Personal Struggle: Hypocrisy

One of the (numerous) struggles I've been dealing with of late is hypocrisy. Hypocrisy in my definition is "performing an action or dwelling on a thought, while knowing very well of its vices and undesirability". It essentially means believing or acting against one's better judgement. The funny thing is, we can trick ourselves to supersede our better judgement. This is perhaps best illustrated with examples.

First example: Paycheck = measure of success or identity?

As a Christian, this is completely against my beliefs as one's wealth should not be measured by materialism. Our treasure is not stored in vases on Earth but in heaven. On another level (though not unrelated), I understand that money has little correlation with happiness. This is evidenced by stories of people's lives ruined due to wealth -- whether they be professional athletes or lottery winners. Greed is very real and a terribly consuming sin.

The above being said, I must admit it is difficult not to judge others by the size of their paycheck and subsequently measure myself to them accordingly. (This problem is compounded by the fact that I work with HR data, e.g. salary). When the person you measure to earns more than you with others things held similar -- for example, age and experience-- it is hard to not lose self-esteem. Or reduce personal self-worth.

Second example: Myopic-ness

I take some pride in my ability (or bad habit) to plan for things, especially for future events. I like to, say, establish a monthly budget or set goals to hit. This habit is evident in a previous post, about my personal goals for the next months and years. Yet in spite of this ability to plan, I often fall short of my personal plans. Not sure if this is a result of insufficient conviction or will, but it does happen much more than I like. Case in point: surfing the internet aimlessly when the better course of action is to develop software skills (blogging included), etc.

I believe the fundamental problem here is short-sightedness, or temporary myopic-ness. I say "temporary" because I am able to keep goals in mind. It is mainly in the moment that I sometimes lose sight of things and hence prone to satisfying momentary desires. Only thereafter do I realize I probably could have done something vastly better than, for instance, surf on the internet and reading about basketball news for a few hours. Or daydreaming about this girl called Mandy...