How To Actually Slow Down
Keep manufactured urgency from ruining your life
I used to view peers as competitors and gauge my place in the world by measuring my success against theirs.
Their wins became personal milestones, and quiet eras made me feel ahead of the curve. I had successfully instilled thought patterns that guaranteed I would never feel good enough or on time in my own life.
I assumed everyone did this to motivate their careers, only to realize the heartbreaking reality that people also struggled with family-planning timelines: Is it too late to have a baby?
Others feel it about relationships. Am I supposed to have met my person by now? Did I somehow miss that chapter?
Some worry about money in the same way. Did everyone else figure out how to invest and buy a house already? Did I miss the memo on how to become a millionaire by 30?
Even creative life has its own version of the clock. Shouldn’t I have published something by now? Shouldn’t my work have taken off already if it was ever going to?
Until the pattern’s interrupted, timeline comparisons multiply in smaller ways, too. The friend who seemed to have figured out their career path early. The colleague who speaks confidently in meetings while you struggle to organize your thoughts. The person who appears to move through life with a sense of direction you haven’t established.
We don’t compare because we’re jealous or malicious; it’s a survival habit to see how we stack up. Unfortunately, it just reinforces the limiting idea that life has a schedule and completely disregards the truth, that for the most part, we’re all winging it.
More dangerously, it pulls us away from purpose and towards an agenda. It disregards our nature to be creative, to sit still, to commune with nature, and to prioritize being over doing.
To be clear, my schedule is hectic at times. But I’ve come to understand my threshold, which is something that’s unique to us all. But through illness, burnout, and breakdowns, I’ve also learned three soul-shifting habits to prevent manufactured urgency from running the show again.
