We live in a world where our worthiness is constantly challenged and, we as individuals, are always questioning this in our heads. The society has created this challenge for all of us.
What is our worthiness based on? Not just by society, but how do we internally justify our worthiness?
This whole thing of feeling worthy is such a big thing and it has such a huge impact on our lives.
I am reading a book at the moment called ‘The Happiness Advantage’ by Shawn Achor. He talks about the fact that society wrongly believes that ‘success leads to happiness’. Where all of his and others research points to the fact that is ‘happiness leads to success’
Success is measure in many different ways, but typically success is always measured by numbers or how big something is or by achievement. This then leads to deciding whether or not we are worthy, whether or not we are a success.
So how many followers you have on Twitter, friends on Facebook, how many ‘likes’ your Instagram #selfie got. Then we’ll look at the title on your business card, how many A* GCSE’s you got, how big the car is, the size of your house, the labels you wear and the list goes on. The achievements that you can rack up and what you have done.
These will be the measures that others use to judge us by and then we can add on all the internal things that we will add ourselves, driven by our fear of what others think of us.
So we’ll compare our pay with others or wealth in general and then determine just how worthy we are or not.
This is serious stuff, as it will effect our sense of self-worth, our self confidence and will ultimately lead to judging ourselves against others. This will create this false truth that others are more important, or better, or more worthy of something because of it.
We have all been guilty of thinking that a ‘successful’ wealthy business person is more important or better than us. Or someone who society has told us to judge as being more handsome/beautiful is a better and more worthy person.
Our society is so infected with this damaging way of measuring success or failure, worthiness or not. It is having a huge impact on peoples mental and physical well-being.
The fact is that it is all a load of bullshit. We are all human beings, we are all as good and worthy as anyone else. The size of your salary, wealth, car, house, tits, the labels you wear, the number of followers, or any other achievement based measure is all irrelevant.
These shallow measures are a curse on our whole society and it is time to stop supporting this system and time to stay true to your values.
The fact is there is no right or wrong in life, after all, if there was the definitive rule book or manual for life, then Amazon would be selling it by the millions of copies.
Society imposes these measures on us and we don’t have to accept them. We need to stop caring about what others think, how others judge us does not matter.
As Brene Brown says in her book ‘Daring Greatly’, we are already worthy. No amount of stuff, achievements etc will make us any more worthy than someone else.
We need to start off with sorting our own minds and we need to start telling ourselves that we are worthy and we are equal to others. Then we need to stop judging others and we need to start viewing everyone else as another worthy human being.
Then we need to stop measuring our ‘success’ by these shallow things. We need to realise that success is a personal thing, where there is no right or wrong. We can define our own measure of what success is.
After all at the end of our lives, we will not look back on the stuff we owned, or the number of followers we had, or how big our salary was. We will look back on the legacy that we are leaving, the impact that we have had on others, the people we’ve met and the moments that we’ve had with them.
It is about being happy, building the life that we want and creating something that we leave behind. We all need to make our own personal difference.
So next time you look at your payslip or the number of friends you have on Facebook, realise none of that matters, it can’t improve your happiness and you are already a worthy human being. Chase your dreams and build your own life that makes you happy.
