What is Good Enough?

There will be nothing new in this post.  It's mostly for me to precisely put down what I am thinking and feeling and what I should do about it.

I am going through a pretty common part of my emotional life, a bit where I am not motivated to do very much, I just want to sit in the lovely sunshine with a beer, a bong hit, and a book, listening to reggae.  So far in my life this recipe has worked every time to make me happy.  When I think to myself as to what I really want to do with my life, it pretty much comes down to that.

However, I am a human raised in a culture of productivity.  I have been taught that I should do my part, not be a slacker, try to have goals and achieve them.  I have a duty to other people to "do my part" and so therefore not doing anything is immoral.  Laziness is wrong.

There are some people for whom what they want to with their life is be productive.  Good for them, but for me these two things are incompatible.  As a result I have a conflict between making myself happy right now and a sense of wrongness about that.

Well, what is my duty to my fellow man?  How productive do I need to be?  What is good enough?  I'll start of with the idea that if everyone helped other people more than they were helped (as far as is possible) then the world would be a pretty wonderful place.  Do I do that right now?  The help I receive is largely from my wife, and I help her too by doing what she hates to do, loving her, and trying to help her be happier.  While I believe her to be giving more than she is getting, she seems happy with the arrangement.  However, I also provided the funds to help mentor some children, protect some people from horrific diseases, and feed some people.  Overall it seems that I am helping more than I am being helped.

Furthermore, I worked in social work, which is almost by definition helping people.  I did that for something like fifteen years, and I was good at it.  After I quit I had problems of guilt, that there were people hurting because I wasn't working anymore.  My wife put forward the opinion that I had done my share for my life, that I had done more good than most people would do in their lifetimes, and that was good enough.

I can therefore conclude that overall in my life I have done more good than harm, and unless I start causing harm to people that should be pretty much true for the rest of my life.  Isn't that good enough?  It depends whether you think "good enough" is more than doing more good than harm, but rather doing the amount of good that you can do.  I could do much more good, give more to charity, volunteer, go back to work, clean the house.    The difference between the two "good enoughs" is the area in which I find myself when I feel guilt about just wanting to make myself happy.  Nobody, well perhaps almost nobody, does the greatest amount of good they could.  Doing more good than harm makes the world better.

I'm going with the idea that I am good enough, and so I'm going to make myself very happy right now.