I was looking at bright white rooms inside spotless houses on Marie Kondo’s site and thought, “Who lives like that and are they doing okay?”
This time of year, self-help rears its head in all directions. But how helpful is it? They all say some variation of
“If you live your life in this way, according to these rules, and adopt this mindset then you will achieve the fabled Final Happiness Moodlet and shine as bright as the beacons of Minas Tirith!”
Imagine the day to day of thinking like that. What happens when you have an off day and can’t meet parts of your routine? For me, it would fuck up the whole day. Like “oh no, I slept in and didn’t prepare my breakfast and missed my morning walk listening to the Happy Forever podcast! The whole day is lost!”
And that goes on for the rest of the week. One day’s failure cascading into the rest of the week like so many dominoes.
Some people can shrug that stuff off and continue on. In a perfect world, that’s what you would do with any advice. “I prefer to do these things”, rather than “I should do these things”.
It’s okay to feel bad. It’s okay to make mistakes and fail. You’ve done it a lot already. You’re going to do it a lot in the future. You cannot avoid it. Trying to avoid it is going to make you feel even worse. When bumps in the road come around, you’re going to feel even worse because you tried so hard to NOT feel bad. You mark yourself a failure and shrink into a corner.
You can’t put that much pressure on yourself to have a Perfect Day everyday. I have a person like that inside of me and they look like a fucking nutcase. Eyes wide, chesire cat smile. Straining to be Happy Forever. It makes me sick looking at them. I’m sure I let this person take over a few times in the past. Now they hang around as a cautionary tale.
Recognize when you are neck deep in trying too hard. Step back for a bit to take a look at what you’ve built for yourself day to day. You’ll find that a lot of pieces don’t have any real value if you look long enough. You can’t build these things expecting them to last your lifetime when you and the world are changing. These structures need to be stable and modular. And when they stop being either, you have to get out the crowbar out and fuck them up a little.
This requires time, patience, and humility. You won’t get done and feel great. You have to build again. But some parts will remain. Some parts have stood the test of time and you have evidence of why. They’re not much on their own, but they make a difference and they work for you.
You’ll be building for a lifetime. Self-help is people sharing blueprints of their own structures. You might get lucky and they’ll fit exactly. But I’m willing to bet you’ll have to figure out where those pieces can actually fit into your own structure.
You can’t demolish the whole thing in one go. Some pieces have been around for so long that you’re going to have to erode them for a long time. These are the behaviors and patterns that always come back after another “better me” episode. That’s the core you. So no, it’s not likely you can slam someone else’s blueprint into your life and it’ll work. You’re not them.
Approach adding these blueprints as experiments. Try it out for a bit, see what works and what doesn’t. Go in with the expectation that it won’t work out the first couple of times. Possibly not at all. But you gave it a shot and now you have another thing to add to the short term “does not work” list. That list is not meant to be permanent, but referred to in the future. You’ll be trying to solve a problem and realize “Oh yeah that thing I tried a while back might be useful now!”
We’re not comfortable with the thought that we don’t live in a stable universe with clear cut rules on how to live. It’s much easier to subscribe to a set of rules that promise success. It takes the responsibility off the subscriber. They can shrug and say, “Sorry I’m just following the rules don’t blame me!”
Maybe for some that’s the best they can do I don’t know. If you’re buried in work and raising a family, it might be hard to have the time and energy to change your structure. That bit takes a lot of reflection. A luxury maybe. Would things be different if everyone were allowed that luxury? I am interested to see.