Never good enough

Social media influencers, celebrities, and most of the people we look up to attest to the fact that they are or have been familiar with the feeling of not being good enough. YouTubers talk about how gaining their first 1000 subscribers felt more fulfilling than 1 million. The more we accomplish the more our goals expand, the more the insatiability of human beings illuminates itself.

But ascending our goals and desires is rarely about self-actualization and working in accordance with our potentialities once we realize them rather it is more about dissatisfaction, majorly about not feeling ‘enough’. There is a thin yet fine line between self-actualization and dissatisfaction. Self-actualization is a healthy way of directing our efforts to accomplish bigger goals, it’s about knowing that you are good enough, all that you do is solely because YOU want to do it because it means something to YOU, all that you need to accomplish something is within you, the means rest within you because you are enough, it’s about appreciating your present, acknowledging your past, working towards your future while being satisfied with your presence, it’s about breaking your own limits, outgrowing yourself and evolving because it is significant for you.

On the contrary chronic dissatisfaction is a by-product of comparison. Comparison is the thief of all joy, we compare our struggles to someone else’s highlights, someone else’s success doesn’t indicate our failure, anything less than our dream job is not failure. Chronic dissatisfaction makes us look outward with envy and inwards with disappointment. Perhaps the only antidote to dissatisfaction is gratitude, redefining success, redefining ‘enough’. Mariane Williamson wrote, “ in our natural state we are glorious beings… our jailer is a three-headed monster; one head our past, one our insecurities, and one our popular culture.”

We need not comply with the indignations which are imposed upon us by society, our definition of success need not be equivalent to someone else’s because for some you won’t ever be good enough but for some, you will be worth it even when you are not at your best. The concepts of contentment and satisfaction are endlessly glorified by us but we clamp down the idea by subjectively defining success and making someone feel not enough simply because their achievements do not qualify the ever-increasing and unrealistic bar that is set for them, thereby, deterring individual happiness. Thus, happiness, contentment, and satisfaction are inside jobs meant for pleasing ourselves and not someone else because from societal perspectives we might just never be good enough.

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