For a very long time, I’ve suffered from what you could call the ‘Shit, I should do be doing that!’-syndrome.

It goes like this:

I come across somebody who proclaims to relinquish something from now on, or take up a specific habit.

They stop drinking coffee, quit social media for a while, throw out sugar, start yoga or running or a regime of cold morning showers, pick up a minimalist lifestyle, make long walks in nature, or write an hour a day to create their new book.

And whenever I read something like that, I felt guilty, even envious.

Guilty that I wasn’t doing (or not-doing) that.

And envious because, well, because they were.

There’s this extremely subtle idea that they now do something I should also be doing, that they might advance away from me with dazzling speed, that they’ll have magical benefits that I don’t have, and that I’m wasting my life not doing (or quitting) the same thing… while I could have.

It’s always something in the realm of ‘self-development’ or health, either physical or mental.

And it’s always fucking weird and ridiculous and nonsensical.

I’ve been aware of this unpleasant tendency for a couple of years, and because of that and because I hated it and worked on it, it looks like I’ve dissolved most of the programming around it, and that is very liberating.

In many ways.

Because the thing is: whenever I had my ‘Shit, I should do be doing that!’-experiences, I always really disliked the person who was involved.

It was as if they were about to leave my dimension and upgrade to a new and WAY better one, and I was left behind, doing nothing, being the failure still drinking coffee, eating sugar, posting dumb and useless shit on social media, or living an un-minimized life.

It’s one of those things that was ready to go, and it did.

So how does that make you feel?

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(Photo by @willianjusten, for Unsplash)