Routines or not?

To everyone that says they don't use routines.....

Bullshit. Everyone uses routines, even pure naturals. If you even say "Hi, my name is ____." on a regular basis, guess what, that's a routine. If you tell a story about something that happened in your life, that's a routine. Basically routines are nothing more than a bit of banter or storytelling you use fairly regularly when you interact socially. Period. Sure, some are 100% fabricated or stolen from others, like what happens when people join the community for a while, but most come from your life. Ideally any routines you use should be natural and true to your own life, but that doesn't make them less worthy or fake at all. Even if you run "natural" game you're still using routines whether or not you realize it or not. That's actually where you want to be, when something is so fluent that you don't even realize it's "in the can" so to speak.

One thing I've been seeing is people will conflate using routines with structured game. Whether or not you run structured or unstructured game, aka "natural game", doesn't matter. Both styles of pickup use routines.

Naturals often say something to the effect "Just go direct and say "Hi". That's what I do and it works fine for me. Nobody needs those silly routines you fakers use." Well, that direct opener of walking up and saying "Hi" is a routine. It may not feel like one to the natural because he didn't consciously invent it to be used as an opener, and so for him it just flows naturally, but no matter how you slice it it's still a routine.

You could argue that structured game uses both organic AND structured banter & routines whereas "natural game" is all organic, but to say they don't use routines at all isn't true one bit.