The Pressure to Keep Moving

Monday, June 12, 2017

Today, I was scrolling through other simple living blogs and came across one about the pressure to be successful. In this woman’s quest to prove herself, or in her words “to not be boring”, she ended up making herself miserable. She switched between 11 jobs in 4 years and moved between many different cities.

In American society today, we are not only trained to be materialists, but we are also taught that we must prove that we have extraordinary lives. With this pressure behind us, we can end up destroying important relationships, or make it impossible to form new ones. In the case of the author of the blog mentioned previously, it would be nearly impossible to build any sort of relationship that would be of worth if you never stayed in one place for longer than a few months.

So, although I have made the observation that I am not happy with being idle, it may be important for me to make sure I walk the thin line of not taking my success, in whatever goal I am trying to achieve, to the extreme. Living a simple life may not entail just dropping distractions from one’s life, but also making sure that our focus does not become too narrow on a single thing that we find important.