[peller]

When I find myself thinking along similar lines, I go back and read a quote from The Conquest of Happiness[0]. Perhaps it may resonate with you.

"The habit of thinking in terms of comparisons is a fatal one. When anything pleasant occurs it should be enjoyed to the fun, without stopping to think that it is not so pleasant as something else that may possibly be happening to someone else.

With the wise man, what he has does not cease to be enjoyable because someone else has something else. Envy, in fact, is one form of a vice, partly moral, partly intellectual, which consists in seeing things never in themselves, but only in their relations. I am earning, let us say, a salary sufficient for my needs. I should be content, but I hear that someone else whom I believe to be in no way my superior is earning a salary twice as great as mine. Instantly, if I am of an envious disposition, the satisfactions to be derived from what I have grows dim, and I begin to be eaten up with a sense of injustice.

For all this the proper cure is mental discipline, the habit of not thinking profitless thoughts. After all, what is more enviable than happiness? And if I can cure myself of envy I can acquire happiness and become enviable. The man who has double my salary is doubtless tortured by the thought that someone else in turn has twice as much as he has, and so it goes on. If you desire glory, you may envy Napoleon. But Napoleon envied Caesar, Caesar envied Alexander, and Alexander, I daresay, envied Hercules, who never existed. You cannot, therefore, get away from envy by means of success alone, for there will always be in history or legend some person even more successful than you are. You can get away from envy by enjoying the pleasures that come your way, by doing the work that you have to do, and by avoiding comparisons with those whom you imagine, perhaps quite falsely, to be more fortunate than yourself."

[0] http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51783.The_Conquest_of_Hap...

[brokenmachine]

I agree with most of that, however...

My aim is not to work for someone else, so I can decide to spend my limited time doing what makes me happy. When I'm getting paid peanuts there is no prospect of being able to have that choice.

I find it very difficult to just try to be happy with whatever "the man" has decided he wants me to do today.

[peller]

In my experience it's a bit of a catch-22. I find by working for people I respect, I learn more about how I can get to the point of having the freedom to do whatever I want. But until that day comes, I have to keep my head up and my attitude positive. If I don't, I find I learn less and I become less productive, and thus less valuable to "the man", thereby pushing my goals further away.

But you're absolutely right; it's not enough to "just try to be happy." I may be reading too far between the lines - apologies if I am, but it could be that you need to start looking for new opportunities. That said, even if you are mostly happy where you are, the best way to get a substantial raise is to have another job offer in-hand. It's the clearest signal there is to your employer what the job market thinks your value is (as opposed to what you think it is). This is where networking comes in.

Ultimately, it comes down to the question, "What can you control?" You can control how much value you provide (how hard you work, what you work on, how much initiative you take, ...). You can control your living expenses (cheaper rent, home cooking, no partying, no tv/video games, ...). You can control how you spend your free time / what you learn about in your free time (How much do you know about investing? Tax law? Corporate/economic/governmental trends?) Anything you can't control, is not worth fretting over.

At the end of the day, beating the system is hard fucking work. Sometimes it seems like the universe conspires against you, and others, if you have the mental clarity to see it, it hands you golden opportunities. I'm not "there" yet, but in my experience, confidence and positivity are the first steps. (I quote "there" because as Emerson and others have said, "Life is a journey, not a destination." And that applies equally to happiness.)

Anyways, hopefully there's something in there that's helpful :)

[brokenmachine]

Nice post. Thanks for that.

> You can control how you spend your free time / what you learn about in your free time (How much do you know about investing? Tax law? Corporate/economic/governmental trends?)

Good advice, there is always stuff to learn. It feels like my problem is that work drains so much out of me that I am too tired/unmotivated to do anything else when I get home. I know it's a discipline issue but that doesn't make it easier. It's hard to come from a day spent working "for the man", straight into more work for yourself at night.

Good luck, I hope we both end up beating the system.

[mnmlme]

Have you honestly figured out what make you happy? For most people it turns out that answering that question is a lot more difficult than it sounds -- at least long term. A cookie would certainly make me happy right now, but then what happens once the cookie is gone?

Without really knowing what you want in the long term to make you happy, it's gonna be a struggle to figure out how to get to that point in your life. :)

[brokenmachine]

> Have you honestly figured out what make you happy?

I'm not 100% sure, because I haven't lived it, but I'm pretty sure I don't need that much. I like quiet and space, the city's not for me. I need a very quiet property quite far from the hustle and bustle (and goddamn leafblowers!). Also a couple of thousand per year for gadgets/technology. I'm a people person but I hate the fakeness and superficial contact with people that seems to come with jobs in the city ("how are you today?" grrrr), so I feel like a sour puss most of the time, which is actually not my personality so it feels dissonant.

At the end of the day I've just kept the machine running for another day. I work in an important industry, so my job is indirectly important, but I can't ever point to a physical thing that I've created or a particular person that I've helped, and most people don't even understand what I have achieved. I think that makes me feel a bit empty. It's just other people's problems all day with a lot of irritating bureaucracy and "professionalism" but a bag of money attached.

Maybe I'm just lazy but I don't want to work as some people seem to. I have many hobbies that could easily occupy all my time, so I don't feel I need work to be happy. I have heard about studies that say that people are happier working but I really don't think that I am (or maybe I just haven't found the work that makes me happy yet).

Unfortunately I haven't worked out how to make an income away from the city yet, but I have thought about quitting and getting any menial job I can find in the country because the rents are cheap in rural areas. Just can't bring myself to pull the trigger, my current job has a lot of pluses and good pay, and I'm not sure if I could come back to the IT industry if I did ever want to after leaving and getting behind.

But who knows? Maybe after a couple of years with a quiet rural lifestyle I'd miss the city. I don't think so though...

[brokenmachine]

"Comparison is the thief of joy" - Theodore Roosevelt.

[zump]

Thats all well and good, but I hate to earn peanuts. I doubt someone has 10x better skill than me, so why do they earn 10x as much?

[sobani]

Because they asked for it?

[dracht]

I always feel like people telling me to be happy with my piece of the pie and to not compare it to others is a ploy by those with a bigger piece to keep me docile and content. Do our feelings of envy not serve a purpose? Would Napoleon have become Napoleon had he not envied Ceasar?