A couple years ago I came to a conclusion that improved my life quite a bit: Happiness is a terrible goal. Many other people seem to have this baseline positiv

A couple years ago I came to a conclusion that improved my life quite a bit: Happiness is a terrible goal. Many other people seem to have this baseline positive emotional state. They're more or less in a state of contentedness most of the time. For me, that's not how I feel most of the time. My baseline emotional state is not happy. I'm not content. I get flashes of contentedness -- after accomplishing something awesome, for example. But most of the time, I feel relatively unhappy. Thing is, for me, that lack of contentedness seems to drive me. It pushed me out of a really terrible career path back in college. It helped me find programming, and then drove me to learn it. It helped drive me across the country to work at a startup. It helps me spend insane amounts of time and energy on side projects. In the past five years I seem to have accomplished more than any of my peers have in the same amount of time. I don't know if I WANT to be happy. I feel like it'll only slow me down. I feel like I bring more to the world by being unhappy. And honestly, being envious of happy peers just sucks. For me, I've just put it aside.