Hard work

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to achieve happiness.

By external measures of success, I’m doing pretty well.

Good job where I’m pretty well respected, making good money, pretty nice car, nice apartment with great NYC views. I last smoked a cigarette on the morning of October 12th.

How much credit does any of those add to my balance sheet of happiness? Not very much.

Why’s that? Because these things came easy. I earned my current job by proving myself in my last. It’s not in the slow, boring times that anyone would take note of what I do, and that’s probably because I don’t do the boring stuff very well. Plodding along bores me, and I slack off like crazy. I can’t concentrate well, and get frustrated because of that. Add in frustration to boredom and I can manage to get the big zero done. Give me a crisis, though, and I can do whatever needs to be done. Perhaps not anything, but enough to make it the case that when the feces hits the air-mover, the people with whom I work like to have me around. Even when I miss the target in a crisis, I often overshoot what could reasonably be expected.

And people remember that. Which gives me enough credit to get through the slacking periods.

And for me, that’s not “hard”.

And despite my libertarian atheism, I hold myself in that respect to a Puritanical standard. If it didn’t take a work ethic to do, why should I give myself credit toward the self-esteem column?

My work success, and its results — car, apartment, etc — came relatively easily. The hardest part of any of it was fighting my own demons. Self-doubt, anxiety, depression. Things that paralyze me, and keep me from trying to attain what would otherwise come easily.

I thought that stopping smoking would be hard. There was a physical addiction, of course. I’d smoked a pack of cigarettes a day for the past year after having quit in December 2000. I wore the nicotine patch for a week, and for the first 2 or 3 days I was a bit edgy. But then I started to forget to wear the patch, and I went hours at a time without it.

So quitting smoking doesn’t really count towards self-esteem. The hardest part was finding another Duane Reade after the one nearest my office told me that they were out of “the patch”.

I realize I’m probably lacking the proper perspective, and it’s making this all way too difficult. Or maybe not. I’m trying other changes. I’m trying to get on the treadmill in my living room for at least 15 minutes, at least 4 times a week. That’s hard. I’ve been getting up at 6 and into the office about 7:30-7:40 for my 9-5 job. That… well, I’m not a morning person, but for some reason it’s been pretty easy.

We’ll see.