How I Currently Navigate My Life

We’re constantly bombarded with economic and social messaging that we’re not good enough, haven’t achieved enough, or don’t have enough. There is a better way.

Anyone who reads what I’ve written over the years is aware I’m amid a constant productivity struggle. Infected since childhood with the misguided imperative to forever be striving for increasingly loftier goals, my life has at times felt like it’s on a repeating loop that can only be stopped by a metaphoric slap upside my head.

I know I’m not alone. I read about other people’s challenges with whatever version of keeping up with the Joneses manifests in their lives. For some it’s never feeling they look good enough. Others can never have enough money. Some wrongly measure their worth based on the expense and coolness of their possessions. Corporate ladder climbers rate their job satisfaction based on their fancy title. Self-improvement junkies gobble up the latest self-help book as if reading about improving actually results in improvement.

Based on what I’ve read and some of the conversations I’ve had with those outside my country, Americans especially seem to fall prey to this malady of never having enough. The particular flavor of never enough might look somewhat different person to person, but underlying all of it is the nagging notion that more is always better.