A lifetime of should-ing

Figuring out what you want is the central task of adulthood, and it’s not an easy one.

Once you leave formal schooling, you’re catapulted into a world with infinite possibilities. You no longer have to show up at school to avoid detention or ace tests to make your parents proud. You’re finally unshackled from the training wheels of life, and now you... See more

Knowing who you are is grounding; it gives you a sense of trajectory. But when we assign words and meanings to what we know we like and value and want, we create attachments. We then strive to keep things within the parameters of which we’ve already accepted. Out of that, we create failure. We create suffering over self. We begin to believe that a

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So many high-achieving people get trapped into obsessing about the external world and neglecting their internal world. When you’ve been suppressing things for so long, you can’t just decide to stop all at once. Learning to listen to yourself takes a long time. I used to think that I always had to justify everything to myself—that I needed to be com

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