Sometimes you can go about life carrying the weight of a dissatisfaction that is not even yours; a lingering sense of anxiety that you might be doing well, but you could always be doing more. I often find myself opening Instagram, only to close it 3 minutes later feeling way more anxious, confused, and rushed than I did before. I’ve started tapping “not interested” on any content along the lines of:
how to make $5M on the internet this year
how I got 250,000 followers in 24 hours
the one strategy you need in order to grow and scale and win at everything in life
You get the vibe I’m talking about.
There’s nothing wrong with these posts as I’m sure they do help people, but the way they tend to land with me is as a distraction. They lure me in by making me think that maybe there’s something essential that I’m missing in the way I live and work, and before I know it, I’m writing down a new detailed plan in my Notes app for how I’m going to 10x my life. It feels urgent, too, like I have something or someone to catch up to.
Last time this happened, I remember looking at my career and feeling like I’m not doing enough, like I should be somewhere else by now. I felt an urgency to come up with a strategy for how I was going to sprint and scale and do everything better. Which is strange, because when I stopped to ask myself whose standards were guiding this, it wasn’t mine. By my standards, when I actually slow down and look at my life, I’m doing more than enough. I’m 26 and have built a career blending entrepreneurship and creativity in a way I never thought was possible. It allows me to live an everyday life I absolutely adore – there is genuinely nothing missing! So, why the sense that I need to be doing more? More for what, exactly? And what does it take to get your body used to the fact that you actually are exactly where you want to be?
I’ve achieved many of my dreams but the goalpost moved so quickly that I forgot to stay in the state where I really know that. It’s one thing to know it in your mind, and another to feel it in your body. When we’re faced with so many random people’s definition of success online, presented so objectively (“if you’re not achieving XYZ and building an additional 6 figure income stream through this one simple strategy, what are you doing?!”) we can quickly lose sight of our own subjective experience of success.
Success is entirely about how you feel – there’s nothing else to it. If you’ve built a life that feels good to you every day, that meets all your needs and wants, if you’re working towards bringing your dreams to life and prioritising your fulfilment, you are already where you need to be. Any extra milestones are just nice to have, but they won’t change the baseline of how you feel every day. Similarly, you could be achieving all the impressive accolades in the world, but if you’re waking up feeling stressed, rushed, and unhappy every day, then what’s the point? Ultimately, we just want to feel good every day – to feel safe, fulfilled, secure, creative, happy. Having built a life that does feel like that, I realised that very quickly, you can get used to it and forget; maybe because you feel that things can’t really be that simple. But sometimes, they are.
No one comes to announce to you that you have permission to rest, to just be in the life you have created without constantly striving for something else. Because ambition is the thing that got you here, but it’s also the thing stopping you from really being here. Ambition always wants to be somewhere else; when left unattended, it can feel a bit too close to dissatisfaction.
Sometimes I notice this feeling creep up and have to become conscious of it quickly, otherwise it will lead me somewhere I don’t necessarily want to be. Because the truth is, I’m very happy where I am. The anxiety you feel may not even be coming from you – but it’s so easy to absorb it. This is one of the biggest reasons why I’ve stopped scrolling on social media in the past year: I don’t want to be made to feel like I’m not doing enough, when I know that by my standards, I am. I’m the only one living my own life every day, after all. The most fulfilling life is the one you build completely on your own terms, even if a business influencer on your feed is telling you it’s falling short. You’ll know when a goal is really yours, or when it’s been planted in your head by someone else. You’ll know when it comes from the heart, as opposed to from fear. And you can allow yourself to take a breath, and realise that you are exactly where you want to be.
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