There may be hope yet for you.
On Sunday, we had a promotion ceremony in karate. I saw Mike in his crazy shihan get up and got all excited thinking that I was in line for a promotion. My feeling was of anxious excitement. I wanted a promotion so badly. But I remember thinking during that time that, since I wanted a promotion so badly, that I wasn't deserving of one.
Well, as I'm sure you've guessed, I did not get promoted on Sunday. I am still a green belt after more than a year. That made me at once both extremely indignant and very depressed. I felt like maybe I wasn't good enough to improve and wasn't worth getting a promotion. And I felt like I had deserved one after all the time I had spent there, and it wasn't fair. There was actually a moment where I was about to cry in class. (Hey, it has been a stressful time. I thought, "Man, this is my break!" Nope, no break.)
But I got past all that. I smiled at the end of the ceremony. And I laughed to myself as I went through the stretch to get ready for class. What was the point? Why keep worrying about that anyway? There's something I tend to think of in certain situations, which is, "Wow, you really think that this stuff is important, don't you?" In a humorous, grandfatherly tone. That's sort of the perspective I put on how I felt in that moment and I just had to laugh. It was funny.
And then I performed the best karate I have performed in a long time. Maybe the best I've ever done.
But that just seems like an instantiation of my mindset at the moment. Talked to someone today and he told me that he, likewise, had been through a rough year. Echoing my sentiments he said firmly, "But everything seems to have gone to shit, so it seems like the only thing that can happen is that things improve."
Statistically speaking, I'm due, right?
On a different note...
I was thinking the past few weeks about something that had been brought up with me a few months ago and I didn't really have a good answer for it at the time. But the concern was in regards to why older individuals tend to be more invested in their jobs and more grumpy in them. Or something of the like (for whatever reason I can't really phrase the question properly).
Anyways, so I had some ideas.
My thinking is as such: Think of your days at work. Most people don't enjoy their jobs, which is a problem. However, there is an external, threatening force (corporation which can fire you) which says that you have to be nice to your customers. So that puts you in situations where you must pretend to be happy to talk to people and help them out and do shit like listen to old people talk for 10 minutes about something you don't care about.
So you're in a situation where your self is telling you, "This is bad." But the external world is essentially forcing you to act contrary to what you feel. Basically, you're in a cognitive dissonance situation, where you have to perform self-subversion. You have to push your sense of self aside and tell yourself, "I'm not going to listen to that right now. I'm going to do what you want me to do." So you lose touch with what you feel or want and just take on the goals of someone outside of you.
With enough time, that just feels normal. If one trains the skill of self-subversion long enough then it will just come naturally and people will just end up being out of touch with their selves basically all the time at work, if not in other contexts as well.
That's what I was thinking.