How to lead your life is a question that overwhelms everyone. With infinite possibilities of things you can do and you can be, life becomes rather overwhelming in how we move ahead and conduct our lives. There are great pulls to live your life in a certain way strongly influenced by your upbringing, your family and friends, surroundings and largely the society itself. What kind of jobs to do depends largely on the values you learnt from family, what kind of leisure to take part in depends on what your friends are doing. What to do on a friday night takes a lot from what others are posting on instagram stories. These are the so-called-normal lives in your localized point of reference. The issue comes up when you find yourself not living the life you see around, or one that is popular or recommended by and large by the crowd. The thought process goes like this – you compare your life to the lives that are being lived around (friend group or people on social media) and get a feeling that your life is not-so-normal (or in somecases extreme). It would be smaller things like everyone else is partying on friday and you are not, or everyone else is travelling on workations and you are not or larger ones like everyone else is working and you are pursuing higher education, or everyone else is getting married and you still haven’t thought about it. This thought when repetitive slowly turns into a hate for your own life and makes it difficult for you to continue living that life.
These so-called-normal lives are too narrow in my opinion. To the point that if you are not on instagram almost everyone would point it out. Or if you are not going out with someone, people would ask why? And a lot of people in certain phase of their life (e.g having a intense job that takes up all the time, preparing for exams, running their companies, exploring something new) would deviate from the so-called-normal lives. “You don’t have a social life”, “You’re too introverted”, “You’re too focused on work”, “You’re too emotional”, “You don’t know this movie or this song?”, “You’re getting old, its time to find a partner”, “Why haven’t you done X thing by age Y”. Through statements like this, the normal starts appear like a single point on the scale. The point you are expected to be at, and if you deviate slightly from the mean point, your life is not-so-normal.
The scope of what is considered normal should be very broad. What is normal is actually a big interval on the scale rather than a point. And there’s no mean on the spectrum that you have to achieve. All the points on the scale are good. Don’t go out to clubs on weekends? Don’t use social media? Don’t watch the same popular shows everyone else watches? Haven’t gotten married by age X? Have unpopular hobbies? No need to worry, all of this falls very well within normal lives. Most lives are normal, and it helps to think this way to give yourself the comfort that there is nothing wrong in continuing to live your life that way.