15 September 2009

Counter-intuitive happiness

If someone has one thing to do in their life on the completion of which depend many other things, one would think that progress in that one thing would always give that person a sense of accomplishment, advancement and satisfaction.

My Master's thesis is such a thing. And on some days I make progress on it. But usually I fell very down and unaccomplished on the end of such days. Why am I happier on days when I don't write anything on my thesis? Why does good progress on the thesis still leave me unsatisfied and empty?

After a normal day of work, I just need some food, chat, and rest to be good for the next day of work. After a day of thesis writing, even if it just has a couple hours of writing, I am in desperate need of some extra-ordinary reward to make me feel human again. Usually I do something creative, like writing, but I don't have enough energy to make it into some good writing like an interesting blog post or an extension to a Wikipedia-article.

I started grad studies because I wanted to have a creative career. Now, I have to consider the option of taking a less demanding job and rather be creative in my free-time. This didn't work that well, last time I tried, but I haven't tried many pass-times yet.

Now, this was my creative writing for the day. Let's go back to the grind.

1 comments:

Sarah, Zurich said...

The difference between past-time creativity and work creativity is that you can just stop when you run out of the former while you have to go on when you run out of the latter. That is why work projects seem to be so much more draining at times. If you could let them lie at times of non-creativity, they would be so much more satisfying. But it amounts to never finishing anything and that is something that makes me feel that all this past-time creativity is often more wasted than work creativity, even though it is more fun.

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