Doing/having it all

Maybe we can just be ourselves

When I started The Spark this summer, I started following some other folks (as you do). One of those folks is Katherine Bettis, who produces the delightful A Cartoon Every Thursday, which I encourage you to check out.

The first cartoon that arrived in my inbox was this one:

Y’all, I looked at this cartoon and I had all the feels. I asked Katherine if I could use it for a future post, and she agreed (thank you!!).

It’s a simple cartoon, right? It’s cute, and it’s funny. But I think there’s more going on here.

My immediate reaction is that what we see here is what so many of us feel right now, which is the push to be and do and have ALL THE THINGS. We may be good at our jobs or good investors or good artists or good Scrabble players. We may be crappy Scrabble players and decent home cooks. We may be awful in the kitchen but be truly remarkable with a brush and a set of watercolors.

All those things are fine. I hope that, somewhere in our lives, someone told us we don’t have to be everything. Somewhere along the line in the last 20 years or so, though—maybe more—we’ve lost that belief, as a culture. It’s not enough anymore to be good at our jobs or good investors or good artists or good Scrabble players. It’s most definitely not enough to be satisfied with being “good enough” when “the best” is lurking out there somewhere taunting us to come and get it.

We’ve been told that we can and should be the best at everything. We’ve been told that we not only can “have it all,” but that we should. That there’s something wrong with us if we’re not interested in or able to do absolutely everything there is to do in our lives even though it’s obvious on its face that that’s a lie.

No one can be everything. Most of us are can openers, not Swiss army knives. And most of us don’t want to be Swiss army knives. Most people are well aware that they’re not good at everything, and that that’s just how being human works, but we’re constantly told we should be able to “have it all.” The internal conflict caused by that internal awareness meeting up with the cultural messaging is what makes us miserable.

Imagine for a second if we were all equally good at everything. If we could all build and maintain our own cars and homes, cook a gourmet five-course meal, give a lecture, sculpt a museum-worthy statue, star on Broadway, and play professional football. What a nightmare! We’d need much longer days and a completely different economic structure to make that work, at the very least.

Steven Wright famously said, “You can’t have everything. Where would you put it?” I don’t know where you’d fit all that into your schedule much less your living space.

Human beings succeed because we all have different skills, talents, and interests. I don’t know about you, but I am really glad that car mechanics exist, because I have no idea how to fix my Prius. I’m sure as heck not going to fill my own teeth, either. And the people who do those things are probably just as happy that they can ask me how to make their writing better or for help on their creative projects.

All the pressure to be and do everything exhausts me even without actually trying to do all the things. I’m not anti-ambition, but I do think it’s good to look at what’s driving that ambition and deciding if it’s reasonable, realistic, and—most importantly—really what we want or not. I have no data, but I strongly suspect that a lot of it is driven by family and cultural pressure and the rise of sites like Instagram where we’re fed the illusion that everyone around us is doing more than we are—and that somehow that makes us less worthy than “everyone else.”

I’m just so tired of the relentless pressure to constantly do and be and produce more. We were never meant to be little widget-making machines. We’re human beings. The Industrial Revolution somehow convinced us that we were not as good as the machines we created and that we should be more like them—how messed up is that?? And well over a century later, our culture now accepts that crazy notion as actual fact…and then we all wonder why we’re exhausted and unhappy.

There’s a difference between a genuine dream that fuels you authentically from within and a hustle for worthiness (to borrow Brené Brown’s term) that drives you out of a fear of not being good enough. And I feel pretty confident that you could feel the difference in your bones as you read that sentence, because they come from such different energies.

I propose, therefore, that it’s okay to go with the genuine dreams and abandon hustling (and hustle culture, thanks very much) for good. It’s okay to be ourselves and let the other nonsense others try to put on us, and that we sometimes try to put on ourselves, fall by the wayside—where it belongs.

It’s okay to be a can opener instead of a Swiss army knife. It’s okay to do what you love for the love of it rather than to chase awards and recognition if that’s what you’d rather do—and it’s also okay to aim for those awards if that’s what calls to you. And it’s okay to be okay with any of those choices.

You’re not a failure if you can’t (or don’t want to) do or be all the things. You’re human. And really, that’s the best thing of all.