Yes. You said it. A thousand times this.
My take:
Whenever I meet someone who isn't some predictable social robot, I latch on and try not to let them go. I get by when socializing by being in control of the conversation, and thus I get to lead the NTs where I want them to go. Makes socializing 99% predictable. But when I meet that 1%, that one guy who doesn't just follow the trail of breadcrumbs I leave, who turns the tables on me and sends me back on my heels; that's what I live for. I live for those moments when I have no idea what to say.
But that's only been a handful of people out of the hundreds of thousands that I've made mouth-noises at in my entire life.
But aside from banal social interactions that can very occasionally become intriguing, I've very deliberately made my days how you describe. I work 7 days a week (shorter days), I do the same things before and after work every day, I eat the exact same meals, I drive the exact same roads, and I even take a crap at the same time every day. Why? Yes, there is comfort in the routine itself, but it's because life is exactly how you've described.
Even if you tried as hard as you possibly could to make your life fresh and new and interesting and exciting, if you're a working person you'll spend 1/3 of your days working, 1/3 of your days sleeping (ideally), and 1/3 of your days split between preparing for those two things, recovering from those two things, traveling between those two things, or miscellaneous.
Even if you include a weekend, and you're living for the 33% average of your life that falls into the "miscellaneous" category vis-a-vis time management, then I sure as hell hope you like your job (33% working) and that you have sweet dreams (33% sleeping), because with "miscellaneous" you're spending most of it taking care of responsibilities for which you have to find your own impetus to give a damn, God forbid kids be involved in this time crunch in any way, shape, or form (I don't know how you parents do it).
So if we throw a figure out, you've got maybe 10% of your waking hours which are even available to be something other than "same S, different day". Nah, for the naysayers, let's make that 15%. Again, you better like your bed, enjoy your job, and take great pleasure in tedious personal responsibilities, because simply by existing most of your time is monopolized before any given time period even occurs; it's like how your paycheck is pretty much already spoken for before you even get it.
So you could try as hard as you could, spend all your disposable income, even take on debt chasing after that 15% and trying to make it good enough to justify the other 85%. Or, you could invest some time changing your life so that 100% of it is the same (well, 100% isn't realistic, but you get my point), and so that 100% of it is enjoyable. Uh-oh, there's that all-or-nothing thinking. But yeah.
I don't do anything I don't enjoy. Picking up a new responsibility that is a burden and is recurrent is like deciding to keep putting rusty tacks in your shoes, one by one. Sure, you can walk through the pain, tacks are weak and you are strong, but the tacks will eventually drive you insane and destroy your will to live, after you've walked a few hundred miles in those shoes.
Institutionalization taught me something. When your every single day is the exact same, you start to lose your sense of time. It all starts running together; you have no timeline, you don't know if you've been inside for 3 years, 3 months, or 3 weeks; it all feels the same. I had to embrace it to survive, mentally, and I'm finding that even in the real world it's a pretty good way to live.
tl;dr/summary - I agree thoroughly, and add that the problem is that almost all of your time is monopolized by responsibilities. Almost all. You've still got some left, and to allow you to titillate yourself with pleasures you won't even have the opportunity to have for the vast majority of your waking hours is a sure way to end up a weekend-addict, always chasing the dragon that is the weekend, over and over. Better to fold that small amount of spare time into the bloc that is work/sleep/other and tailor your entire life to be enjoyable.
