Grow Up Already: Why Gen-Y Has To Stop Blaming Everyone Else For Its Mistakes
With the world being as complex as it is, it’s easy to blame your misfortune on others. Our egos don’t like to be bruised so the majority of people fail to take responsibility for their actions and, therefore, fail to take responsibility for the lives that they have created for themselves. I understand the urge to point the finger at anyone and anything but yourself — I really do.
Like everyone else, I had the same issue growing up. Fortunately, I was able to grow out of it. I began to understand that by not taking responsibility for my actions and their outcomes, I was failing to take control of my life and produce any positive change. You see, when you are unwilling to accept the outcome of your actions, then you are accepting a fallacy; you are accepting that in the grand scheme of things, your life is completely out of your control. If you accept such a thing then you are accepting a fate that is entirely out of your hands — you are choosing to live a half-truth.
No matter how well off or not you are, you are almost certainly hoping for a life that is still better. It’s human nature. We are never entirely satisfied because we always feel that life has more to offer us. And for a good reason: life always does have more to offer us. This is why happiness is so difficult to hold on to. We tell ourselves that if we achieve this and this or attain that or that, then we will be happy, content.
Unfortunately, this is not the way that we work. No matter how much we have experienced, how much we have lived, we will always, always, be hungry for more. This can be a beautiful thing if we are one of those few people who have learned how to get what they want out of life. There are those out there that get up every morning and go out there and live life to the fullest. However, these people are a minority. The majority of people in the world stop living once they reach adulthood.
Once we are on our own and have to support ourselves, we become swamped with things that we need to do. We need to go to work. We need to make money to pay the bills. We need to clean and do the laundry. We need to walk the dog, feed the cat, take out the trash. We need to go shopping for a new pair of jeans. Go to a birthday party. Find a partner and start a family. On top of all this, we have expectations.
We have expectations for ourselves, the success that we will experience, the love that we will find, the fun times that we will have. And, of course, we cannot forget the expectations that our family has. Our parents want us to be lawyers, doctors, good fathers or mothers, they want grandchildren and great grandchildren… With so much pressure from ourselves and the world around us, it’s no wonder that most of us, at some point, simply give up.
Achieving the worthwhile things in life isn’t easy and is very time and focus consuming. Success is only experienced after consistent failure. So it should be of no surprise that, at some point or another, most individuals seem to let go of their wants and dreams and decide to trudge through life with as little difficulty as possible.
We choose the ‘easier’ way of living because it brings promise of less disappointment; if you don’t shoot very high then you can’t fall very low. The problem is that because of our egos we cannot blame ourselves for our shortcomings. Oh no… we can’t be the ones to blame because we are amazing people that are capable of so much — if the world wasn’t working against us, that is.
So we tell ourselves that it isn’t our fault that we never amounted to much. It’s not our fault that we couldn’t land the job, find the right lover, create the life that we wanted for ourselves. It’s not our fault because we have accepted to believe that our situation and our lives themselves are out of our hands. And so we have the birth of the most widely accepted fallacy on the planet: the belief that our failures are not our own, but rather the result of a world that is exceptionally cruel and unfair. We comfort ourselves with such nonsense in order to keep our egos from crumbling.
This belief is accepted by almost every individual on the planet to some extent or other. I am sure that each of you know at least a handful of people who, although have amounted to absolutely nothing in their lives, still believe that they are the Lord’s gift to humanity — schmucks who talk self-righteous drivel and try to feed it to others as word of gospel. These fools are unable to create any change in their lives, but instead of accepting their situation as being the result of their own failures, they blame the rest of the world for their incompetency. In fact, I am sure that plenty of you reading this right now fall into this category.
You can feel free to comment below, find me on Twitter and tell me how stupid I am and question how I could be so crass as to speak to you in such a tone. But at the end of the day, I will have made more progress in 24 hours than you’ll have made all of last year. You can go ahead and keep blaming everyone else for your problems — in fact, I encourage it; it only makes it easier for everyone who realizes that they actually do have control over their lives.
If you wish to keep lying to yourself and acting like an adolescent, denying responsibility for your actions and the results, then go for it. I have already accepted that the world is filled with more idiots than it is intellectuals and although I wish the tables would turn, I can also accept the reality of things for what they are. If you were to take responsibility for your life for a change then maybe, just maybe, you wouldn’t be so damn miserable. Grow up already.
