I Didn't Do the Thing Today: Letting Go of Productivity Guilt by Madeleine Dore

Author:Madeleine Dore
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Self Help, Psychology, Adult, Health
ISBN: 9780593419144
Publisher: Avery
Published: 2022-01-11T08:00:00+00:00

Taking an Inventory of Our Shoulds

Rather than dismissing the days that didn’t meet our expectations, perhaps it’s the unrealistic shoulds and the onerous obligations that we need to strike.

Shoulds accumulate from many sources, but it’s our self-imposed shoulds that may be the easiest to spot—for me, anyway, they are front and center on my to-do lists. In How Do We Know We’re Doing It Right? journalist Pandora Sykes writes, “When I moan about how busy I am, what I actually mean is that I have a lot that I should be doing.” Our lists of shoulds are of our own making—and so is our subsequent misery.

External expectations can be harder to trace. We may have internalized the notion that we should expect more from ourselves in school, in our careers, in our personal lives, in our relationships—and built our identities around such expectations. In the last three generations, according to psychoanalyst Esther Perel, much of Westernized culture has shifted into an “identity economy,” bringing with it more personal freedom but also struggles with uncertainty, loneliness, and self-doubt. We’ve turned to work as more than a means to an end; it’s where we expect our emotional, physical, and psychological needs to be met. As Perel puts it, “Work is no longer just what you do, but who you are.”

When we conflate who we are with what we do, it’s perhaps no wonder we crowd numerous shoulds onto our to-do lists—it helps us feel tethered to something. But if to tether is to restrict, do we really want to restrict ourselves and narrow who we are? When we tie who we are to what we do, we can get stuck in an “if only” spiral—we might say we are a runner, for example, but then shame ourselves when we don’t manage to run every day. We make the mistake of labeling ourselves as nouns, when we are really verbs—we are not a runner, but rather a person who runs; we’re not a writer, but a person who writes. Our sense of self doesn’t have to be bundled up with whether we did the thing today—because we are not the things we do.

Perhaps being okay with being untethered from what we did or did not do is a better way to live with the ambiguities of life. In leaving ourselves undefined, we have the space to become anything—or at the very least to be flexible and adaptive to the changes we’ll encounter.

To untether ourselves from our shoulds, we may first need to recognize them. Naturally, we can’t simply drop everything we don’t want to do at any given moment. The lines between a should and a responsibility may become confused, but there’s a distinct difference between the two. A should is an expectation placed on us by ourselves or by others; when inspected, it might seem flat, expired, empty, or heavy. A responsibility, however, might not be something we wish to do—it might be uncomfortable, or boring, or difficult, but is essential, or something we can’t avoid without letting others down.

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