Life Sucks?

I have it all. I have a loving and beautiful wife. Our three young children, although sometimes a bit overly rambunctious, are outrageously smart and wonderful. We have a nice house in a great neighborhood. I have what must rate as one of the best jobs in the world: I am a tenured professor at a prestigious university. My hours are flexible, external demands minimal, and while I don’t make a prince’s ransom (or what I imagine most of my college classmates to be making) it would be ridiculous for me to complain about my salary. I am a straight white man – which, unfortunately, remains an advantage (or at least a lack of disadvantage) in modern America. And we all, thankfully, have good health. No, I realize that it not only appears that I have it good. It is simply a statement of fact.So why is it that sometime not long before the sun begins to set on these short winter days, I often feel a creeping dread? Why do I increasingly feel like I dislike my job? Why do I go home, and let a glass of wine with my wife before dinner turn into one too many scotchs after? Why do I feel like a failure at most everything I’ve touched?  Why do our finances tie my stomach up in knots? Why do I sometimes forgo my wife’s subtle suggestion to join her in bed because I would prefer to look at porn on the web? Why has my gut become a body part as permanent as an arm or leg, and why does this bother me so much? Why, although I have the time, don’t I spend more time playing with my children?Nobody prepared me for these things. My father, whom I suspect went through something similar, died some years ago. I would almost call this a “midlife crisis” if I did not recently read a relatively compelling condemnation of the term in the New York Times. Besides, I am hardly falling apart, buying a convertible, or abandoning my family. Rather, I am trying to make my way through some unfamiliar terrain that contains some rough going.I read the same men’s magazines that you do. (Not those – the internet has replaced the need for them.) You know – Men’s Health, Esquire, GQ. All offer guys like me lots of advice, every month, in easy to read and digest bullet points. Ten ways to lose your gut. Six great sex tips. How to get a raise. Twelve “miracle foods.” Guidance on how to dress well, how to eat well, how to drink well. Three hundred useful tips, offered in so many sentence fragments.I have come to the conclusion that they are all bullshit. Sure, they are fun to read, and I especially enjoy them when I am waiting in airports. But in terms of offering stuff that really is useful? I don’t know about you, but the “twelve tips to juice your workout” never did shit for me, except perhaps contributing to a muscle sprain and an even bigger gut as I followed the tip for the “post-workout recovery meal.”If you stumbled onto this blog looking to increase your own self-pity, or looking for another fifteen points to get your internal house in order, you might as well leave now. I don’t have the answers.About 1,500 years ago, Augustine sat down to contemplate his desire to do evil. The result of his contemplation was his magnificent Confessions, in which he attempted to wrestle with and come to terms with the human condition as he understood it.I obviously did not know him, but I know that I am no Augustine. This blog, though, is written in that spirit, only in real time. I cannot tell you how to live your life. What I can do is to use this forum to work out, perhaps, how to live my life. If you would like to help me, with your comments and responses, all the better. And if this also helps you in the process, then this blog really would have accomplished something.Over the next few months you are going to get to know me a lot better. In fact, this is going to be embarrassingly intimate – an insider’s view of my life. I have and will continue to change some critical identifying details, but in all substantive respects I intend to be brutally honest. You will learn about my frustrations at work; take a look at my balance sheet; go inside the gym, and cupboard, with me; witness my sex life; and be exposed to some of the darker areas of my psyche.Welcome to my blog.