I spent all day writing blog posts.  I wrote three posts, each one carefully edited and rewritten until it was ready to publish.  I got to the point of convincing myself that it was ready for hitting the publish button.  And that at that instant, I moved the entire post to the trash folder.

The point of all three was to talk about how writing makes me happy.   Blogging with the realization that someone is actually reading my ramblings makes me happier still.

Where things got out of hand is when I started to reconcile this happiness with the fact that I’m not working.   I have no job and I think I’m happier even though my budget is limited.

I enjoyed my work.  I liked the feeling of accomplishing, of serving, or making a contribution.  At the same time, the work failed to make me happy.  More than that, it prevented me from pursuing things like writing that does make me happy.

Employment hampered my ability to write for many reasons.  One, it takes a huge amount of time to compose even a little blog post, time not available after giving the employer his time.  Two, my job involved inevitable take-home work usually in terms of researching or learning to prepare for the next day or next task, making even less time available.   Third, if I do write, I would write about something work related and would not venture far from that.  Fourth and somewhat related to the third is that I would be excessively cautious about what I would attempt to write about.

I worked for various jobs across three decades and during that time I never wrote for fun.  I forgot how fun writing could be.

What got my earlier articles in trouble is that I attempted to explain this pursuit of happiness in the context of expectations of modern american culture.  Apparently it is a topic that gets me pretty worked up.

Many years ago, a date asked me a simple question: Do I work to live or do I live to work.  I answered honestly the wrong answer.  I live to work.  I took the question to mean whether I do anything for fun with the fruits of my work.  I invested the fruits of my work to get more work.

The goal of working is to finance unemployment breaks such as this one so that I could live.

I do miss the work, but I don’t know where I’d find the time to do it.

It took me all day to write this.  I deleted all the fun parts.