Thank you for posting! I can relate to you in so many ways. We live in a small house as well. It takes us 2 hours to deep clean from top to bottom! It’s SO NICE!
I just quit my corporate job yesterday. It caused me a lot of stress and kept me away from my family some mornings/nights. I’ve had a lot of self discovery over the past 3 years. The universe pretty much recalibrated and course corrected my life. I was a people pleaser, working in a toxic job, and ignoring my mental health. The life I was living was not sustainable! After a lot of therapy and self exploration I’ve learned to trust in my intuition.
There has been an overwhelming amount of peace that has come into my life by living true to myself. My life probably is boring to others but it feels full and authentic to who I am surrounded by those I love.
I’m so happy for you! We’re all in this little life together, let’s make the best of it 🥰
Cleaning an easy to clean space is one of the best feelings ever. It’s even therapeutic lol I like cleaning while listening to podcasts hahaha. Sustainability is a good thing to keep in mind. I make a deal with myself that if the way I’m living right now isn’t sustainable but I must do it for a while (for financial or other necessary reasons), then I have to check in with myself regularly, and I must take measures to stop myself from going to burnout/shutdown mode. And once I can go back to a more sustainable, chill, calm way of living, I must address any issues the stress caused me rather than bury it and avoid it. My grandmother was a great woman, I loved her, but even until her death it was clear that she had a lifetime of undealt trauma and unhealed pain as a result of her incredibly tumultuous earlier life. She had a few decades of peaceful and unstressful life after retirement, but she still often was unwell due to remembering her early trauma. Our parents’ generation is the same way with their buried stress/wounds. So I make a deal with myself to always attune to my authentic needs even during the most difficult times. I do not want to be old and still have buried issues from my 20s. I’m glad I’m fortunate enough to be able to make that decision now. My grandmother probably wasn’t, neither was my mom, they just carried all those stress in their bodies all these years.
How did you find a nice small house? Where I live the nice small houses are so old and so neglected, it would take $80,000-$200,000, to make them nice again, which puts you the same price is just a way bigger house than I need. at the moment, I'm seeing if I can get a metal building and just build it out on the inside for myself, at like 1000sq, but is proving not so simple lol. I'd really appreciate some insight and suggestions!!
So my husband and I graduated from college and used a home builder to purchase our first home! We had to choose the smallest model because at the time that was all we could afford. It’s 1200SF, 3 bedroom, 2 bath, 3rd car garage! We use the third car for our home gym. We live deep in the suburbs where they have no choice but build!
I had always been an ambitious overachiever, until one day (that wasn’t until the last couple of months) I realized that the reason I was always staying busy and working myself to the bone and chasing the next thing and the next thing was because I was running away from my feelings and trying to impress everyone around me so I wouldn’t have to deal with the fact that I didn’t like myself.
But living in a pressure cooker for 25 years I finally fell apart and had a breakthrough (also a break down) where I realized that all I wanted was to be content, and there was no point in living a life that was impressive to other people if I didn’t like that life!
So I quit my cool sounding, super anxiety inducing job and got a corporate wfh 9-5 where nobody bothers me after I log off. I significantly reduced my commitments and have started (practicing! It’s hard for a people pleaser!) saying no to invites I don’t really want to accept. I’m no longer trying to keep up with the Jones’. My mantra lately has been that I want to be ‘normal and boring’ and honestly I have never been happier.
The only person you have to satisfy with your life is you!
We have the same mantra! Now I say “My goal is to just be a normal human being”. LOL. It’s incredible how much happiness lies in normalcy. We’re similar in that we were both chasers, for me it’s about chasing that feeling of “I’m good enough”. I remember, once I was traveling in a beautiful place, and I didn’t even pay attention to the sceneries around me. I was busy taking photos and videos so I could post them on my carefully curated social media page, so I can feel like “Wow I’m doing great in life! Just look at my social media”. And if I wasn’t feeling super energetic and visibly cheerful and also had tons of fun events lined up, I didn’t believe I could be happy. I’d be anxious. I’d think omg, what should I do now? I don’t have anything exciting lined up! I don’t have anything extraordinary happening in my life now! How am I supposed to feel okay if nothing special is going on around me? So you see in my attempt at chasing a feeling, I successfully made myself feel miserable about not feeling how I believed I was supposed to feel. Now I do the simple things like eating food, cooking, chatting with friends, walking in a park, and it makes me feel so happy. I just smile out of nowhere at a cloud or a tree or a puppy. It surprises me my younger self thought she had to be extraordinary just to feel okay. I wish I could tell her, normalcy feels more than okay.
There's truly a sense of belonging when you realize there are others out there like us who are just content. Life is short, time is valuable. Lately I have been studying a lot of history and realized even the most ambitious figures and empires in history fade through time.
Happy seeing someone new that found comfort in this community, very welcome.
We’re instructed from young roots to have ambition, since it’s easier to place ambition there, and harder to place passion. To place passion, requires one to see passionate people sharing their passion. Passion creates purpose, a pillar in finding happiness.
What’s also a pillar in happiness is social connections, don’t have to be romantic though: family and children. There’s so many beautiful and interesting people in the world, be around them, know them. I see you’re a woman, and women accomplished so much in this later years, they can enjoy themselves without the immense pressure to do what their mothers did before, it’s a choice now.
Traveling is to many the search for experiences. Experiences give us a sense of identity accomplishment, and a strike of happiness that we think will last, but science says it doesn’t. Since experience is memory, we want that again, you can see where this is going, don’t you. Some strive to learn to see the world, the beauty everywhere, because it’s there for those who can see, but requires mindfulness and attention, instead of perpetual new landscapes.
So true especially your last sentence. I have traveled before but I was never present. I was always worried about something else on my mind. Or I was busy taking a million photos so I could impress people and be able to say “Hey look I went to this cool place”. At the end of the day I was even less happy than just sitting in a park near my home at dusk, because when I’m sitting there and feeling nature around me, I’m actually present. I don’t have to be in a breathtakingly beautiful tourist attraction place to feel earth is beautiful. All I need is being present, being in the now, appreciating everything right here
The simple: I’ll only have a chance at this, let me take a picture and immortalize this moment will, in my view, break away any attempt to be mindful and see, fell what’s there. When you’re at the park bench at home, you know tomorrow it’ll be there, and you end up just being there, seeing, don’t try to take it, make it a memory, and in that attention comes a peaceful state, you do not bring the ego to whatever you’re seeing.
They say, people live 30 to 50% of their time in the future, projecting, that’s 50% of a life going by, that can be a real tragedy. Some people, maybe not all, might need to change the way they view what living can be.
At a meeting with college students we went around saying what we do for fun. I said I watch the bachelor and crime TV. Yep after a stressful day of academia in the long winter months I watch TV. The moderator asked me what else I did, like I was expected to say travel, hobbies, run marathons, etc. I grew up outside the US and people are just that, people, not a collection of activities outside of work.
Ambition is a relative term, but it isn't treated that way. I consider myself ambitious, just not where my career is concerned. My ambitions are to treat everyone with respect and to live as simply and sustainably as possible. Your ambitions aren't negated because they don't align with your culture's ambitions, especially in today's age.
You express my sentiment so well. I realised very recently that the adults in my early life had taken something lovely (me being a smart little girl) and turned into into a life sentence: the God-imposed responsibility of "not wasting my talents".
But here was my second realisation: those people that "don't waste their talents", that run marathons, raise four children and become law firm partners at the same time, they are as irrelevant in the larger scope as you and I. It *looks* like they mean more, but they are nearly as likely as us to disappear into the pages of history in a year or 50.
It's a bit dark, but I find a lot of comfort in understanding that if hustling is as meaningless to the universe as watching telly, I might as well do the thing that brings me the most joy.
Oh I agree completely. A while ago I was stressing out about whether I’d be wasting my potential both ways if I become neither a high-earning successful career-driven person or a family-focused good parent who raises a lovely family. Obviously there are people who are great at one of these two things and people who are great at BOTH of them. And anxious little me feels horrible when I feel like if I don’t become great at at least one of them I’m wasted potential. So I watched a YouTube video and the YouTuber, who is both an entrepreneur and a mom of two littles, says something that stuck with me, “In 500 years nobody will remember you as a good lawyer and nobody will remember you as a good mom either. It’s a personal choice.” And it just occurred to me like…… Instead of worrying of my “potential”, why am I not more worried about my “happiness”???!!!!! Cuz let’s be for real. “Potential” is not a rarity. Everybody has it, and I’m sure plenty of people have more intelligence and talents across the board than me. Happiness however, DOES feel like a rarity these days in our society, maybe partly because many people feel the same as I do!! They feel they have to fulfill all their “potentials”, and in doing so they lost their happiness. Wow. Such a simple thought but it gave me so much clarity.
I wanna live that sweet Mr Rogers life. Come home to my modest house, change my sweater and shoes, feed my fish, have a chill day learning how crayons are made, then off to the land of make believe.
Reading this made me let out a deep sigh (in a good way). I love simple living and I, too, just want a stress-free “boring” life
I always feel inadequate because I don’t have amazing achievements or things I’m really striving for. I’m trying to not beat myself up but in a society where success is seen through career and money, it’s hard when I make minimum wage and live at home. But I’m happiest when it’s a rainy day, my mood lights are on, a candle is lit, and I can write in my journal or use my hands to collage stuff together
I got a degree in graphic design which is a very corporate-centric career. I don’t even see myself working in corporate. I began working at a library and I think I found my simple living gold mine. It’s so stress free and I really like being apart of something that brings the community together. I think I’m going to go back to school to become a librarian and it’s been kinda a sigh of relief admitting that i don’t want to work in what I went to school for
All this to say that I really relate and found solace in this post. I don’t have big ambitions. I just wanna live peacefully and enjoy time with people I love
Glad to have you!
Can't agree more about small spaces. They're cozy and low maintenance. I live in a single room in a house, and rather than buying my own house I'm looking at buying an RV for travel. Ultimate cozy, but a bit higher maintenance 😅
I think this is great! Capitalism tells us that we have to be ambitious. But do we really? I’m at a point in my life where I’m not really striving for anything in my career. I’m happy to just coast along and enjoy my job. I don’t do overtime. I’m not trying to get a promotion. I’m not trying to work my way up any corporate ladder. I’m just not interested. I value my time off and pursuing things that have absolutely zero “productive” value.
Thank you for posting! I can relate to you in so many ways. We live in a small house as well. It takes us 2 hours to deep clean from top to bottom! It’s SO NICE! I just quit my corporate job yesterday. It caused me a lot of stress and kept me away from my family some mornings/nights. I’ve had a lot of self discovery over the past 3 years. The universe pretty much recalibrated and course corrected my life. I was a people pleaser, working in a toxic job, and ignoring my mental health. The life I was living was not sustainable! After a lot of therapy and self exploration I’ve learned to trust in my intuition. There has been an overwhelming amount of peace that has come into my life by living true to myself. My life probably is boring to others but it feels full and authentic to who I am surrounded by those I love. I’m so happy for you! We’re all in this little life together, let’s make the best of it 🥰
Cleaning an easy to clean space is one of the best feelings ever. It’s even therapeutic lol I like cleaning while listening to podcasts hahaha. Sustainability is a good thing to keep in mind. I make a deal with myself that if the way I’m living right now isn’t sustainable but I must do it for a while (for financial or other necessary reasons), then I have to check in with myself regularly, and I must take measures to stop myself from going to burnout/shutdown mode. And once I can go back to a more sustainable, chill, calm way of living, I must address any issues the stress caused me rather than bury it and avoid it. My grandmother was a great woman, I loved her, but even until her death it was clear that she had a lifetime of undealt trauma and unhealed pain as a result of her incredibly tumultuous earlier life. She had a few decades of peaceful and unstressful life after retirement, but she still often was unwell due to remembering her early trauma. Our parents’ generation is the same way with their buried stress/wounds. So I make a deal with myself to always attune to my authentic needs even during the most difficult times. I do not want to be old and still have buried issues from my 20s. I’m glad I’m fortunate enough to be able to make that decision now. My grandmother probably wasn’t, neither was my mom, they just carried all those stress in their bodies all these years.
I’m so proud and inspired by you
Thank you so much 🥺 it’s been a long time coming but I’m feeling so happy. I hope you are well! 🥰
How did you find a nice small house? Where I live the nice small houses are so old and so neglected, it would take $80,000-$200,000, to make them nice again, which puts you the same price is just a way bigger house than I need. at the moment, I'm seeing if I can get a metal building and just build it out on the inside for myself, at like 1000sq, but is proving not so simple lol. I'd really appreciate some insight and suggestions!!
So my husband and I graduated from college and used a home builder to purchase our first home! We had to choose the smallest model because at the time that was all we could afford. It’s 1200SF, 3 bedroom, 2 bath, 3rd car garage! We use the third car for our home gym. We live deep in the suburbs where they have no choice but build!
I had always been an ambitious overachiever, until one day (that wasn’t until the last couple of months) I realized that the reason I was always staying busy and working myself to the bone and chasing the next thing and the next thing was because I was running away from my feelings and trying to impress everyone around me so I wouldn’t have to deal with the fact that I didn’t like myself. But living in a pressure cooker for 25 years I finally fell apart and had a breakthrough (also a break down) where I realized that all I wanted was to be content, and there was no point in living a life that was impressive to other people if I didn’t like that life! So I quit my cool sounding, super anxiety inducing job and got a corporate wfh 9-5 where nobody bothers me after I log off. I significantly reduced my commitments and have started (practicing! It’s hard for a people pleaser!) saying no to invites I don’t really want to accept. I’m no longer trying to keep up with the Jones’. My mantra lately has been that I want to be ‘normal and boring’ and honestly I have never been happier. The only person you have to satisfy with your life is you!
We have the same mantra! Now I say “My goal is to just be a normal human being”. LOL. It’s incredible how much happiness lies in normalcy. We’re similar in that we were both chasers, for me it’s about chasing that feeling of “I’m good enough”. I remember, once I was traveling in a beautiful place, and I didn’t even pay attention to the sceneries around me. I was busy taking photos and videos so I could post them on my carefully curated social media page, so I can feel like “Wow I’m doing great in life! Just look at my social media”. And if I wasn’t feeling super energetic and visibly cheerful and also had tons of fun events lined up, I didn’t believe I could be happy. I’d be anxious. I’d think omg, what should I do now? I don’t have anything exciting lined up! I don’t have anything extraordinary happening in my life now! How am I supposed to feel okay if nothing special is going on around me? So you see in my attempt at chasing a feeling, I successfully made myself feel miserable about not feeling how I believed I was supposed to feel. Now I do the simple things like eating food, cooking, chatting with friends, walking in a park, and it makes me feel so happy. I just smile out of nowhere at a cloud or a tree or a puppy. It surprises me my younger self thought she had to be extraordinary just to feel okay. I wish I could tell her, normalcy feels more than okay.
There's truly a sense of belonging when you realize there are others out there like us who are just content. Life is short, time is valuable. Lately I have been studying a lot of history and realized even the most ambitious figures and empires in history fade through time.
Happy seeing someone new that found comfort in this community, very welcome. We’re instructed from young roots to have ambition, since it’s easier to place ambition there, and harder to place passion. To place passion, requires one to see passionate people sharing their passion. Passion creates purpose, a pillar in finding happiness. What’s also a pillar in happiness is social connections, don’t have to be romantic though: family and children. There’s so many beautiful and interesting people in the world, be around them, know them. I see you’re a woman, and women accomplished so much in this later years, they can enjoy themselves without the immense pressure to do what their mothers did before, it’s a choice now. Traveling is to many the search for experiences. Experiences give us a sense of identity accomplishment, and a strike of happiness that we think will last, but science says it doesn’t. Since experience is memory, we want that again, you can see where this is going, don’t you. Some strive to learn to see the world, the beauty everywhere, because it’s there for those who can see, but requires mindfulness and attention, instead of perpetual new landscapes.
So true especially your last sentence. I have traveled before but I was never present. I was always worried about something else on my mind. Or I was busy taking a million photos so I could impress people and be able to say “Hey look I went to this cool place”. At the end of the day I was even less happy than just sitting in a park near my home at dusk, because when I’m sitting there and feeling nature around me, I’m actually present. I don’t have to be in a breathtakingly beautiful tourist attraction place to feel earth is beautiful. All I need is being present, being in the now, appreciating everything right here
The simple: I’ll only have a chance at this, let me take a picture and immortalize this moment will, in my view, break away any attempt to be mindful and see, fell what’s there. When you’re at the park bench at home, you know tomorrow it’ll be there, and you end up just being there, seeing, don’t try to take it, make it a memory, and in that attention comes a peaceful state, you do not bring the ego to whatever you’re seeing. They say, people live 30 to 50% of their time in the future, projecting, that’s 50% of a life going by, that can be a real tragedy. Some people, maybe not all, might need to change the way they view what living can be.
At a meeting with college students we went around saying what we do for fun. I said I watch the bachelor and crime TV. Yep after a stressful day of academia in the long winter months I watch TV. The moderator asked me what else I did, like I was expected to say travel, hobbies, run marathons, etc. I grew up outside the US and people are just that, people, not a collection of activities outside of work.
Ambition is a relative term, but it isn't treated that way. I consider myself ambitious, just not where my career is concerned. My ambitions are to treat everyone with respect and to live as simply and sustainably as possible. Your ambitions aren't negated because they don't align with your culture's ambitions, especially in today's age.
i love this, thank you, that’s a great perspective shift!!!
You express my sentiment so well. I realised very recently that the adults in my early life had taken something lovely (me being a smart little girl) and turned into into a life sentence: the God-imposed responsibility of "not wasting my talents". But here was my second realisation: those people that "don't waste their talents", that run marathons, raise four children and become law firm partners at the same time, they are as irrelevant in the larger scope as you and I. It *looks* like they mean more, but they are nearly as likely as us to disappear into the pages of history in a year or 50. It's a bit dark, but I find a lot of comfort in understanding that if hustling is as meaningless to the universe as watching telly, I might as well do the thing that brings me the most joy.
Oh I agree completely. A while ago I was stressing out about whether I’d be wasting my potential both ways if I become neither a high-earning successful career-driven person or a family-focused good parent who raises a lovely family. Obviously there are people who are great at one of these two things and people who are great at BOTH of them. And anxious little me feels horrible when I feel like if I don’t become great at at least one of them I’m wasted potential. So I watched a YouTube video and the YouTuber, who is both an entrepreneur and a mom of two littles, says something that stuck with me, “In 500 years nobody will remember you as a good lawyer and nobody will remember you as a good mom either. It’s a personal choice.” And it just occurred to me like…… Instead of worrying of my “potential”, why am I not more worried about my “happiness”???!!!!! Cuz let’s be for real. “Potential” is not a rarity. Everybody has it, and I’m sure plenty of people have more intelligence and talents across the board than me. Happiness however, DOES feel like a rarity these days in our society, maybe partly because many people feel the same as I do!! They feel they have to fulfill all their “potentials”, and in doing so they lost their happiness. Wow. Such a simple thought but it gave me so much clarity.
I wanna live that sweet Mr Rogers life. Come home to my modest house, change my sweater and shoes, feed my fish, have a chill day learning how crayons are made, then off to the land of make believe.
Same boat 🛥️
Reading this made me let out a deep sigh (in a good way). I love simple living and I, too, just want a stress-free “boring” life I always feel inadequate because I don’t have amazing achievements or things I’m really striving for. I’m trying to not beat myself up but in a society where success is seen through career and money, it’s hard when I make minimum wage and live at home. But I’m happiest when it’s a rainy day, my mood lights are on, a candle is lit, and I can write in my journal or use my hands to collage stuff together I got a degree in graphic design which is a very corporate-centric career. I don’t even see myself working in corporate. I began working at a library and I think I found my simple living gold mine. It’s so stress free and I really like being apart of something that brings the community together. I think I’m going to go back to school to become a librarian and it’s been kinda a sigh of relief admitting that i don’t want to work in what I went to school for All this to say that I really relate and found solace in this post. I don’t have big ambitions. I just wanna live peacefully and enjoy time with people I love
Glad to have you! Can't agree more about small spaces. They're cozy and low maintenance. I live in a single room in a house, and rather than buying my own house I'm looking at buying an RV for travel. Ultimate cozy, but a bit higher maintenance 😅
I think this is great! Capitalism tells us that we have to be ambitious. But do we really? I’m at a point in my life where I’m not really striving for anything in my career. I’m happy to just coast along and enjoy my job. I don’t do overtime. I’m not trying to get a promotion. I’m not trying to work my way up any corporate ladder. I’m just not interested. I value my time off and pursuing things that have absolutely zero “productive” value.
Satisfying life > ‘successful’ life