I think for so many people facing the world of self-development, self-improvement, trying to live better, it really is kind of annoying, because it’s kind of like a bunch of people telling you what to do, aand telling you that, you know, the way that you do things, you know, you may think it’s OK, but actually it’s not OK.
The way you’re living is not ideal, and you have to move towards a more ideal way of living.
Or like it’s some kind of competitive game, where you know, like oh, you know, look at you pressing the snooze button, and you know, checking social media in the morning.
You know that’s just- you know, you’re on a lower level than than me you know, because I wake up and meditate, and you know, I do my push-ups and then I go for a walk in the sunshine, and I say my affirmations, and you know, my mind is clear you know, I think good thoughts, I only do good things.
You know, you have to get more like me.
You have to change so you become better.
It’s like even in the word itself self-improvement.
It’s like you have to improve yourself.
It means you’re not good enough.
Somehow you’re being told that you have to make a change, either because there’s something wrong with you as you are, or you have to try to compete and catch up to these other people that are just so advanced and developed in their lives.
And yeah, you know, I can understand simply not wanting to have anything to do with that.
It would be very reasonable to say “Why should I listen to you? You know, maybe my life would be better if I meditated instead of checking my social media in the morning.
That may be true in principle.
But so what? Should I feel that I need to change all my habits because of something that people say is good? And some of these things you think, well always we’re going to say probably, you know, these things are probably true.
But then there’s other things that maybe it changes over time, that people have, you know, “This food is good now” and “This food is bad now”, “This exercise is good now”, “This exercise is bad now”.
This always changes.
And so, you know, if you’re feeling bad because you’re not doing kettlebells or you’re not drinking kombucha, or whatever the thing is now, I don’t even know if I’m caught up with what the current thing is, but you know, these things come and go.
It used to be drink your milk, then drink your milk is bad.
Used to be, you know, long-distance endurance, and now it’s not so much about the long-form cardio, it’s more about more shorter bursts.
But even that, I don’t know.
I’m not even caught up.
I can’t even keep up with all the changes in this kind of, you know, conventional wisdom about what is the way to improve.
It’s just something that we can’t even keep up with.
So this pressure coming from outside of “You really need to catch up.
You need to improve to be more like the way things are done these days”: I can completely understand somebody to just say “I have had enough of that.
I don’t want to think about any of that.
I am going to just do what I want to do.” But of course, just deciding to OK, you know, because these things changed, and you know, what’s considered “good for you” changes, you know, every few years, it doesn’t mean that, you know, OK, I’m just going to have a beer and a bag of chips, and you know, watch TV all day.
That is something that is probably not going to be very helpful.
Even though, you know, the exact rules about, you know, how different fads and different prescriptions, they could say well, you should never drink any alcohol, or never have any processed hydrogenated oils or whatever’s in the chips, and you know, you shouldn’t watch any TV.
But then other people will say, you know, it’s good to have these things in moderation.
Always changing.
So we can never really keep up with what is this some kind of ideal way of living that, you know, you have to emulate this particular way.
It’s up to us to decide for ourselves.
We can get the input, we can get the suggestions, we can get clues, from everyone that’s come before us and everybody else that is simply trying to live.
But we can never get a perfect system, and we never need to feel that if we’re not drinking kombucha while jogging and meditating at dawn, you know, we don’t have to feel that we’re somehow missing out on some kind of pinnacle of self-development.
It’s up to each of us to figure out what do we really want and need with our lives.
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