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So many of the intense anxieties we struggle with in our lives center around feeling pressured to live up to perceived expectations, many of which are not even genuinely our own. Lists of ‘should’s and ‘supposed-to’s we inherit from our families, friends, and society at large which paint pictures of what a successful person, a successful life, supposedly looks like. Those pictures can provide us with targets to strive for but can also set us up to feel deficient and undeserving unless we achieve them.
These idealized images can make sound logical sense and have powerful emotional appeal but the should/supposed-to mentality brings with it a double edged tone of requirement and obligation. You can only be happy if you achieve certain things and if you do manage to achieve them then you must be happy. Both are false and both are dangerous because they are purely external definitions seeking to dictate our internal experiences and perceptions.
Happiness gets placed outside of our immediate reach like a carrot dangled from a stick the length of which is controlled by other people. We become pressed into a habit of always looking outward for ‘more’. There is never any encouragement to look inward for sources of fulfilment and the concept of ‘enough’ gets villainized as a form of complacency and mediocrity.