The Tyranny of the Should

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  • The Defining Decade –– Meg Jay
    • [[The Tyranny of the Should]]
      • Working toward our potential becomes a search for glory, when somehow, we learn more about what is ideal than about what is real.
      • Maybe we feel the cultural press to be an engineer before we find out what exactly that entails. Or our parents tell us more about what we should be like than what we are like.
      • Scrambling after ideals, we become alienated from what is true about ourselves and the world.
      • Shoulds can masquerade as high standards or lofty goals, but they are not the same. Goals direct us from the inside, but shoulds are paralyzing judgements from the outside. Goals feel like authentic dreams while shoulds feel like oppressive obligations. Shoulds set up a false dichotomy between either meeting an ideal or being a failure, between perfection or settling. The tyranny of the should even pits us against our own best interests. [[Paralyzing perfectionism]]
      • An adult life is built not out of eating, praying and loving, but out of person, place and thing: who we are with, where we live, and what we do for a living. We start our lives with whichever of these we know something about.
  • The Defining Decade –– Meg Jay