Crucifixion before the Resurrection

Sick and tired of how I feel like I'm making progress, and then something happens that shows me I haven't really progressed at all. Why does change have to happen so incrementally? Why does change take 'dedication' and 'commitment' and other words from some vocabulary list of clichéd words. Nothing I can do but press on, I suppose. Discouragement is crippling, but we limp on anyway. Acknowledging that you feel a certain way but recognizing that acting on these feelings is not the right way to go is difficult. Don't you feel like a emotions vs reason battle is a one-sided fight? It's like my emotions have some inherent right to be expressed, like all the muscles in my body couldn't cage in my anger/pain. The longer it sits the worse it gets.

I want to live an effortless life. I don't think I mean I want a life where I can be lazy and hang out in my bed like a sloth in a tree. I mean that I want to live a life where it's easy to find joy in everything I do, such that nothing seems to require effort anymore. I don't know how people enjoy every moment of life, or live each moment to the fullest. How am I supposed to walk down the street and think, "Oh this concrete is so beautiful!" How???

I don't like the belief that intelligent people are sad people. Yes maybe Plath and Woolf killed themselves. Yes maybe Camus and Sartre and Locke or whoever understood the evil and cruel tendencies of human nature. Yes maybe Noam Chomsky is not the happiest man alive. Being intelligent and aware of the world around you, all its perfections and its (sometimes gargantuan) flaws should not discourage you. I think perhaps even more so you should learn to be happy with the good things when they do happen.

Is there really any difference between Sartre's rambling lamentation on the nauseous feeling of existence versus any 15 year old's life motto "I hate myself and everyone around me especially you mom"?

I don't even know what I'm saying. I'm tired of these lulls I get in the days where all my hard work seems futile. Where it feels like I'm incapable of any change. I don't know.