Our Relationship With Life
The way we see life is a direct reflection of how we see ourselves. You will not see a person who hates themselves be absolutely in love with the idea of life. And vice versa, if someone loves themselves for who they are, they will not see life as a drab, pointless venture. Everyone makes of the world what they feel within themselves. As different as we believe our inner and outer worlds to be, they are actually deeply interconnected.
Every person experiences life differently. We are each born in a different place, with a unique family, and a very personal series of events to guide us as we get older. No one will see the world the same way, and we certainly will not live it as such. There is both beauty and confusion in this fact. At times, we may feel lost and want to seek advice from someone only to realize that their suggestions are not applicable to us. If you lose your job, for example, one person might encourage you to jump right back in and start looking for another one, while a second individual will suggest you take a good month off and go backpacking through Europe. Who are we to say that one of these people is right and the other is wrong?
That is because there is no right and wrong answer. Each answer is a perfectly good option except one is perhaps more suitable to the life of the person who just lost their job. Going on a backpacking trip might seem outlandish to them if they have a family to feed and a debt to settle, but for the person that suggested that solution, a backpacking trip seems like exactly what is needed after suffering a loss. Although there is no objectively wrong answer to this issue, we have to look out for one thing, and that is making a choice out of alignment versus out of a sense of pressure.
Society has managed to embed itself into every crevice of our lives. Its standards, expectations, lessons, and judgments can be felt in nearly every decision we are ever faced with. If we are not strong enough to withstand them, we can end up doing things that will only hurt us in the future.
Let us assume that the person who just lost their job chooses to go instantly after another one on account of the family they must support. They do not even think twice about their options as the answer seems clear to them: Make sure they have enough money to pay bills and feed their family. However, since true desires never leave us, perhaps they hate the fact that this is the choice they know they must make. Instead, they imagine that backpacking trip and wish they were living someone else’s life for a change because they feel so trapped in their current circumstances. They dream of this freedom while they sit at their new, dull job, on the verge of a midlife crisis. All this because many years ago, they followed the expectations set out for them. They had a family because that is what they were told was right. However, with their current misery, they are hurting more than just
themselves. By making the choice to have a family out of pressure, they have made it so easy for them to pass their suffering on to their family. When a person is not truly happy, the people depending on them will hurt just as much.
Losing Touch
An identity crisis does not happen overnight. It may feel as if it does, but truly it takes much more than a few unfitting decisions to end up in this position. Unfortunately, many cases involving a sense of disconnection with your identity arise from past trauma. Whether it was experienced growing up or in their adult years, a person’s past can haunt them into the present. However, even without any severe experiences, a person may begin to feel as if the life they are living is not true to themselves.
There are many signs of identity problems or a full-blown crisis. These include (Maron, n.d.):
● Letting yourself be manipulated. There are lots of harmful people out there. Some will make it their goal to make you feel crazy while others do so without actually trying to. Regardless, a person that gaslights you will make you doubt yourself. You are supposed to know yourself the best, yet they convince you that you actually do not. You start to doubt if you saw what you really saw or said what you really said. You begin to treat yourself as if you are crazy; you feel as if the emotions you experience do not accurately reflect the situation and you constantly overreact. All of these are symptoms of you giving up control over yourself to someone else. Your mind has been so confused by other people that your own feelings and thoughts no longer belong to you.
● Always fitting in. At first, this might seem like an unlikely symptom of an identity crisis, but it will begin to make sense. A person with concrete interests and passions will definitely be able to find a community to call home. However, they are unlikely to be the perfect fit for every community. As nice as it feels to be liked by many people, changing yourself to experience this is a sign that you don’t truly know yourself as well as you should. The ability to conform to every group of people’s likes and dislikes is a sign that you put too much value into other people’s validations. It is okay to not be everyone’s favorite. In fact, it would be unnatural to be.
● Struggling to say no. For one reason or another, you may hate being the cause of conflict. You may not want to create tension between you and another person, or
you simply want to avoid an argument. By people-pleasing, we are directly disrespecting ourselves. It is a trait that is truly only harmful to ourselves. This is because we neglect our own needs and prioritize someone else’s comfort all the time. You may find yourself agreeing to things you do not want to participate in or sacrificing your time to help someone else with little to no reciprocation. If you struggle with your self-image and valuing yourself, people-pleasing is a very deep hole to fall into.
● Being indecisive. Similar to previous points, indecisiveness is a sign that you struggle to trust yourself. This is something reflected by those types of people that spend more time stressing about making a decision than actually enjoying what they chose. Even after they’ve made their decision, they might have doubts creeping up and making them scared that they made the wrong choice after all. When you are not well aligned with yourself, you will struggle to know what is best for you and will be easily swayed by others.
● Questioning all that you know. This may occur on a smaller basis such as “what are my hobbies?” Or it could be on a much larger scale such as “what is my purpose in life?” These are inquisitive questions, and they are crucial to our development as individuals. However, if they are all coming at you at once, there’s more to the story than just curiosity. This is a sign that you are trying to get to the bottom of who you really are. Unless these questions are sending you into a spiral of existential doom, facing them is a great way to begin your journey of self-exploration.
Your personal identity is not something that can truly be quantified. There’s no way to know whether or not you are living the life that you are meant for using numbers. No graphs, pie charts, or formula sheets exist to guide you to your true self; only you can do that. Identity tends to develop over a lot of time. It includes both factors of nature and nurture, meaning parts of you are definitely determined simply by what you are born with while other parts are influenced by the people, events, and environment that you grew up in. Through life’s trials and tribulations, there can be numerous things that interfere with this natural progression. Traumatic events, poor parenting, and bad relationships can all influence how well our identity and self-concept have developed. According to researcher James Marcia, there are four different types of identity statuses (Cherry, 2022):
● Foreclosure. This occurs when a person has already committed to a certain identity without verifying if it is the right one to commit to. As per the earlier description, the person who chose to create a family without really asking themselves if it is what they truly want is a prime example of foreclosure. Their identity was created to fill some void and not to truly reflect their inner selves.
● Achievement. As the name might suggest, this is when a person has successfully explored themselves and made a commitment to the most fitting identity.
Evidently, this is one of the best approaches to adopting a fitting identity. It honors the person’s true desires, their history, their beliefs, and their individuality. It also allows the person to make changes as needed; if they believe their identity no longer fits them, they won’t hesitate to find one that does. Identities are fluid, and they treat them as such.
● Diffusion. This is quite a common occurrence and happens when a person does not feel the urge to find their own identity. They neither experience an identity crisis nor do they commit to an identity at all. Unfortunately, this often leaves them hanging in the world without a great sense of who they really are. They often have no urge to do any self-exploration although it sometimes backfires.
● Moratorium. Oftentimes, this is the status of a person who is in the process of finding a fitting identity. This is when the person is still in the stages of exploration and has not yet made a commitment to a certain identity. Obviously, if this status drags on for too long, the person may have trouble committing and will struggle to be satisfied with any of the identities they have explored.
An identity crisis is not uncommon. Even if people do not label what they are experiencing as an identity crisis, they will likely go through one several times in their lives. They often occur at times of a major life event. This includes marriage or the start of any new relationship, the death of a loved one, a divorce, developing a health condition, or even finding a new job. Any event that jolts us out of the routine we have gotten used to has the potential to ignite an identity crisis. This is often explained by the fact that these events often mark the end or the beginning of something and force us to acknowledge parts of ourselves that we rarely come into contact with.
The Glorification of the Hustle
The world moves fast. It waits and stops for absolutely nobody—we know this. Its quick pace makes it so that some people simply cannot keep up, especially those who did not have a head start in life like some other people. Companies always have competitors and try to be the first ones to jump on a new opportunity before their rivals get to it. They tackle new demographics, find new ways to advertise their products, and often do not hesitate to sacrifice some of their employees for the sake of business profit. Corporate giants rarely stop to think about how the termination of a certain employee will affect their life—they just do it. In this world, professionalism has become almost synonymous with a lack of empathy, an environment of workhorses who don’t question their company’s intentions and just do as they are told. Things such as mental health, family time, and rest are not often seen in the corporate vocabulary. The need for speed seems
to trump absolutely everything else, and if you cannot keep up, well, that is your problem and your problem alone.
To the average person, finding out that the average investment banker can work anywhere from 80 to 110 hours per week should be a jarring discovery (“Investment Banking Analyst,” n.d.). One can only question what the point of earning so much money is if the earner has absolutely no time to actually enjoy all that they have made. This only makes sense to someone who lives to work and not the opposite way around.
This phenomenon has been coined as hustle culture, and its popularity spiked a few years ago, followed by a decline throughout the pandemic years. The idea behind hustle culture that attracted so many people to its ideology is that you are responsible for your own success. Indeed, this basic belief is highly inspiring and motivating. However, the reality of earning money and surviving in the modern world is much more nuanced. People of different backgrounds will have to face different levels of hardships throughout their lives and careers; therefore, they will not reach success as easily as others. Similarly, this ideology is often taken to the extreme and is used to shame people for taking rest. If you are not making money with every minute of your day, you can be called lazy and blamed for your lack of financial stability. But, is this so? Does spending an afternoon with your family really mean time wasted? Is disconnecting on a Saturday to celebrate you and your partner’s anniversary really an indication of your laziness? Unfortunately, to many people, the answer is yes. They may consciously know that there is more to life than money and a successful career but have gotten too sucked into hustle culture to see how badly they neglect other aspects of their life.
Falling prey to hustle culture is easy because it feels like we are getting power to put back into our own hands. However, it is no surprise that the people who benefit the most from the popularization of the hustle culture have been corporations and already rich CEOs. They witnessed employees overwork themselves in order to earn more money, climb up the career ladder, and feel productive. This rat race was first framed as something that was beneficial to the participating individual; however, the reality shows that this type of mentality was highly damaging in the long run. The only people who truly don’t want hustle culture to die down are those who benefitted from their employees lacking any sort of boundaries.
The endgame of hustle culture is almost always the same: burnout. No matter how motivated you are or even how strongly you love your job, burnout discriminates against no one. It will tackle you at the worst possible time when you are already stressed by how much you have to get done and how many deadlines you have to meet. The only way to escape this endless cycle of toxic overworking is to create some changes in your interior and exterior worlds. The following are steps you can take to prevent yourself from reaching burnout (Ball, 2022):
● Redefine success. Hustle culture and adjacent lifestyle theories can easily convince you that success is only real if you can enjoy financial luxuries in life. They don’t identify relationships, friendships, family, mental health, physical health, and general enjoyment as metrics of success at all. If you keep running after career success with no regard to other important parts of your life, you will surely be disappointed by how unhappy you remain. In order to reach this happiness that hustle culture initially promised you, it is important to define success based on your own terms. Maybe a promotion is another person’s life goal, but yours is to create a family. Preventing a lifetime of unhappiness means living life according to your own desires and no one else’s. So ask yourself what you truly want and whether or not working insane hours per week is the way to get it.
● Set a minimum and a maximum. When chasing after boundless goals, you will surely never be satisfied. You will reach a certain level and instantly desire to go after more. Without a lower and upper bound for goals, you will run and run and run until you get exhausted and then experience slump after slump. The best way to avoid this is to ensure consistency. Make a goal that pushes you to work hard but is achievable.
● Assess your habits. We are all different people and therefore have individual needs. For some people, a certain course of action will accelerate their productivity while being a nightmare for others. Perhaps you are naturally a night owl and are most creative after 8 p.m. In this case, you must alter your lifestyle to the best of your abilities to suit this unique aspect of yourself. Fall asleep later, wake up later, and create a routine that truly benefits you. Living someone else’s lifestyle will just stall your potential progress. Ensure that the habits you have accepted are working in your favor.
● Learn to set boundaries. Hustle culture has taught us that there should be no real ‘off’ switch. You should always be accessible and ready to jump on a work task or opportunity. However, keeping yourself ‘on’ all the time will drain your battery and never allow you to recharge. So learn how to set boundaries. Whether or not it is uncomfortable for others, boundaries prevent animosity and help you create balance in your life. Depending on the situation, you may need to set boundaries regarding social time, work-related tasks, and communication to keep yourself from being drained.
Do You Know Who You Are?
We each view the world through our own lens and adapt to each situation accordingly. This is both a blessing and a curse, because if you are stuck with a strong dislike for yourself, I guarantee the world around you will not seem so sweet either. If you are still searching for the right identity or have adopted one that suits you best, you are on the right track. This means that you have either already taken or are in the process of taking steps toward finding yourself through the chaos of the world. However, most people struggle to do so in some capacity.
The expectations put on us since we were children overshadow many of the things we should be expecting from ourselves. They end up taking up much more brain space and time than they should and prevent many people from freely exploring who they are. Even the question “so what do you like to do in your spare time?” is one that can stump many people. Perhaps their answer is something generic that simply helps them unwind such as watching TV, or maybe they’ll answer with a hobby that they have developed through others’ influences. The younger the person is, the less likely they are to know what it is they like and dislike doing. Thankfully, you are never too young or too old to explore these aspects of yourself.
The bottom line of living a life that is full of meaning and value is making conscious choices. You never want to set that power into someone else’s hands—only your own. Mindfulness is what ties all of the above together; it teaches us how to use our minds in a way that benefits us. It allows us to see the bigger picture past just materialistic success and money. Finally, it allows us to use our minds as a refuge. Rather than having the chaos of our minds only stress us out at night, mindfulness replaces it with peace. You go to bed, and instead of experiencing a rush of stress right as your head hits the pillow, you are overcome with a great sense of hope, confidence, and gratitude.
