When I was scrolling through a website the other day, I suddenly felt like I was being sucked into a self-help vortex. Every other article was a list about all the ways my life was wrong and all the things I wasn’t doing right.
Although well-intentioned, these articles weren’t helping me to live my life “the right way” — they were subliminally whispering that my life wasn’t good enough, that I wasn’t living my life the way an Internet writer wanted me to live it.
But I ask, what’s so wrong with my life? Enough people out there are telling us how to see the world, how to live in it and how to get the most from life. So, check out these 15 reasons why your life is already great, no matter what the Internet has to say about it:
1. You’re living it. You’re alive. You’re breathing. You’re lucky.
2. You have enough time to waste some of it on the Internet (and you also have Internet service). There are people who don’t — be grateful.
3. You have opportunities. I’m won’t tell you how to chase them. But you have them, whether you recognize it or not.
4. You have your fix. We all have one — candy, basketball, Disney sing-a-longs. I won’t tell you if it’s bad to be addicted or not, but this at least means you have some pleasure in your life.
5. You live in an age in which you’re allowed to choose what you want to do. Plenty of people have opinions about how to use or abuse your freedom — but at least you have freedom at all.
6. You’re allowed to wear (basically) anything you want. Yes, we still have laws that require you to be clothed, but you’re allowed to clothe yourself in whatever fashion you wish. You don’t have to listen to people telling you what to wear.
7. You can write your own Quarter-Life Bucket List, and everything after that. You don’t have to copy anyone else’s list. Write what you want and then do it. Because guess what? You’re allowed to do it — it’ll be more fulfilling, if you act in a way that’s meaningful for you.
8. You actually don’t have to want a Quarter-Life Bucket List. Because guess what? It might not actually be fulfilling for you, and no one else really cares.
9. There is a sun and it shines on you. That giant floating ball of cosmic gas around which our entire planet orbits? Yeah, it smiles at you and kisses your skin. It loves you. How cool is that?
10. You get to enjoy the elements without being subjected to them. There’s no feeling better than sunlight on your skin or mud between your toes or shaking snow out of your hair. You can enjoy these things according to your own agenda.
11. If you have a problem, you can actually fix it. So you have a birth defect. So you have a psychological illness. So you have a chronic disease. You can go to a doctor and get medicine or surgery or whatever you need. Rarely is any ailment hopeless.
12. If you can’t fix it, people are sensitive about it. If you can’t seek help and it is a helpless situation, people won’t laugh at you or stone you.
13. You’re allowed to love whomever you want to love. This is so important to remember during times of heartache — at least it’s heartache of your own accord.
14. You don’t have to marry if you don’t want to, and you’re allowed to wait. You don’t have to marry your 40-year-old “family friend” when you’re 19, or at all. You don’t have to bear children by age 22, or at all. If you’re unmarried at age 28, society won’t peg you as an “old maid,” it’ll peg you as an “independent woman.”
15. For the most part, everything will be fine. What’s the worst that could happen? You live on your parents’ sofa for a while or you have to move to a less expensive apartment or you make a mistake. Whatever it is, it’s not because you didn’t live your life right — it’s because you’re living your life, period.
