There are some activities in your routine that are necessary for life (e.g. eating, drinking water). You don’t have to make an effort to maintain them throughout your life. Then there are activities in your routine that are necessary for a civilized life (e.g. brushing your teeth). These are also rather easy to maintain. And then there are some that are necessary for keeping in harmony with your external environment (e.g. coming to office to work, having dinner with your wife, playing with your child). These are also very easy to maintain (though you may want to avoid them some times but they are easy to maintain anyway). Call them obligatory activities.
After these three types of activities, there are activities that you want to push into your routine for your amusement. For example, reading, jogging, listening to music (and by listening to music I don’t mean that you listen to music while doing something else like jogging/cooking; I mention listening to music as an activity by itself wherein you just spread yourself on your bean bag, close your eyes, let your head fall back a bit and listen to music). These activities are hard to maintain on a daily basis.
The for-amusement activities are hard to maintain for multiple reasons. The chief reason is time. 24 hours - (necessary activities + civilized activities + obligatory activities) == too little time to do any damn thing.
If you want to have an activity for amusement, there would be so many other activities that would compete for the same time slot. For instance, I go for jogging in the morning. So, I can’t browse in the morning as the same time is utilized for jogging. If for a day, I get a strong urge for browsing, I won’t go for jogging. Also, I can’t party in the night or watch movie till late night as I have to get up early in the morning and I prefer sleeping well on a daily basis. So, if someday a friend invites for dinner, next day, I am not going to jog.
So, as you can see, any activity that is for-amusement is hard to maintain. And that’s why sustaining them over long term means a lot of effort.
So, what happens if you don’t put in much effort to sustain them. Simple, you won’t be able to sustain them. If you go for jogging every mornning, soon a time will come when you’ll go out for a short vacation and your jogging is cancelled for 5 days. Then you’ll take 2 days to settle down in your house and work, your jogging is cancelled for 7 days. If you don’t go for jogging for 7 days, you’ll again need that extra push (i.e. inclination+energy) from your side to resume it. Which will not be there for some reason. And you’ll stop it altogether.
Now, even more interesting is when you put in the effort to sustain it. Let’s say you make sure that you continue to do it for 1 year. Great! 1 year is a long time. Now you have got used to jogging in the morning. You must jog everyday because if you don’t jog, whole day you’ll feel that something is missing. You won’t feel that fresh, that energetic, that normal. You would immediately resolve that tomorrow, you must go. In fact, you might jog in the evening itself to make your day normal.
You know what has happened? Your for-amusement activity has become obligatory. Your jogging is not something that you do everyday to amuse yourself. You do it to continue feeling normal. You have further reduced the time available for your amusement!!