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Among the most famous Instagram celebrities, 19-year old Australian model Essena O’Neill had it all: more than 600,000 followers; around 2,000 uploaded photos, in which she showed off her fit body wearing designer dresses in beautiful locations; and it didn’t hurt that she was making $2000 per promotional post.
Yet one day she quit her lucrative business. As she said in a deleted vlog commenting on her decision, “I, myself, was consumed by it. This was the reason why I quit social media: for me, personally, it consumed me. I wasn’t living in a 3D world.”
Some goals or achievements — as exciting as they can be — can turn your life into a nightmare. Instagram models like Essena pay a high price for their success. Each day, she had to spend hours trying to take a perfect picture, hide her every flaw, and pretend she was living in a fantasy world.
We live in an era where unrealistic standards are forced upon us at every corner. We’re to follow them at all cost, even at the expense of our self-worth or happiness.
After all, if you don’t post your travel pictures on Facebook, it’s as if you didn’t travel at all. If you don’t share a picture of your meal on Instagram, you didn’t go to this new fancy restaurant. If you don’t post hundreds of pictures hanging out with your friends, you don’t have friends.
This problem isn’t limited to social media only. People waste years of their lives in constant stress, chasing goals they themselves would never pursue if it weren’t for their social conditioning or the admiration they can get.
Society pressures young people to go to the college. And those who want to consider an alternative career choice or start a business? Nah, too risky. It’s better to study, get your degree and put your faith in your employer who can (and unfortunately, at some point probably will) fire you overnight.
There’s this widespread belief that you need to find a life partner, have kids, settle down, get a mortgage, waste your life in traffic jams and retire to enjoy your golden years (if you can afford it). It’s the American dream, baby. What about those who don’t want to start a family, who don’t want to drown in debt, or who have dreams of traveling the world or doing something other than following the conventional path? Better adapt yourself to the “real world” and be like everyone else.
Then there are millions of people all over the world who go to a job that (even if it’s lucrative and makes them a respected member of society) is living hell for them. But since the common idea of success is making as much money as you can, at the expense of your health and time, they keep on living in silent suffering rather than consider the preposterous idea that maybe they should find an alternative path that would allow them to enjoy their lives.
I guess you can tell that “undisputed” social mores make my blood boil. I don’t want you to waste your life chasing things that don’t matter to you because you were fooled by a social dogma that you should chase them. This is the first common reason why you should give up on certain goals: if you’re chasing them not for yourself, but out of the need to conform.
I went to college because my parents wanted me to do so. According to them (and the great majority of society), you need to go to college if you want to succeed in life.
It doesn’t matter that most professors base their knowledge on handbooks released in the last century and won’t teach you anything even remotely useful in the real world.
I studied business administration from people who have never run a business. Most of them have never worked outside of academia. I forced myself to exist in this ridiculous reality that few people question, for the sake of accomplishing the “crucial” goal of acquiring a formal education.
I put an end to this suffering within less than two years. Attending college was one of the unhappiest periods of my life. The only regret I have is that I didn’t drop out sooner. At least I got to experience firsthand how ridiculous the system is.
Revise your goals and ask yourself if you’re chasing something you really want or if it’s something you’re pursuing because somebody else has established that it’s a worthwhile goal.
You may find yourself in a situation in which you’re chasing a goal you do want to achieve, but it generates too much daily suffering. It’s impossible to reach your goals without some level of pain and discomfort, but if it costs you too much, it’s probably not worth it.
I once owned a company that sold software to real estate agents. Few things are worse to me than trying to sell strangers my product over the phone, yet that’s precisely what I had to do in this business, on a daily basis. Even though there was a lot of potential in the idea, I sold this company because its effect on my stress levels was overwhelming. It wasn’t worth it to sacrifice my mental health to reach the goal of turning this business into the best solution provider in the industry.
If a goal you’re working on makes you stressed out no end, ruins your health, destroys your relationships, or negatively affects your self-worth so much that you’re starting to hate yourself, give up. Don’t fool yourself that it will go away. Yes, you can push yourself and keep going, but at what cost? It’s only a matter of time before you give up anyway, due to all the pent-up rage boiling inside you, or the stress will ruin your health and you’ll have to give up.
However, let’s be clear: sometimes you don’t have a choice and you need to do something unenjoyable. All goals come with some inconveniences. I heavily dislike certain parts of self-publishing, but I don’t deal with those aspects on a regular basis. If I hated writing, how long do you think I’d be able to persevere, if my main job is to write thousands of words each month?
As long as it’s a rare occurrence, it won’t affect your long-term performance. If you feel negative emotions on a daily basis, the process isn’t sustainable and you likely won’t be able to sustain it long enough to reach your goal. Some people are more skilled at tolerating the things they hate in the long-term, but even they will eventually pay the price — in lost energy, bad health, damaged relationships or other negative consequences of living a lifestyle that is incongruent with your personality.
Procrastination often signals that you should give up. Whenever I procrastinate about something, I know that deep down I don’t care about it as much as I think I do. If I did, I wouldn’t constantly put it off. This makes me rethink the importance of a given goal.
If you find yourself in the same situation and you usually don’t procrastinate with other tasks, perhaps you’re trying to stay faithful to a goal that you should give up.
EMPOWERING STORY #10: TONI MORRISON
It was 1933. Toni Morrison was two when her parents fell behind with their monthly $4 rent. Because of their inability to pay, the landlord set fire to the house while the family was inside. Toni was too young to remember the event, but she remembered her parents telling her about it and the important lessons about resilience they passed on to her.
In 1993, she recounted the event in an interview for the Washington Post: “It was this hysterical, out-of-the-ordinary, bizarre form of evil. If you internalized it, you’d be truly and thoroughly depressed because that’s how much your life meant. For $4 a month somebody would just burn you to a crisp. So what you did instead was laugh at him, at the absurdity, at the monumental crudeness of it. That way you gave back yourself to yourself. You know what I mean? You distanced yourself from the implications of the act. That’s what laughter does. You take it back. You take your life back. You take your integrity back.”[49]
Living in a period of racial segregation, she would deal with adversity on a frequent basis. When she first encountered lunch counters she could not sit at, stores that wouldn’t accept her money and buses where she couldn’t sit at the front, she used the same lesson her parents taught her. As she said in an interview for the New York Times in 2015, “I think it’s a theatrical thing. I always felt that everything else was the theater. They didn’t really mean that. How could they? It was too stupid.”[50]
Despite living in the times when black people were denigrated, Toni would never let it affect her self-worth. As she said in a 1994 interview for New York Times, “Interestingly, I’ve always felt deserving. Growing up in Lorain, my parents made all of us feel as though there were these rather extraordinary deserving people within us. I felt like an aristocrat — or what I think an aristocrat is. I always knew we were very poor. But that was never degrading. I remember a very important lesson that my father gave me when I was 12 or 13. He said, ‘You know, today I welded a perfect seam and I signed my name to it.’ And I said, ‘But, Daddy, no one’s going to see it!’ And he said, ‘Yeah, but I know it’s there.’ So when I was working in kitchens, I did good work.”[51]
After completing college and graduate school, she married and had a son. While she was months into her second pregnancy, her marriage fell apart and Toni became a single mother with two sons. Brave and strong in spite of the hardships, she moved 400 miles away (with her children) when she received a job as an editor with L. W. Singer, a textbook division of Random House that was based in Syracuse, NY. Two years later she transferred to Random House in New York City and became the first black woman senior editor in the fiction department in the history of the company.
In the meantime, she spent five years working on her first story. As a single mother doing all she could to support her two children, her time for writing was limited. She woke up at 4 a.m. to write. As she said in the New Yorker interview in 2003, “I stole time to write. Writing was my other job—I always kept it over there, away from my ‘real’ work as an editor or teacher.”[52] After her early morning writing sessions she went to work where, as an editor of black literature, she was instrumental in fostering a new generation of African American authors.
Her first book, The Bluest Eye, took five years to finish. It didn’t sell well until it was put on the reading lists of black-studies departments of several colleges. It would take 17 years more before Toni Morrison would release her most successful novel, Beloved. Despite critical acclaim and international renown, it wasn’t until a group of 48 black critics and writers protested the lack of national recognition of Morrison’s works that she would get recognized for her contribution to American literature.
In 1988, at the age of 57 and more than 23 years after she began working on her first book, Toni Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Five years later, in 1993, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature — the first black woman of any nationality to win the prize. In 2012, she was honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Perhaps the best words describing her mental resilience and unbending will in the face of adversity come from her 2012 novel Home, in which she writes: “Look to yourself. You free. Nothing and nobody is obliged to save you but you. Seek your own land. You young and a woman and there’s serious limitation in both, but you are a person, too. Don’t let Lenore or some trifling boyfriend and certainly no devil doctor decide who you are. That’s slavery. Somewhere inside you is that free person I’m talking about. Locate her and let her do some good in the world.”[53]
If you’re hesitant about giving up on a goal that isn’t congruent with you, consider the cost of lost opportunities and mismanaged resources.
I started working on a digital product that would cover certain problems I couldn’t address effectively in my books. I procrastinated on this project from the start. I realized that I was wasting my time and energy. Instead of working on a project that clearly didn’t play off of my strengths, I could have directed more resources toward writing new books.
When I gave up on this project, I refocused my efforts to writing books. If I had continued to work on the project, the quality of my books would have suffered. In the end, I would have lost more than I would have gained.
In everything you do, there are always hidden costs of lost opportunities and mismanaged resources. If you had a job paying you $20 per hour that forced you to do things you hate and I told you there’s a job paying $200 per hour that doesn’t come with any of those drawbacks — all other things being equal — would you stick to your current job?
Working on a goal that is incongruent with you makes you lose twice: first, by causing you unnecessary suffering, and second, by making you lose opportunities in which you would generate better results with less effort.
If you still feel that you need permission to give up on something you hate, there you go:
I hereby give you my permission to give up — Martin
Don’t waste your life pursuing something that turns your life into a nightmare. You’ll find another way to reach your objectives that won’t involve so much suffering.
1. If you’re chasing something only because society tells you to do so — as in the case of going to the college or working in a job you hate — you’re wasting resources that you could have spent on something more aligned with your personality and outlook on life.
2. If you associate your goal primarily (or even worse — exclusively) with daily negative emotions, you should give up, as the objective is clearly not congruent with your personality.
3. Working on the wrong goal doesn’t just make you lose the time and energy invested in pursuing the objective itself. It also costs you in lost opportunities and mismanaged resources.
