s not that I hate routine. It’s that I hate how routine pretends to be purpose. We move, we hustle, we pretend that replying to emails before noon is character development. And in between it all, I catch myself asking what day is it and realising that question no longer requires an answer. Because it doesn’t matter. Because it’s all one very long, very confusing day, broken by overpriced lattes and Wi-Fi crashes.
So yes, today feels like a loop we can’t escape. But maybe it’s because the universe forgot to hit shuffle.
The quiet dread of repetition.
Here’s the thing no one tells you: monotony is seductive. It’s predictable. It doesn’t ask questions. You wake up, you scroll, you reply, you sigh, you scroll again. The rhythm of existence hums like a broken fridge. Sometimes I wonder if I’m living or just buffering eternally.
Repetition lulls you into false safety. You convince yourself that stability is peace, but it’s often just emotional Groundhog Day. Wake. Work. Scroll. Sleep. Repeat. Except there’s no Bill Murray, no lesson, no cathartic jazz moment; just you and your screen light glowing like a ghost story.
We call it adulthood. We call it “grind culture.” I call it spiritual lag. The scary part is how normal it starts to feel. You stop noticing sunsets. You stop finding random joy in silly memes. You start timing your feelings between meetings. And when you finally look up, it’s already November again.
What’s worse is how the world feeds this cycle. Brands sell us productivity as personality. Universities baptise us in busyness. People post their 5 a.m. morning routines like they’re decoding the matrix of self-worth. Meanwhile, I’m celebrating if I manage to make my bed before my next breakdown.
The repetition doesn’t scream. It whispers. And that’s why it wins. Because it convinces you it’s fine. That everyone’s doing it. That it’s just how things are. And maybe that’s the scariest part, that we all keep calling it life.
The collective loop we all pretend not to see.
We are all trapped in the same slightly glitchy Reels loop. Scroll enough and you’ll realise it’s the same arguments recycled in different fonts: climate change panic, celebrity drama, relationship hot takes, political despair, and one really good recipe for overnight oats. We’re performing variety while living reruns.
We wake up to breaking news that’s already broken, trends that look suspiciously familiar, and conversations that keep circling back to how tired we all are. Sometimes I think the world collectively pressed repeat and forgot to press record.
And god, we are all complicit. We doomscroll, we repost, we retweet, we cry about late-stage capitalism and then order something unnecessary off Amazon as emotional CPR. I’m not judging, I’m literally the same. The only difference between me and everyone else is that I add unnecessary sparkles to my self-awareness.
Even love feels looped. We fall for the same type of people, expecting different endings. We write the same apologies. We learn the same lessons, just with better eyeliner. It’s the universal syllabus of the human condition: heartbreak, healing, repeat until comprehension.
It’s not that the world lacks newness. It’s that we’ve forgotten how to see it. Everything feels like déjà vu because we’re too busy documenting to feel anything. We’ve traded awe for algorithms. And if that isn’t the most poetic form of self-sabotage, I don’t know what is.
Why it hurts more than we admit.
It’s not just boredom. It’s grief. Grief for the version of us who used to get excited about nothing. Who used to wake up and think, “maybe today will be different.” Now we wake up thinking, “maybe my Wi-Fi won’t disconnect during class.”
Repetition dulls everything. You forget that joy can be loud. You forget that peace doesn’t have to feel like apathy. You start believing that exhaustion is the same thing as consistency. That surviving is the same as living.
There’s this quiet ache in the pit of your chest when you realise you haven’t felt newness in a while. You’ve replaced curiosity with coping mechanisms. You’ve learned to call numbness “stability.” And that’s the most tragic kind of comfortable.
I think it hurts because it’s not a clean kind of sadness. It’s sticky. It lingers. It hides behind laughter and deadlines. You’ll be joking with your friends about being burnt out, and suddenly the joke stops being funny halfway through.
And yet, we keep going. Because what else is there to do? The loop offers structure. The loop is safe. The loop whispers, don’t think too hard. But we always do. Because deep down, we know this isn’t it. There’s got to be more than this glorified hamster wheel. There has to be a door somewhere.
The cracks in the loop.
Sometimes the loop glitches. The right song hits shuffle at the perfect second. Someone says your name in a way that makes it sound new again. You catch the sun doing something dramatic in the sky and for a second, you feel it. You’re not a robot. You’re alive.
The cracks are subtle but sacred. The friend who texts you a meme right when you were about to spiral. The stranger who compliments your outfit in a way that feels divine. The day you actually wash your hair and suddenly life feels cinematic again. It’s ridiculous how fragile joy is, but maybe that’s the point.
The loop doesn’t like when you laugh for no reason. It hates spontaneity. It thrives on predictable misery. So when you dance in your room, or journal at 2 a.m., or cry at a rom-com you’ve already seen ten times, you’re rebelling. You’re breaking the code.
Maybe the point isn’t to escape the loop entirely but to paint on it. To make it ugly and chaotic and human. To find little ruptures of realness inside the copy-paste template. Maybe the goal isn’t freedom, but awareness. Because once you start noticing the loop, it loses its power.
And that’s the thing about awareness: it’s contagious. Once one person glitches, others follow. Suddenly, we’re all laughing in sync, realising we’re not trapped, just hypnotised. And maybe that’s how the cycle begins to crack.
Reclaiming the day.
Today still feels like a loop we can’t escape. But I’m starting to think that maybe the exit isn’t somewhere far away — maybe it’s inside it. Maybe escape looks like noticing how good the tea tastes this morning. Maybe it’s deciding that routine isn’t punishment if it’s painted with intention. Maybe it’s forgiving yourself for being bored sometimes.
We can’t keep waiting for the big change. The revolution is micro. It’s saying no when you mean no. It’s wearing glitter on a Monday. It’s crying at 3 p.m. because you’re human, and not apologising for it.
The world keeps spinning and we keep calling it progress, but maybe real progress is learning to be present while it spins.Maybe the loop isn’t a trap but a mirror — one that keeps asking, what will you do differently today?
So yeah, today feels like a loop we can’t escape. But maybe the trick is to dance inside it. To rename it. To say: this is my loop, and I’m the one remixing it. Because even if the world keeps replaying, we don’t have to. We can still sing something new.
And maybe that’s enough.
Want more tiny rebellions, soft awakenings, and essays about the glitchy bits of being human? Come sit with Her Campus at MUJ, where we break the loop word by word. Written by Niamat Dhillon at HCMUJ, currently dancing inside the simulation and refusing to perform autopilot.