Maybe it's always been this way, but I just feel it's easier and easier to fall into the pit of fear of missing out and personal insufficiency.
You know that feeling when you're flicking through a magazine or looking at something online and see something and think, “Oh my God, everything they do is better than me, and I feel quite worthless?” Do you ever get that?
It's probably just me.
There is a really funny little book called The Ladybird Book of The Mid-life Crisis, and in it, there is a middle-aged man walking around the B&Q (the DIY hardware store), and he noticed a tin of boat polish.
It is in that instant that he is devastated about the fact that he will never own a boat even though he never wanted to own a boat at any point, up until the time that he saw the kind of boat polish.
Fear of missing out and comparing with other people's lives is a little bit like that; it’s just that we have so much access to other people's information now that we compare ourselves.
It happened to me yesterday in an innocuous little bit of admin where I saw someone else, something that they were doing, something that they were promoting.
It is of such enormously high quality, it is so utterly brilliant that I was crestfallen and devastated for a minute, thinking that everything that I was doing was just worthless and a waste of time, because I would never be able to reach that level.
The World Symposium in Singapore that I will be attending this week will also be a little bit like that, as I will watch cases presented by people who are just out of my league and while that is supposed to motivate me to better things has a significant risk of demotivating me to a terrible place.
How do we avoid this in modern society?
How do we avoid it for our Children?
It's one thing to say that comparison is the thief of joy, isn’t it? It's another thing to live it.
Shrinking back down to your own little world, to the things that are important to you, and understanding the things that you would keep if your house or your life were on fire is the best way to come back to this.
For a few minutes, I was lost in a spiral of ‘not good enough’, I was lost in a place of thinking “, What is the point of me continuing to push here and push there when I will never reach those heights?” and then I realised that our little football team, some of the guys that I've coached for the last nine years, have a game on Saturday to win the league. They may or may not win the league, but whatever happens, we have created something brilliant in a place nobody has noticed. Where hundreds of other people are doing the same, but for us, it's extraordinary.
And then I realised that it was still OK to be me and to do the things I was doing.
It's hard, though; it takes a sh*t tonne of energy to go through that stuff.
I'd rather just be going on with life.
Blog Post Number - 3797
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