Normal is good enough

We are often told to strive for the best. Some may tell you "you can get anything you want as long as you try hard enough".

This is plain simple lie. It's not how the world works.

A common negative feedback loop that many may have is:

1. Set a higher-than-normal expectation to oneself
2. Try hard to achieve some goal
3. Failure
4. Blame oneself for not trying hard enough
5. Go back to 2

Once trapped in this loop, one is hard to get out of it as one is always blaming oneself for not being good enough. The sense of shame, guilt and not accomplishing anything is overwhelming.

When contemplating how this happens, one often realize that some very fundamental misconceptions can be found. One of those is "having unrealistically higher than normal standard of being normal".

Since our childhood, we are told that we have to be better than others to get what we want. Better education opportunities, better partners, better jobs, etc. One has to prove themselves to be superior to others to get them. In this context, the normal ones equal to the defeated ones, who lost the combats and therefore shall be forgotten.

This mindset could be helpful to some extent. It might spur you to study harder or work harder. However, after one grows up and realizes that the society is way more complex than "one tries hard, and one gets what they want", their perception of how the world works might collapse. They might find out that now matter how hard they try, there are always people who are better at something. Simply being hardworking can no longer set you apart. And they can feel terrible about it because they come such a long way where they are constantly better than others but end up in a place where they themselves are pretty normal.

One real-world example is the engineers who spend their lives in some tech hub like Seattle or Silicon Valley. Most of them have been excellent students with very promising education background, and among those students they are the one who are capable enough to secure positions at tech companies that they might have dreamed of for years. And when they pack everything, move to the cities that they know for legendary companies or people, and start their jobs, the magic just disappears. They find out that they are surrounded by people who are just like themselves. Here, everything that you might be proud of before can no longer set you apart, as most people around you are equally capable. So, for some who want to continue to feel good for themselves just try even harder, just to be marginally better than others on some perspective.

It's just mentally unhealthy.

C'mon, you are good enough. Seriously, I mean it.

The purpose of one's life could be anything, but I believe "bettering others" is definitely not a good one. This is more of a process rather than the end result.

Don't let the urge of bettering others stop you from trying out new stuff and fail. You don't even have to be better than yourself yesterday as one might tell you. You are committed, you show up, you try, and that is good enough. It's okay to be mediocre or poor at something, as this is exactly what a normal person is: we are not perfect. So stop asking or demanding yourself to be perfect, because no one is.

I am also not trying to make this post perfect by abruptly stopping here, because I am not a perfect writer.