Guilt, part 2: what you're doing

No matter what situation you're in, you should not be enjoying yourself. You should always feel like your time would be better spent doing something other than what you're actually doing. And because of this, you should always feel guilty about everything you're doing.

You have many talents, but you do nothing at all with them except congratulate yourself secretly about how talented you are. So when Friday comes along and you decide to go out and get drinks with your friends (or by yourself, if you have no friends), you should feel like every moment at that bar and every sip of alcohol you take is like throwing your hands up and giving up on life. How can you enjoy that vodka tonic when you have a book you've been meaning to (and telling everyone you know you are going to) write? How can you sleep at night knowing that those are 8 hours where you could be cleaning your disgusting room or doing your back taxes or just sitting on the computer looking up symptoms for the various illnesses you know you probably have?

The worst thing you could ever do is decide to take a nap in the middle of the day. If you decide to do this, the first 30 minutes of it should be spent completely awake, worried about the horrible, but totally non-urgent, flaws in your personality and upcoming events in your life. Even if you know you would have spent these 2 hours, if awake, surfing the Internet or playing video games, you should still think that every moment you lay in bed getting the rest your body needs is a moment you could be spending saving your life from catastrophic failure. Any nap you take should comprise some of the most stressful, unsatisfying minutes in your entire life. And you should "wake up" feeling more tired and worried about your life than you did before you laid down. 

Then, that night when you're completely unable to fall asleep because your body thinks it already went to bed once today, you should by no means take this time to do something productive like clean your room, do your back taxes or find out on the Internet that mouse droppings can give you hantavirus. Instead, you should just lay in bed, awake, hating yourself and watching the clock inch closer and closer to morning. If you put enough energy into hating yourself, you'll eventually tire and fall asleep. You'll get a solid 90 minutes of fitful "rest" before your alarm goes off and you're forced to engage in your most guilt-ridden activity -- going to the job that pays you more than you deserve for doing only slightly more than might be expected of a pretty intelligent ape.