Pursuit is bliss

I should really get fired more often. Other than the strain of worrying whether I’ll ever find one, I’m a lot happier. I’ve settled into my jobless life quite well. It’s amazing the money you don’t spend when you can eat home for all our meals, you don’t need to purchase work clothes so you feel fashionable and your stress level becomes almost zilch because you are no longer consumed by a job you hate that causes your only perk in the day to be a daily conversation with your barista at Starbucks. Phew, I didn’t realize all the materialism I was using to fill the void that was my job.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…” Thomas Jefferson (of course)

I find myself wondering if people really know what would make them happy and if they knew what that was if they would really pursue it. I stayed in a business for almost 6 years that never made me happy, but only encouraged my paycheck to grow and a lazy comfortable way of life to continue. I didn’t even realize I was doing it. I thought I was doing what has expected of me and that a 9-5 job is just the average way of doing what you want to after 5. I wanted that trip to NYC and my daily Starbucks latte so my job provide me with those things. However now I’m outside of that and I realized nothing is worth being bored, stressed, and generally upset for 8 hours of a 16 hour wake period.

So am I pursuing happiness? I hope so. The more time I spend outside of an office the more I realize I never want to see the inside of a cubical again. And the more time I spend without my stress, the more I realize NYC (and my expensive taste in shoes) can wait until I find something that makes me happy every day and not just waiting for my next vacation.

(By the way if you feel trapped in your pursuit of happiness, I highly recommend using Quicken to evaluate your lifestyle. Believe me, it might be shocking what you find you're wasting.)