Life worth living

Yesterday, for the first time since the middle of March we had two of our friends over. It was beautiful! Having a normal conversation with real humans, after almost 2 months without gloves, masks and other corona safe talking equipment. It felt a bit like having unprotected sex. It was refreshing.

In the last two weeks I sank hard. Up until then I was doing really well. At the beginning I was like, ok this is going to be like a little vacations because some stuff that I was doing dropped, so I suddenly got a lot more free time. I was and still am going to work and that made me happy and it gave me some sense of security in these insecure times when people are getting fired left and right, hell I even got a raise.

I created new routines for myself. I never had problems with self-control. One of them was to continue working on my danish while the school is corona-out. And I was doing great until approximately the beginning of May and then I crashed.

The crash was triggered by a life event of one person close to me, that started me on a train of thought about life about aspirations in life and about what kind of a life is a happy life or a life worth living.

While I acknowledge that I should be happy with the fact that I am working and working on a job that doesn't make me unhappy or frustrated. That gives me a lot of free time and opportunities to pursue my interests. This corona-lock down makes all these perks of my job void. I can't go to vacation because I can't leave the country, I can't go to language school because it is closed, I can't attend festivals because they are cancelled. Hanging out with people is still severely limited because of the ban on gathering of 10+ and some people are still afraid of doing things and activities they would normally be doing. So my life is currently work, nap, danish, World of Warcraft and repeat. For how long, who knows... next year and a half maybe?

I never had and never will have that danish click in me that makes work an important part of my identity and I realized that during the time I had my dream job. The realization came on a day when I figured what the days look like for my boss. He wakes up at 5, works on some of his papers, goes to the office, stays there until either 13 or 15, depending whether he has a meeting or not. After that he goes home, spends two to three hours with his family, goes back to his study and works on his papers until 21 and of to bed. My first thought at that point was, man don't you have a life after work, what do you do when you are not working? That moment was the realization for me that while I may love my job at the time, it is still just a job. It is something that you do in order to finance living. Living is currently suspended. It boils down to work and staying at home doing... whatever you can do at home.

There is nothing for me to do except go to work, practice danish and play World of Warcraft. While it was fun when it started, for me it just isn't enough. I need to do and experience things that are not work related in order to be happy and currently that just isn't possible. I wonder how many people feels the same way?