In Jane Wagner’s 1985 Broadway play, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, the disenchanted career gal, new-age feminist, wife, and mom, Lynn, groans, “If I’d known this is what it would be like to have it all, I might have been willing to settle for less.” Like Icarus, she realizes that what she wanted isn’t what she wanted. Lynn’s struggle to follow the herd led her to crave money, success, power, and popularity. True then, true now.
We want creative freedom and agile lives, yet we attach ourselves to the very things that restrict our movement. We spend an inordinate amount of energy doing and acquiring whatever it takes to achieve the modern idea of success—and our roving eyes always want something else. Our storage units are stacked high with the shit we want, but don’t need. We make career decisions based on our fear of poverty or what others will think, and we follow the pack because everyone else does. Left with no elbow room to seek our creative potential, we throw up our arms in defeat and say, “I can’t chase my dreams now, I’ve got a cable bill to pay.”
We buy the sales pitch that these things will bring happiness along with them—only to find out later that what we really desire are simpler values—values in the form of love and acceptance and being heard.
If you want more in your life, you may have to accept less. Accepting less means less clutter and less meaningless stuff. Less distraction, less servitude to work, less debt, less greed, and less craving. It means surrendering our attachment not only to physical things, but even to our past and the possible future.
Your happiness shouldn’t teeter on a bank ledger or come from any source other than acceptance of who you are.
Never settle and never give in, but accept less.