Our culture today is obsessed with these unrealistically positive expectations: be happier, get healthier, be the best, better than the rest. We’re constantly being told we should be smarter, faster, richer, sexier, more popular, more productive, more envied and more admired.
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It’s like we’re expected to be selfie-ready for the morning school run, kissing our handsome and successful husbands goodbye, before a gruelling workout session at the gym to maintain that pert body, before jumping in our helicopter to our wonderfully fulfilling job, which of course is filled with incredibly meaningful duties.
But when you stop and think about it, conventional life advice – all the positive and happy self help stuff we hear – is actually fixated on what we lack. It hones in on what we perceive to be our personal shortcomings and failures to already be, and then emphasises them.
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You learn about the best ways to make money because you feel you don’t have enough, or you go for that extra hour in the gym because you feel your body isn’t good enough. You follow relationship and parenting advice because maybe you’re not so good at that either. You follow a goofy visualisation exercise to be more successful, because you might not feel successful enough. And the list goes on. This fixation on getting better only serves to remind us that there is always room for more improvement.
Today we live in a society that gives us unlimited options, free and easy access to information, and even information that we are unwillingly exposed to every day like advertising and notifications through smart phones, as well as no real worries or threats in this country that previous generations may have had to contend with, like wars or hunger.
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So subconsciously we start thinking and concentrating on frivolous, unnecessary elements of our lives. This causes us to become overly attached to the superficial and fake, to dedicate our lives to chasing a mirage of happiness and satisfaction. Our society today has bred a whole generation of people who think and overthink unimportant bits of information, churning it over until it makes them anxious, guilty, depressed and so on…
The need for feedback from our followers has become an epidemic in itself, making many of us overly stressed, neurotic and perpetuating self-loathing. Whether we like it or not, it makes us all addicted to the technology that provides these quick fixes.
I’m sure most of us have had moments when we’re feeling down and at the same time are bombarded with images of happy people living amazing lives. It’s almost impossible not to feel like there’s something wrong with you. We feel bad about feeling bad. We feel guilty for feeling guilty. We get anxious about feeling anxious. It’s an endless loop!
Perhaps it’s time to stop caring – to accept that the world is totally fucked up and that’s all right. It’s ok to accept yourself for you. When you stop trying to live up to high expectations, you may just realise that it is in fact you who places these expectations on yourself in the first place.
When was the last time you spent a whole day without your phone? Or met up with a friend and had a hearty conversation, without disruption from the buzzy sounds of your smartphone notifications? When was the last time you turned off the outside world and lost yourself in a good book? Perhaps it is time to start paying attention to what is real and right there in front of you, instead of the nameless, faceless voices online.
