Right now, I'm living the easy life.
Yes, I'm working 60 - 80 hours a week and I'm stuck in a town in Germany, a full days drive from basically everything I hold dear. So how is this the easy life?
Easy... Right now everything is disciplined, focused, singular and straightforward. Life is about sleeping, eating, working, working and then working some more. My entire world consists of my appartment, the work site, a few restaurants, a grocery store and the paths between them. With some time pressure and work focus like this, most normal life worries simply fade away. It actually wouldn't be "hard" to live like this.
Scary idea? Well, it would be a very colourless and limited existence. And it's definitely not compatible with relationships, or even friendships; my social circle having shrunk to the few fellow victims of this situation. All evidence of anything bigger has been reduced to a few phonecalls and e-mail messages.
I know that my "life" here is very limited compared to my normal life and I wouldn't want to swap permanently for all the money in the world. But the worrisome part is that it is, aside from missing my girlfriend and friends, mostly my rational side that "knows" I shouldn't be satisfied with this life. It would be very easy to simply "exist" like this and not bother with abstract larger world concerns. How does this work, psychologically?
I can see that "this life" would be a lot easier. In some ways I guess it's... comforting? ... to have so few concerns. Is there an odd appeal to such simplicity of subsistence? Or is it the fading of other concerns, the singularity of purpose here, that seems appealing?
