Moods

[robinturner]

I've noticed that one the one hand, my overall mood has lifted somewhat over the past few weeks, while on the other, I'm rather more irritable. The first may well be due to all this reading on happiness I've been doing as background for this semester's course, plus a lot of incidental "external goods" (to use Aristotle's term), such as getting free Internet access at home, buying or ordering nice toys etc. I'm not sure where the irritability comes from. Perhaps when your life as a whole is going well, you start noticing the little things that aren't. To give a silly example, I got up this morning intending to grab a quick cup of coffee and go to the office before anyone else was awake. While I was looking for my jeans, my wife got up, and I felt irrationally irritated, sort of "Why aren't you sleeping like you're supposed to?" Then we had an argument about bread, of all things. Since her sister is staying with us, there wasn't enough bread left for breakfast for everybody, so I should go up the road to the shop and get some. I pointed out that I was on my way out, I wasn't having breakfast, and I had warned her about the bread situation when she was wolfing it down last night. Both of us simmered at each other until her sister woke up and we had to start behaving like rational adults.

I mean, this is silly - I haven't had arguments like that since I was sharing houses over a decade ago. In those situations they are inevitable; in any shared house there is always one person who will eat communal food without replacing it, one who will buy food but not wash dishes, one who will wash other people's dishes then try to make them feel bad about it, and so on.uanai. There's something about living with people that seems to short-circuit higher cortical functions.