Happiness is easy ...and so is apathy.

Blog Week February 9, 2010

Geezey Louisy, How happy am I?

I like to think of myself as a generally happy person. I think that for the most part my happiness remains pretty static throughout my life. I would rank my happiness as something along the lines of a 7.5 to an 8. I think that generally, I get what I want out of life and enjoy it. I have good friends and I think that helps a lot too. But, to be honest I think that I am happy no matter who I am around (mostly because I am good at entertaining myself).

I think that what is more changing is my levels of unhappiness. (Now a 4 or 5). I think that the best way to describe why I am unhappy is frustration at wanting different things. First, I think that teaching adds to my unhappiness a lot. While I do feel like it is rewarding and draws upon my intrinsic desire to do good. However, there are a few circumstances that make me not want to do so. First, I feel frustrated at the fact that teaching involves many processes that I neither enjoy nor am proficient in. I think the planning involved simply is something that I struggle with because my mind doesn’t work in that way. The second part is that I feel frustrated with the fact that I am not sure that my struggles are worthwhile. Next year, I am not going to be teaching. So what does this mean? It means that my struggles to get better at teaching will be lost. That makes me somewhat unhappy. The last thing that makes me unhappy is that sometimes I take momentary happiness over doing things that will make my life more peaceful. In some instance, I feel like I put off certain things that would make me happy to complete.

The irony of talking about apathy while blogging for ASU is worth mentioning. Right now I feel frustrated at the current level of apathy that I have for doing ASU work. I feel like this is related to my earlier comments: I am frustrated because I cannot see the value of my actions right now in terms of it being good for me or others over a long term basis. I think this is really dangerous for me because deep down I find it valuable but completing work simply does not make me happy.

I want to be an 8 on my scale of happiness (80% mastery HA.) I think that in order to get happier I need to work on balancing different parts of my life. This means concretely that I will be more proactive in completing certain things that I would to complete like instead of putting things off. I will clean my room and complete most of my ASU and complete some random to dos that I have been putting off.