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All or nothing: Where’s the middle ground?

People of our generation pride ourselves on our ability to reach our goals and obtain everything we want. But are we going a bit overboard?
Every person I have met in the past year has shared an intense similarity. In their quests for adulthood they have adopted the “All or Nothing” mentality.
This mentality is exactly how it sounds, you either want all of something or will do everything in your power to obtain it, or want absolutely nothing to do with it at all. While this way of life is good for some things, it’s not for most.
We’re so focused on having everything that, we have forgotten what it’s like to have those treasured moments and aspects of our lives.
Gone are the days of doing our best and accepting our short comings.
We’ve lost what it means to be human. We put so much pressure on and have set such high expectations for ourselves that when we do fail, it’s catastrophic.
We have come to believe that if we can’t have all that we want, when we want it, we simply can’t have it at all and that others cannot have it either.
We become self-destructive and sometimes pick up habits that are harmful to us in order to fill the void our obsessive failure has created. This causes more stress and greater failure when we find a new objective to fixate on.
We also have a tendency to project these feeling onto others and find ourselves reacting in an excessive or sometimes violent manner when we feel that they have let us down.
What used to be described as determination and slight stubbornness has morphed into a neurotic and potentially dangerous way of life. This has to stop.
I’ll be the first to admit, there’s nothing wrong with setting a goal and doing the best you can to achieve it, but once you start sacrificing your health (mental and physical), your relationships and your values, it’s just not worth it.
Nothing is worth sacrificing so much.
We, as a generation need, to take a step back and reevaluate ourselves and our priorities. Think about it for a minute.
In the past year, how many times have you sacrificed a good night’s sleep, food or even a friendship in order to get something that you wanted?
How many times have you said “this is the last time” or “I don’t want anything to do with that thing or person anymore?” How many times have you gone back to it?
How many times have you put all your time, money and self into achieving something to either fail or realize it wasn’t worth that much in the first place?
This mentality is dangerous. Slowly each of us are being chipped away at by our desire to have everything until all that’s left is a neurotic, power hungry and obsessive shell of ourselves.
It’s not a bad thing to want to be successful and to achieve the goals we set ourselves, but we have to remember we’re only human.
We’re going to make mistakes. We’re going to fail, and we’re going to succeed. We have to remember that there’s more to life than things.
So be determined. Be a little stubborn. Don’t believe that life has to be lived as all or nothing because we’re meant to have exactly what we need. Nothing more and nothing less.

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