People talk about EA being this all-consuming thing sometimes, but for me it doesn’t really feel that way. Right now I’m earning to give, and so the main thing I need to do for EA is go to work every day and work hard, which is what I would want to do anyway. For the most part I don’t get paid any more money for working more hours. I guess there are things I maybe should be spending time on, like EA community-building and thinking about cause prioritization, but for the most part I think the official EA take on what I should be doing in my free time is “idk, maximize your personal happiness?”
And like, there’s something scary about that? Sometimes on a weekend afternoon I’ll find myself switching from activity to activity, opening and closing a book, starting and stopping a TV show, because the only point of anything right now is to maximize my happiness, and if I’m not really enjoying myself then why am I doing this? I find myself imposing structures, deciding “I will go to Mass every Sunday,” even though I don’t quite know what the point of that is either. And then I go, even though I’m tired and I want to sleep in and I don’t exactly enjoy it, because that seems better somehow than sleeping in and drinking tea in bed and watching Outlander.
I’ve been fantasizing more about having kids lately, and probably part of that is normal biological clock stuff, but I think part of it is that once I have kids, I won’t be trying to be happy anymore, I’ll be trying to make my kids happy. And that seems like a more fulfilling thing to live by.
When I was a kid, I always thought my mom’s life seemed kind of terrible. After a week of school, all I wanted was to do was play with Barbies and read books and dress up in costumes and generally have fun. Whereas my mom didn’t seem to have fun on weekends, really: when she wasn’t taking us to lessons and activities and playdates, she was cleaning the house or gardening or dropping off the dry cleaning. Even her fun was work: she’d invite friends over for dinner, but that meant hours of grocery shopping and cooking and cleaning up. Now I see it differently; she has a very firm conception of what a good life looks like for her family, and she works to achieve it. And that seems really appealing.