A user on Reddit.com posted a personal story about how his life is out of order and how depressed he feels and how he believes something is wrong with him. It is a long but decent read. I thought a reply to this post was very well worded. While targeted towards this particular user, I feel that it is good advice for anyone feeling down. Here it is.

Kind of depressing, but a lot of folks have been down this path. I think most get out of it, but end up miserable for years. I don’t know your philosophy on life, or if you even have one but I can tell you how to move the ball forward just a bit. You should devote tomorrow to cleaning your apartment. Not picking it up and moving the garbage around clean it. Stop at nothing until it is perfectly spotless. When you have finished that task start to organize your life on paper. Work at it. Do it better than you have ever done anything. I am much older than you and I’ll tell you one lesson I’ve learned …

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I don’t know if anybody reads Men’s Health, but they had a good article about Obama “The Challenger” in their 20th Anniversary edition.  They list “9 Lessons in balance, love, and leadership from a guy who’s even busier than you are”.  It’s a nice look at Obama when he’s not just crushing a lot…  you know, bumming smigs, parent teacher conferences, all that jazz.  Here’s a snippit (for anybody trying to kick the habit):

Lesson 6: Quit smoking (as often as you need to)
For all of Obama’s physical credentials, he’s carried around the ultimate health taboo — smoking — for most of his adult life. And he inhaled, all right. Then word came that he’d quit smoking.

“There wasn’t some dramatic moment,” he says. “Michelle had been putting pressure on me for a while. I was never really a heavy smoker. Probably at my peak I was smoking seven or eight a day. More typical was three. So it wasn’t a huge challenge with huge withdrawal symptoms. There have been a couple of times during the campaign when I fell off the wagon and bummed one, and I had to kick it again. But I figure, seeing as I’m running for president, I need to cut myself a little slack.”

He does have advice for people, like him, who are wrestling with the dependency. “Eliminate certain key connections — that first cigarette in the morning, or after a meal, or with a drink. If you can eliminate those triggers, that should help.”

The same issue has a fun read on the ‘Value of Personal Authenticity’, and how it relates to elections.

The most authentic candidate from the past 8 years didn’t even make it to the general election in 2000 or 2004. I’m talking about the maverick senator from Arizona named John McCain, who ran against Bush in the 2000 primary. That McCain rode around on a bus called the Straight Talk Express, and straight talk he did. He ripped the leaders of the religious right as “agents of intolerance.” He pushed for campaign finance reform and sensible tax policy. He was that rare politician willing to buck his party. Moderate Democrats like me swooned.

Unfortunately for the maverick, authenticity in the primaries isn’t as important as playing to your party’s base, and McCain’s independent ways were too much for the more conservative elephants of the GOP.

Update:  They changed Obama’s title from “The Challenger” to “The President Elect” in the article.