Everyone puts pressure on you -- so why put pressure on yourself?

If you have a job, you have pressure. Someone hired you and expects something of you. If you don't have a job, you have pressure: you need to find a job. If you have a job you don't like, you have pressure; you're doing something day after day that bores you or stresses you and doesn't make you feel good about yourself. Any time you're working for someone else, you feel pressure. Succeed or be fired.


When you go home, you're carrying a lot of that job with you, no matter how many times you wash your hands. You just did that for eight whole hours, and what do you have to show? After child care and insurance and groceries and gas and all that other stuff, maybe a few bucks in the coffee can buried under the sunflowers out back.

Yes, a lot of it comes from your bosses and your job situations. But how much pressure do you put on yourself?


It's worth stopping to consider.


You've been doing too much. You're letting yourself get stressed. You could let a few things go, get someone else to do them, especially the least important things. Unless you live alone, you have a mate and/or kids who can take some slack off you. Every now and then. Do you live alone? Order out. Get it delivered. Eat pizza in that hot tub you never cranked up. Pamper yourself. Whenever you can. However you can.


No one is going to do it for you. If they do, God bless 'em, but don't count on it.


If you work for someone else, you have pressure in your life. Recognize it, accept it, deal with it.

If you don't work for anyone, you have less pressure but still the kind you impose on yourself: okay, now you have all this time, what are you going to do with it? In other words, now's the time to prove what an artist/craftsman/whatever you are. You always thought if you only had time you would do this or that. Well, dude, you now have the time. Produce!


I'm thinking that we put pressure on ourselves from early ages all the way through to the end of our days. Trying to be bigger and stronger, or prettier, in our younger years to trying to be richer (and still prettier) in our later years. Do we humans not know how to pull back and relax? Admit that we can't do certain things, achieve certain goals, be who we thought we were going to be? Acknowledge, when the time comes, that are best days are behind us?

If we could, we'd relax and know that we did our best and that there are lots of things in life to enjoy that don't have anything to with us or our problems. Movie, anyone? Dinner? A good book? Sex?

Everyone puts pressure on you in this life. Well, not everyone but too many people. Why put pressure on yourself? You ought to be your own best friend, the only one who'll give you a pass from time to time, a day off, because you know you deserve it.

Be at peace with yourself. The rest will work itself out.