One thing nobody seems to have brought up, is who is reinforcing these anxieties in you.
Is it your parents, is it your friends? Is it school?
4 year olds aren't depressed about being successful - they just live their life.
As you get older, your parents think your happiness is related to making money, having a family, stuff like that.
They're right to some extent. The crucial point is since you have anxiety about this issue, what has happened is their incompetence (this is a crucial point, incompetence breeds anxiety), has created anxiety in them, and they have infected you with it.
They're anxious you're not good enough, they're anxious your grades aren't high enough, they're anxious, anxious anxious. They're comparing you to their friends' kids and they're having an internal competition - they want to tell their friends how well you're doing. Their self esteem is tied to your 'success', success they've defined for you without asking you if that's what you want (This doesn't always happen, but it is extremely common)
All this is unfortunate and extremely common. Your parents/friends are just incompetent at being happy, sorry. They mean well, they just don't know how to live happily and spread that around.
The possible solutions are:
- to succeed, according to your parents' worldview, to shut them up
- to disagree with their worldview and create your own (redefine success for yourself)
- to do a combination of the two - succeed to some extent (get higher education), but also distance yourself away from them, so that their regular dose of anxiety doesn't get in the way of your self discovery
This is something everyone goes through, and doesn't get talked about enough, because most people are not aware of what really happened - they just think everyone is insecure to some extent, and that it's ok. It's not ok, but only a few will be curious enough to rediscover what THEY actually want out of life. That's what a mid-life crisis is - when people finally reach a peak in reaching what everyone else told them would make them happy, and they're not. So it's something you figure out now, or mid-life, or after, doesn't matter when really :)
Is it your parents, is it your friends? Is it school?
4 year olds aren't depressed about being successful - they just live their life.
As you get older, your parents think your happiness is related to making money, having a family, stuff like that.
They're right to some extent. The crucial point is since you have anxiety about this issue, what has happened is their incompetence (this is a crucial point, incompetence breeds anxiety), has created anxiety in them, and they have infected you with it.
They're anxious you're not good enough, they're anxious your grades aren't high enough, they're anxious, anxious anxious. They're comparing you to their friends' kids and they're having an internal competition - they want to tell their friends how well you're doing. Their self esteem is tied to your 'success', success they've defined for you without asking you if that's what you want (This doesn't always happen, but it is extremely common)
All this is unfortunate and extremely common. Your parents/friends are just incompetent at being happy, sorry. They mean well, they just don't know how to live happily and spread that around.
The possible solutions are:
- to succeed, according to your parents' worldview, to shut them up
- to disagree with their worldview and create your own (redefine success for yourself)
- to do a combination of the two - succeed to some extent (get higher education), but also distance yourself away from them, so that their regular dose of anxiety doesn't get in the way of your self discovery
This is something everyone goes through, and doesn't get talked about enough, because most people are not aware of what really happened - they just think everyone is insecure to some extent, and that it's ok. It's not ok, but only a few will be curious enough to rediscover what THEY actually want out of life. That's what a mid-life crisis is - when people finally reach a peak in reaching what everyone else told them would make them happy, and they're not. So it's something you figure out now, or mid-life, or after, doesn't matter when really :)