The Charlie Brown formula
It’s 1 am in the morning, and I can’t sleep. This is rarity for me, because normally I operate on a level of perpetual sleep deprivation that I can sleep anytime, anywhere, at the drop of a hat, as soon as I stop moving. Must be some free-floating anxiety about school starting up soon at UNC. A tagline popped into my head as I was lying bed: “The Self Knowledge Symposium: transforming vague anxity into actionable guilt since 1989.”
My boss told me today: “You need to take a really extravagant vacation. Go somewhere, do something. I know you have your SKS and everything, but you can’t just work all the time. You need something to look forward to, a reward for the work you’ve done.” My immediate gut-level reaction was, “Yeah, but I don’t feel like myself when I’m not working.”
He may be on to something, though. The truth is that, at 1 am, I don’t always know what is motivating me. I experience brief highs (like, 15 seconds of happiness) when I solve a problem at work; I do a little happy-dance when the code does what it should. But then I’m moving on to the next fire. Daily victories breaking up a sea of dread . . . it’s hard to connect the day-to-day trials to the big picture, which isn’t a good sign.
Charlie Brown said: “Happiness is three things to look forward to and nothing to dread.” I always thought that was a pretty good functional definition of happiness. It showed some special self-knowledge on the part of Charlie Brown, since, by that definition, he was rarely if ever happy. Charlie Brown was the poster-child of dread; 90% of the humor in the Peanuts cartoon hovered around his impending sense of doom, interspersed with brief respites of joy and love. It’s also why, in spite of him being such a sadsack, so many people connected with him. Charlie Brown was Everyman; we all felt the same way.
So what am I looking forward to?
Let me get back to you on that . . . because, man, am I slammed with work right now.
My boss told me today: “You need to take a really extravagant vacation. Go somewhere, do something. I know you have your SKS and everything, but you can’t just work all the time. You need something to look forward to, a reward for the work you’ve done.” My immediate gut-level reaction was, “Yeah, but I don’t feel like myself when I’m not working.”
He may be on to something, though. The truth is that, at 1 am, I don’t always know what is motivating me. I experience brief highs (like, 15 seconds of happiness) when I solve a problem at work; I do a little happy-dance when the code does what it should. But then I’m moving on to the next fire. Daily victories breaking up a sea of dread . . . it’s hard to connect the day-to-day trials to the big picture, which isn’t a good sign.
Charlie Brown said: “Happiness is three things to look forward to and nothing to dread.” I always thought that was a pretty good functional definition of happiness. It showed some special self-knowledge on the part of Charlie Brown, since, by that definition, he was rarely if ever happy. Charlie Brown was the poster-child of dread; 90% of the humor in the Peanuts cartoon hovered around his impending sense of doom, interspersed with brief respites of joy and love. It’s also why, in spite of him being such a sadsack, so many people connected with him. Charlie Brown was Everyman; we all felt the same way.
So what am I looking forward to?
Let me get back to you on that . . . because, man, am I slammed with work right now.
posted by The Thin Man | 1:17 AM
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