When you repeatedly do something over and over again, it tends toward a certain regularity. Repetitive tasks are usually associated with basic subsistence operations: maintaining food stores, infrastructure, habitations, tools, etc. But repetition also crops up on lower levels of finer disciplines and activities.
Even with something fine, to do it well and successfully requires coordinated mechanical movements or attention, which have to be built up through repetition.
With repetition comes a dulling of experience and attention that increases over time, so the exercise becomes a process of expediency: how to perfect the repetition process so as to finish it quickly and efficiently?
So the pathways for executing a given operation constrict away from play, away from haphazard wandering, so as to distil the most expedient line, or combination of muscle movements and coordination which produce the quickest, most dependable results, so one can move on quickly. This tends to produce a regularity and a conformity. It produces success, but also boredom.
Further, regularity also arises out of volume, and the necessity of producing a desired object - which is expected to be a specific way - in bulk, which requires a systematizing of the production process. Which comes first? Volume? Successful repetition? Regularity? Or does it all grow together?
All of this is also anthropomorphizing repetition and regularity. More generally, something which is repeated over and over again - because it is useful, or because it is something that is continuously happening - tends to produce regular pathways as part of its perpetual operation, or it is only occurring in the first place because of certain pathways or conjunctions.
A large, complex society tends toward a relegation of its most mechanical and repetitive tasks to the less powerful members of society, or members lower on the social ladder. Much social energy is expended staying above this zone of repetition, jockeying for positions of executive control, play, or creativity.
To clarify with a microcosmic example, this sort of phenomenon happens in music too. One part of improvisational jazz - and other forms of improvisational and communicative music - consists of the basic social requirement that each member plays as an equal, that is, equally willing to produce repetitions and diminish one's importance, but also equally given the opportunity to play, to improvise, to playfully express oneself with an instrument and become seen.
Oftentimes in pop music, a certain style arises which is a refined form of a set of social relations, but which is hardened. The dominant musical members change from outfit to outfit, but oftentimes you have the rhythm section, the drummer and the bassist, relegated to the background, producing highly repetitious rhythms so that the lead guitarist or vocalist can dance about pretty-like, or otherwise these functions are assigned to a computer or drum machine.
There are plenty of outfits in this mold who produce music that I've really enjoyed and have been inspired by, but it is also important to remember this dynamic.
We also attempt to relegate a lot of our regular, mechanical functions to machines themselves, which has saved a lot of human toil and labor, but it seems we continue to increase in complexity, requiring ever more repetitious processes, and so there is always a need for individuals producing repetition. Further, the machines themselves must be built, maintained, and energized with repetition, which oftentimes requires human labor.
It seems to me that there is no escaping repetition. If one wants to escape it, one requires some form of slave, something which can be made to continuously repeat a successful operation, against the tendency of matter and energy to continuously drift. It would be more fair, and sustainable, for each individual to assume their own burden of repetition, and after all, repetition isn't so bad, especially as it puts one in a meditative state, and can produce some wondrous things.
