I believe there is a lot of merit in this finding. I’ve noticed that I always need something to look forward to in order to be happy. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be a long vacation. It could be a birthday party, a weekend trip with some friends, or even just planning some time with a significant other. Looking back, the times when I was unhappiest was when my life was stagnant, and I didn’t seem to be making progress toward anything.

Now I am going to go one even one step further and say that perhaps for some people, happiness is a function of the change in quality of life. (For all you math people: the derivative of the “Quality of life” function) So what I mean by this is that…people with many problems in their life but see their situation improving rapidly are more happy than people with -not so many- problems but experience little to no improvement in their life. This would explain why multi-millionaires and rock stars are some of the most depressed people in the world. Since they have already reached the “top”, their quality of life has nowhere to go except downward. Now this theory alone doesn’t explain why simple people with simple lifestyles seem to be the happiest, but I would imagine that they view the passage of time as an increase in their quality of life. Especially if they have children that they can raise and at some point can have families of their own.

So the next time that you’re feeling depressed or unhappy, ask yourself the question: “What do I have to look forward to?”

I would be lying if I said that my job was the only thing distracting me these days. I have a wonderful girlfriend, Sally, who I’ve been seeing for a few months now (6 months in Feb.) I usually don’t like to talk about girls until I know exactly what’s up, but I know what’s up with her and I’m really happy. The only hard part is the semi-long distance. She lives in long island while I’m still in south jersey so that’s pretty lame. I’ve been learning NJ Transit pretty well though.

On the gaming front I’ve been playing the same two games for the past 2 months: Left 4 Dead 2 and Guild Wars and I can’t get enough of them. L4D2 needs no explanation, but I feel like Guild Wars is the most under appreciated game in the history of PC games amongst everyone I know. There’s just so much to do in the game both PvE and PvP wise. And competitively it takes a lot of skill to play. I really like that the expansions are horizontal (meaning that the new content is spread amongst all areas of gameplay) rather than vertical (meaning the new content is solely focused on adding to the end game which obsoletes old content like WoW does). I am really looking forward to Guild Wars 2 but there has been no release day announcement so it’s going to be a while. I’ve pretty much stopped playing dance games all together but the community is still amazing and I will try to be a part of it as long as I can.

Other random thoughts that I don’t feel like putting into paragraph form:

-The Old Republic Q1 2011 YES
-Raquetball is cool
-Rock climbing is very cool
-I will never look at the Jersey Shore the same way
-Time to make a music game engine
-Time to make GAMES
-I really want to play poker
-The Battlestar Galactica game is amazing and I need people to play with me
-I need to do more physical activity
-PAX EAST!!!!

I’ll be in good old South Jersey for the summer doing a lot of things actually:

1. Working on my Programming/Game Dev portfolio – So much stuff to learn. My first project will most likely making an online poker game, just to gain some experience with networking. Possibly also learning iPhone stuff.

2. Working on some websites – I want to make a tournament section for GrooveStats, finish ChezWorld v3, and start my top secret project GETTYBUNGA. Even I don’t know what it is yet.

3. Traveling – tentative visits include San Diego, Las Vegas, Lake George, insert random Anime con/game tournament here

4. Working remotely part-time for the web company I did my Co-ops with. I’m so looking forward to working in pajama pants.

5. RELAXING – Probably will be doing this more than anything.

And after summer? No idea, but I’m not worried. We’ll see how things pan out.

In other news I finally sold and transferred GrooveStats to the new owners. It was more hassle than I thought it would be but they were nice enough to keep access to the server so I could implement the tournament section.

Note to self: FINISH CHEZWORLD. THIS IS PATHETIC.