You can’t have it all.
Because we are human and we all have limits, whether we choose to accept it or not.
If you live in the age of social media there is a good chance you’ve compared yourself to a friend, coworker, ex, and the person that is in front of you in the checkout line. How can we not? We’re designed to survive and a survival tactic is to look at how someone is doing better than you and try to get that skill or knowledge they possess. Being judgemental is part of how we learn and how curiosity can lead us.
Where this gets muddy, is we’ve lost perspective. We’ve lost the perspective of time, limitations, and privileges.
These ingredients are the reasons why we can’t *sustainably* :
- Have a really grueling work day and be our best selves when spending time with our family later
- Afford to keep up with the jones’s
- Keep all the friends we made from high school and/or college
- Take a trip to another country and come back without jet lag
- Give to others endlessly and find it an easy path back to our own needs
- Have access to all the dating pools in our city
- Spend an excess amount of time to make a decision
We can’t do things we put our mind to?
During covid, we were all forced to be inside. People were quitting their jobs, beginning new careers, road tripping more, paying off all their debt, starting families, figuring out their hobbies, etc. It was wholesome and organic how these personal and interpersonal shifts unfolded. And there was a subtle messaging that the world is our oyster based on all the flexibility we had from less commuting and having endless freedom to explore and invest in our personal and professional lives.
Now that we’re out of covid, there seems to be a shift in our culture’s value systems. Hustle culture did not go away, it shape shifted.
There has been a rise in productivity culture. One that makes it seem like we can do anything we put our mind to. There has even been a trend of people outlining their 5–9 before their 9–5! This exacerbates a culture of optimization, efficiency, and striving. While all those things are good when done with self-defined values, it makes it seem like we all need to be busy. But busy filling our lives up with other people’s expectations of what living a quality life means? It can begin to get noisy and harder to tune into your own intuition of what is right for you when you fall into the trap of compare and despair.
So, we can do things we put our mind to, but now that we live in a post-covid world, we have to admit that we aren’t limitless. For example, we all have different strengths that are natural for us to step into. Some people are really great listeners and problem-solvers. It wouldn’t be surprising that these same people have trouble turning inward and are aware of how and when to start restoring their energy.
What does it mean to live a balanced life now?
I fall into it more often than not. And hustle culture is sneaky because after covid a lot of the narrative of what it means to live a balanced life by society’s standards has changed. Its not about grinding at your day job and moving up the office ranks. That is so pre-covid. Now, it’s about having a job that supports your lifestyle , is a calling from where your passions are, and allows you to make a real impact. Then, after work it is about having a bustling social life, a soothing nighttime self-care routine, going to therapy once a week, and always a clean apartment because your apartment is a reflection of yourself, right?
We can’t entertain all or most of the aspects of how to do life right because we can’t each have the same definition of it. And even if we did, we have our own limitations and strengths that allow us to create that life. This article isn’t meant to sound cynical, it is meant to be realistic in a comforting way. These expectations seem reasonable to attain, but it isn’t a factoring in the reality of limitations that each of us confront.
