the essence of striving is dissatisfaction. If you decide that you will be happy when you get a promotion, bench two plates, or find a perfect partner, then you tacitly make an agreement with yourself to not be happy in the present. Stated otherwise: we stop accepting and liking ourselves for who we are in this moment, which is corrosive in itself.
is this necessarily the case though? can’t we both strive to be the bestv ersion of ourself while still enjoying the present moment?
Ask yourself: why is the self-help industry such a thriving one? Why are there so many self-help books and articles and videos? Because it’s big business and because we have become a society of voyeurs and dreamers: by reading about the day-to-day grind, we allow ourselves to imagine that we will become what we have dreamed of and, since these books spoon-feed us what these dreams should be, it then becomes unnecessary for us to expend precious energy sitting with ourselves and deciding what we really want.