Pressures from society:
Age 3: Should have a driver’s license
Age 6: Should be married
Age 13: Should have a net worth of $300,000+
Oh, those sound ridiculous? Well, they’re no more ridiculous than any other arbitrary and pressurized expectation society puts on us!
Here are six societal pressures you can freely shun to boost your sanity and make life 300% more enjoyable.
Relax, because you don’t have to…
1. Be Successful/Married/A Homeowner/Slim/President by Age __
You can be and do whatever you want in your timing. If someone decides to delay their career after high school to travel the world, they can do it. If someone wants to work 90 hours a week to retire by age 40, they can do it. If someone wants to wait until they find the right person to marry, even if it carries them into their 30s, well, I’m doing it right now and it’s been great overall!
Society (and our own mental fabrications) can create artificial deadlines for certain achievements with no logical reason. Life is not a matter of right and wrong answers and perfect timing, it’s about taking ownership of your journey, guiding your ship as best you can, and enjoying the ride.
The beauty of life lies within the near-infinite paths we may take. Some are traditional and some are not, but what path(s) you choose to take are personal choices. Would I want 4 kids before I turned 30? NOPE, but some people do and I applaud them! Would others want to be single at my age? NOPE, but given my path so far, this has been the best option for me and I’m happy with it.
You don’t need to feel pressured to take any particular path, because other people aren’t the judge of the best path for YOU. You are. Comparisons to others can only give us a false sense of superiority or inferiority, so don’t worry if your story looks different than anyone or everyone elses’ story.
2. Get a Degree
I have a degree. It’s been useless to me. As for my experience in college, it was of some value, but I’ve learned much more on my own after college. Thus, my whole college experience could be seen as expendable.
If you want to get a degree, go for it, but don’t feel like you must do it or that it’s your only option. The internet is enabling more alternatives to college than ever as tuition continues its astronomical rise, which makes this once-must decision for a good career a genuine choice to consider.
3. Know Your Career Path
Whether you get a degree or not, don’t sweat it if you don’t know where to go yet. I’ve read that about 50% of people end up in job fields different than their college degree. I’m one of them.
A study on baby boomers found that they had an average of 11.7 jobs from age 18-48. That’s a new job every three years! In a modern lifetime, we might have multiple careers, so finding “the one” career might be more of a fairytale than a reality that must happen.
It’s good to try to determine the intersection between your skills/strengths and interests, but I don’t buy that you need to know your career path to retirement. It’s something you can feel out with good ol’ trial and error. If someone pressures you to know your entire career plans now, ask them when they figured out theirs and how easy it was. They’ll suddenly be more understanding.
4. Fit In
We’re all pressured to fit in sometimes. Whether it be an individual event or in general, fitting in always feels good, but if it comes at the cost of being yourself, it isn’t worth it. Everyone is weird, trust me, so the idea that we all need to conform into the same people-pleasing clonebots is absurd.
If you’re unabashedly yourself, you should be able to find somewhere and some people that feel like home. But I think the real lesson we must learn is that it’s okay to be an outsider sometimes. It’s okay to be an outsider most of the time. Why? Because nobody will fit in to every group! Can you imagine someone in a biker gang going to a knitting club? Me too, but not all people will fit in so seamlessly like that.
5. Do the Expected
I’ve personally been dealing with this one. I get a lot of interview requests and some speaking requests. As an author, I feel like I’m “supposed” to take every one, or at least the higher profile ones, but I just don’t want to right now. I want to focus on my writing (something I’m better at doing), and there’s no law saying that I must do interviews. So I haven’t been, and it’s great!
In your life, you will fall into some expectation traps—things that are naturally expected of you that you don’t actually need to do. Be alert for these, and ask yourself if you really need to do these things, or if you’re letting external pressure persuade you into doing something that isn’t necessary or fulfilling.
6. Be Perfect (or Fit an Ideal Stereotype)
As a single guy, I sometimes worry what people would assume about me if I got a cat. I freaking love cats. But I know that a dog is seen as a tougher, more “masculine” pet (for really stupid reasons… I mean, watch a lion or tiger hunt prey and get back to me).
If you want a cat, dog, or oyster as a pet, get it. If you are a single woman and want multiple cats, get them. The “crazy cat lady” stereotype is as stupid as they come. There are men, families, couples, and more who own multiple cats. If someone wants to label you with a stereotype, you don’t want them in your life anyway.
Even if we’re aware of a stereotype that looks like us, we should get to the point where we laugh about it instead of feeling defensive or insecure about it. If you’re confident in who you are and where you’re going (something that comes from practicing being yourself and doing your own thing), these external pressures and stereotypical suggestions about who you are will only make you laugh (because you already know who you are).
Fearing stereotypes can cripple our personal power to choose our own paths and be our unique, non-stereotypical selves. Let’s not live in fear of stereotypes, or in fear that a decision we make will reveal some hidden flaw(s). Let’s live freely and joyfully imperfectly (are you even allowed to stack adverbs like that?).
Cat note: I admit the thought has crossed my mind, but I’m not actually afraid of owning a cat for image purposes. My concerns are allergies, litter boxes, and the fact that I’ve been moving and traveling so much. I’m moving across the country to Orlando in a month (maybe after my move I’ll settle in and become a crazy cat man).
I’m only slightly allergic to cats, but when I’m around a cat, I find it highly difficult not to snuggle them aggressively, which really maxes out my allergies. I can be in the same room as a cat and pet it and have no reaction, but once I shove my face into the fur (an inevitable moment), my eyes itch a lot.
Conclusion
From a young age, we’re influenced and pressured by so many external things that it can actually be difficult to tell if we’re living the life we want to live or one that someone else has designed for us. Your best life is the one you design, so ask yourself what you truly want, and make plans to make it happen.
When you go your own way, you will please some and not others, you will impress some and provoke judgement from others. It’s exactly the same result you get when you try to please everyone. That’s why being a people pleaser is so painfully not worth it.
This article has been a friendly reminder that you can safely ignore society’s nudges telling you what to do, who to be, what to believe, and who to vote for. Be who YOU want to be (as long as it’s legal). Everything else is noise.
If you want to better train yourself to be yourself in a world full of perfectionistic pressures and expectations, check out my book, How to Be an Imperfectionist.
