The Beauty of a Mediocre Life
Read this if you dream of quitting your job...
Recently I’ve been perusing r/simpleliving on Reddit, and if you’ve never seen it, I highly recommend. It’s full of people who, you guessed it, live simple, dare I say, mediocre lives, and are happy and content with that.
I recently saw a movie called ‘Perfect Days’ — it’s about a guy who cleans toilets for a living and how he finds peace in his simple life.
He actually smiles while he cleans and finds the small joys in his day, then he goes home and reads his books and listens to old cassette tapes.
Everyone Wants More…
Quitting the 9-5 is so glamorised these days, and most people are secretly dreaming of becoming a full-time business owner, content creator, or artist.
We’re all born with creative dreams in our hearts, especially those of us here on Substack.
Society pushes this idea that there’s a ladder for us to climb and that material success is vital. We need more money, more views, more accolades, otherwise we’re unworthy in some way.
So we push for more. We have to ‘make it’, and we have to get ‘there’, but nobody even knows where ‘there’ is. There’s a constant striving for more to feel good enough.
My Story - I Quit My 9-5 and Now I Love it Again
So I quit my 9-5 back in 2021. I really thought I was a bad-bitch-hot-shot entrepreneur too...
I thought my 9-5 was the enemy and that working for myself was the key to happiness. And it was for a while. I got to travel the world and I felt free.
But I also felt like shit. Unpaid invoices and complete financial instability, zero work-life balance, no friends. I thought the grass would be greener if I quit my job and worked for myself, but in reality, there were even more weeds.
Eventually, after struggling with total exhaustion and burnout, AND being scammed out of tens of thousands of dollars (but that’s a story for another time, subscribe), I moved back to the UK to return to the 9-5 with my tail between my legs.
At first, I resented that and felt like a failure, but now I feel awesome and I want to share with you what I learned...
The Problem with Ambition and Goal Setting
Being ambitious or having big goals for your life isn’t inherently bad, let’s make that clear. BUT the problem that often arises with ambition is that the constant striving to do, be, and have more means we’re actually never satisfied with where we’re at. We’re forever looking at how far we still have to go.
What if instead of looking at the gap between where we are and where we want to go, we could look back at the gap between where we are now and how far we’re already come? You’ve already done so much, you should be proud!
Also, you’re not aspiring to be the thing, you ARE the thing. The accolade of having written your future book doesn’t make you any more of a writer than you are right now today. The achievement of making money from your music doesn’t make you more of a musician. YOU ALREADY ARE THE THING!
There’s so much more to life than goals, benchmarks, and accolades. Why aren’t our goals to laugh and dance this week, instead of how many posts we’re gonna write and the results we want them to get?
Finding Meaning in Life
We spend 8 hours a day at work on average, let’s not hate such a big part of our lives striving for something else or something more. If you learn to stop hating your job for just a second or seeing it as means to an end, you might actually learn to enjoy it...
There’s a girl I discovered recently called Johanna who romanticises her 9-5 in London, and it really got me reflecting on the fact that my life is pretty cool and I’m actually pretty blessed.
It’s so true that the grass is green wherever you water it, and the joy of sneakily writing for your Substack while you sit in the office (me right now) is pretty damn green.
Life is actually full of fun, joy, and meaning already when you SLOW DOWN and allow yourself to feel it.
The Laissez Faire Approach
What if your goal and ambition was to just be? To simply exist, create, and be happy. That means you’ve already achieved your dream and there’s no pressure anymore. Bask in that for a second.
Ironically, often when you turn the pressure off and switch to a more laissez faire approach, your goals usually take care of themselves.
Love this!🥰❤️