When I attend the Jazz Club on a Wednesday night, I order the same drink and the same meal. After my first four or five visits, the bar tender asked me if I wanted “The Usual”.
There’s something nice about “The Usual”. To be able to order “The Usual” means that someone else out there in the world knows you exist, remembers you, and knows what you like, even if it’s in the most narrow sense like a favourite drink or meal. This other person knows a small piece of you and what brings you pleasure.
Of course, the usual can also impose artificial limits on us, limits that form ruts, habits, and assumptions that, for whatever reason, encourage us to act automatically, often without interrogating whether what we want this particular time might be something… unusual.