I should
The unquestionable expectations.
The list of things I should be doing is so long that I don’t even know where to start. Let me think... Okay, let’s start with the more pressing ones.
I should be looking for a job that provides a solid income.
I should be applying for a mortgage to buy a house so I can spend the next 20 years of my life pouring most of my income (provided by the stable job I never had) into it.
I should stop wasting my time pursuing new side projects because they lead nowhere.
I should focus only on my area of expertise—multitalented people are jacks of all trades, after all.
As I’m listing those shoulds, a new, insidious list is gradually emerging… the I should have list, and it’s crippling.
Have I been procrastinating, going around aimlessly so much that my life has now been impacted on a large scale? How is this possible? I believe myself to be a hard worker. And yet, there are so many things I should be doing.
I look around to get a feeling, a pulse check, of what my peers are doing. They’ve been diligently doing all their shoulds—a mortgage here, a baby there, a nonsensical franchisee agreement so they can have their “own” business—and what do I do? I sit on the sidelines while I throw money away on rent and try to make a living without getting sucked into the corporate game.
Do I have a problem with commitment? Am I scared of commitment? Or do I simply want to be independent and detached from everything that resembles giving up the helm?
I hear my dad’s voice saying to me, “Quello che fanno gli altri non ti deve interessare” (What others do shouldn't concern you), and it makes me smile. We’re taught not to compare ourselves with others. But the reality of our practical society is completely the opposite. From the way school grades you to the way a job candidacy is done, we all find ourselves in a lineup.
Ultimately, society leads us to sense rivalry and pits you against me. It’s you against… your classmate, a colleague, a teammate, another candidate, and in a wretched scenario, your kind.
How are we supposed to deal with this then? How can we ignore what others do or think but still put ourselves in a position to come out on top of them? It doesn’t make any sense to me. And I believe that’s exactly the point.
The point is to make you spin so much that you lose control.
No one in their right mind would think of capturing a Grizzly bear without a tranquilliser—it makes it much easier to put it in a cage that way.
I don’t believe that comparing ourselves to others is right, but I believe we are meant to use others as a reference to understand what we like and what we don’t like, what we need to do to improve or to loosen up a bit.
The simplest parallel I can draw is when a company runs a competitor analysis to see what other companies are doing. It’s an integral part for those who want to run a healthy business. Hence, it seems odd to me that it’s totally fine to apply that strategy for a company but not for a person. Do you see the contradiction here?
I don’t know what the best way to deal with this dilemma is. And I don’t know if, after all, comparing myself to others has helped me get to where I am or if it has made my journey more tumultuous.
What I do know is that being able to go through this journey in the first place is an unprecedented privilege, and it’s worth every single second of it.
I should… be grateful.