Enemies of Happiness

Besides stress, two major distractions from happiness for me are:

1) tv/internet
2) alcohol

Holy crissmass how I loathe tv, and yet how I love love love love love it. I love the funny things and the pretty people and the numb bland feeling of nothingness that replaces my baseline agitation/loneliness/despair etc. Man it is such a needle in the vein - and time just slips by in a floating, flavorless paper ship to nowhere. And then it's bedtime. Ah relief. Ah escape.

So that's the upside, which is pretty dark. The downside: self-loathing for laziness and lack of productivity, a general sense of how everything and everyone that is not famous has somehow become irrelevant, a crumby feeling of how much more pretty and rich the rest of the world must be, not that I even believe that stuff, but it's got to be sinking in on some level. So yeah, downside sucks too.

So why watch tv? My conclusion is that I shouldn't. I didn't have a tv for a long time, like 5 years, and that was great. At least then when I watched tv it had to be out of the house, and probably social, and it could end easily because I had to go home. But then stupid hulu and netflix came along to ruin my brain - and my computer, the word-processing email checker, became a tv as well. And I don't self-regulate well with tv, I just want to see everything that's happening and really don't want to turn it off for any reason at all. I have a friend who completely embraces tv watching as a permissible, decadent, occasional sloth-fest, which I can really get behind in theory, but her method of moderation is a little more highly evolved than mine. Even the occasional sloth-fest can tip my resolve over into a week-long binge. Moderation is for people with legitimate self-control, and I don't think that's me. My modicum of self-control is the result of insistent, habitual, obsessive discipline, otherwise it all unravels and I find myself comatose in front of the tv for 5 hours a day.

Same with the booze. So yummy, so calming, such a splash of forgetting as the mind is too hampered to worry for a while. But it also sucks time, and productivity, and is a bar to physical comfort if you over do it (especially the next day), and interferes with sleep, and distances you from your mind, and then the disappointment you feel with yourself afterwards, yuck.

So what to do? Total abstemiousness with alcohol in a way is, I understand, just as obsessive and distracting as its abuse. But I think a hard-and-fast method of regulating consumption is good for me. Some rule besides "don't over do it" is necessary for me, because my feet happily kick sand over that line and blur it to nothingness pretty fast. Usually when I'm having a glass of wine, tra la.

So anyway these are two easily identifiable, external enemies to my happiness that I can actively contemplate my relation to in a way that hopefully aids my sense of well-being and increases my happiness.