I feel like what I do is not good enough and I wonder if it is not good enough for me or if it’s not good enough for everyone else? Do we really live life for us or to appease others? Why do we envy what others have/do when what we have/have done is wonderful too?

My day would be similar to yours. I would wake up and have a great breakfast, walk to the lake and feed the ducks (I am still trying to get paid to do this), kayak a bit, and cuddle with my favorite person in the world, maybe hit a movie, and spend the evening cooking and baking yummy treats. And then read a little, discuss what I read, and fall asleep with my best friend. Simplicity.

How do we squeeze in simplicty everyday?

I say modern era because in times past, people did not have many options. You had connections and ability to do a narrow set of things, and you did them because you had to in order to survive and provide for your family. But now, we have many options, and those options seem to broaden every few years. We can choose our line of education, choose our line of work, choose our place of work, even choose to leave for any of thousands of new jobs we can consider with just a few clicks and keystrokes. I know many people who feel trapped, that they can only do certain types of jobs that they hate because they need to make $N per year, but they forget we also choose our lifestyle. We can always scale it way back and probably get by on a fraction of what we currently earn.

I often ponder this question of enjoying work, and I search for intersections of things I enjoy with the skills people will pay me to do. My most successful intersection has been with designing new stuff and engineering. Engineering is a rather dull discipline most of the time. In practice, the engineer spends most of this time documenting, measuring and analyzing things. But sometimes you get to design new stuff – new products, new processes. I have sought to place myself into roles involving new product development as that gives me an intersection of a marketable skill and my boyhood love of playing with lego. Even in a product development type role, I get perhaps 20% of my time doing fun stuff, but that makes the other 80% far more bearable… a necessary evil to support my ‘lego’ habit and to make sure it will last into perpetuity.

I would also wonder if your 15+ year line of work in computers is just because you happen to have fallen into it, or if there is something innate to it which you enjoy and attracted you in the first place. For me, I went into engineering because I enjoy the sciences, but I enjoy it in a practical sense of application as opposed to discovery. I also realized there were careers in engineering while physics has been pretty well figured out for all but the smartest thinkers. I happened to have fallen into an excellent first job, but since have been shaping my career and choices to intersect more with things I enjoy.