Written by: Britta Lübbing, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
"You have as many lives as you have possibilities" — Matt Haig, 2020 (The Midnight Library, p. 31)
One of the most famous cliches about my generation is that we have a collective commitment issue. We are unable to choose between the possibilities and the freedoms in front of us. Suffering from the privilege of having it all.
I believe that what we are really suffering from is not necessarily too many choices but too many limiting beliefs. Why? Let me take you into the brain of a 27-year-old, aka member of the just Millennial almost Generation Y club.
Your 20’s seem to be a weird period. For some reason, it feels like an in-between level of child- and adulthood. Well, I kind of AM an adult. Not only officially stated by my ID. The fact that I receive an electricity bill every month or just paid a ridiculously high garbage fee also confirms that. On the other hand, youth seems to be only a breath away. Didn’t I just finish school? How is it possible that years of studying seemed to have passed in a second? When did all this seriousness enter my life? Or, to put it in my younger sister’s words, who likes to quote IKEA, "Leonie would like to be picked up in AdultLand" (referring to Småland - the playground in IKEA stores).
Although my current "playground" looks very different from the "playground" a couple of years ago, the contrasts — looking at my environment — couldn’t be more extreme. While it is still acceptable to indulge yourself in weekends in bed watching Netflix or, pre-Corona, enjoying a wild nightlife, I might very likely be attending the wedding of my childhood friend one week later. Some of us feel trapped in our shitty jobs, while others have founded successful companies already. Not to forget mentioning the moment when you find out that your first love, aka ex-boyfriend, already has a child while you struggle taking care of your newest Monstera plant. You get where I am going? People of my age are all over the place when it comes to dreams, goals, and ambitions. But does it mean we feel free, happy, and fulfilled, following a path of excitement and adventure? I dare to state the opposite.
Funny enough, as kids, we dream about being adults — it seems to equal total freedom. We can stay awake as long as we want to. Nobody restricts our TV usage or candy consumption. We are allowed to drive cars, and we can be whoever we want to be — at least that’s what we think. We want to "become," and many of us know very certainly who or what. With increasing age, this "becoming" turns out to be more and more difficult. Our inner and outer limitations start to form us. As a result, we develop a mindset of seeing more reasons why we shouldn’t do certain things rather than why we should. We assess our impact as smaller and smaller, our freedom of choice begins to fade, our idea of what is possible is shrinking slowly.
Let’s come back to why I believe that our commitment issues don’t resume from the fact that we have too many choices but too many limiting beliefs: In my opinion, the reason why we cannot commit is that we have already decided that we only deserve living in an aquarium, when in fact we are meant to live in the ocean. And seriously, why would we limit ourselves to the former? We start comparing our aquarium with bigger aquaria or other peoples’ aquaria. We jump from one aquarium to another because we assume it to be the ocean or a good equivalent. Only to find out later it is not. Because we haven’t lost our idealistic view of the world yet, we still believe in the ocean's existence, and it seems like some have even found it. So we continue searching.
The solution: Instead of overthinking our becoming, we should put much more focus on un-becoming - how we can escape the aquarium that we have built for ourselves and make decisions that are actually coming from an authentic, honest desire for who we want to be.
I believe that in our 20’s un-becoming should be our deepest concern:
When I was 18 years old, my parents got divorced, followed by years of family drama. During that time, I felt like someone had thrown me into the washing machine, spin cycle program. The truth about my life and my identity — which I thought I was (supposed to be) — got so shaken up that I started seeing their relativity. Things I had taken for granted were suddenly disposable. The world as it used to be, how I was raised to see it, was totally messed up. Some parts of everything happening around me had a hilarious amount of reality tv character — only increasing my urge to run. In NLP, we talk about "Towards" and "Away" Meta programs, a concept that fascinates me a lot. My younger Self tried to run away until a point that I realized I couldn’t run away from myself. Not to forget that "Away" never has a specific direction. Hence, I didn’t know where I was aiming.
Even though this has been the hardest period of my life with too many mental low points, it has also put me in the unique position to re-assess my life at an age where most of my peers are busy enjoying it. The good part about the "spin cycle program" during that age was that it intensified and sped up my inner growth. The positive side effects and safety an aquarium has to offer — I didn’t have them (anymore). I realized that to be fully free and fulfilled, I had to follow my heart and make what I considered the best choices for myself, not what other people thought would make me happy or be the best to do.
I have spent the last years un-becoming, and I am still in the middle of it, a hard yet so rewarding journey. But who said learning to swim in the ocean was easy?
There are some words that I would like to share with people of my generation reading this as well as all other readers of any age.
Don’t try to figure things out: This is very much in line with preaches of Gary V. To expect the youngest generations of our society to have things figured out is simply unrealistic. Most people of any age haven’t, so why should we? The amount of pressure we are facing as a consequence of this will only lead to us building stronger aquarium walls but not help us grow into responsible, innovative, critical, global citizens. Building walls takes time and energy, and it doesn’t leave us with much energy left.
As human beings, our view of the world is quite limited - making it hard to see the bigger picture of pretty much anything. Our brains want linear, but life is not. So stop wasting the present by trying to figure out a future that will most likely not happen. That brings me to the next point.
Purpose is overrated - thinking big, underrated. As humans, we love to indulge ourselves in philosophical questions. One of our favorite ones seems to be the purpose of life, and many big thinkers have developed various concepts around this. Metaphorically speaking, questioning why we need to swim at all while unhappily feeling stuck in an aquarium seems to be not only the wrong order but also the wrong approach.
As I mentioned earlier, many of us are in a constant trade of different aquaria versions, but only a few ever doubt the legitimacy of the aquarium at all. This is a friendly invitation to swap the purpose question against something more useful: What do I really really want, why I am not there yet, what is holding me back, how can I overcome that, and what the hell am I doing in an aquarium? The ground rule when thinking about your answers: THINK BIG and then even bigger!
Setting goals is more important than reaching them: Once you have wrapped your mind around the last point, you will most likely identify new goals for yourself. Great progress! Setting goals can be very motivating and fill us with a lot of positive energy. Goals are important because they give us direction and help us prioritize. The tricky part, however, is right to come: Execution.
Now, there are approaches out there that will tell you to push for your goals no matter what. Luckily we have already talked about the fact that "life happens when we are busy making plans" (I am not the smart person who said that, unfortunately). Therefore, I have a little bit more compassionate idea to offer. What about if we agreed on the importance of having goals? And even more, on letting them go if they don’t feel right anymore? I want you to never feel bad, guilty, or ashamed for a course of direction.
First of all, setting goals needs to be learned; hence, failing at it is part of the game, especially in the beginning. There is nothing bad about not reaching our goals and sadly, nobody tells us that. We are expected to set the perfect goals perfectly from the beginning. Only by allowing ourselves trial and error will we eventually become masters in knowing what we want and how to get there. The learnings lie in evaluating why goals were missed, not accomplished, or wrong in the first place but not in beating ourselves up.
Secondly, while — as said before — we are busy executing, life is busy happening, and sometimes both go together and sometimes they don’t. Therefore, we need to act from a place of flexibility, knowing that the ocean is big and different paths lead to it. Plus, an agile mindset will keep us sane and allow us to stick through the tough times. The storm might delay our plans but not delete them. By the way, storms… another quick tip coming!
Never follow the money. Always follow your heart: Especially in hard times, we start questioning why we are doing all this. Without a good answer (for yourself), you will simply not make it. While money might be a great answer at first — sooner or later, unbearable circumstances and trapped dreams cannot be paid off. On the other hand, ideally, the ocean holds some type of currency that pays not only our rent. While I am neither rich nor have acquired a fortune through my current doing yet, I am convinced that freedom and abundance lie in the ocean and not in an aquarium. Got it?
Time for the last checkpoint!
Soul searching is a privilege: I have covered many aspects in this article, and what we should never forget, is that most parts of it are written from a rather privileged perspective. All of the struggles we are facing are real. Wanting more from life is important. Nevertheless, we should never forget that different people face different realities of life.
In the bigger picture, our struggles regarding our inner growth most likely are not existential or life-threatening. So be gentle with yourself, take care of yourself (physically and mentally), and acknowledge your pain. But also know what life has given you and show solidarity with those less privileged. Gratefulness for who we are, where we are at, and what we have is such an important tool and will make your journey to the ocean much easier.
I hope you have got some inspiration out of this, and I hope your journey of un-becoming starts soon. For everyone here who thinks they are too old for this aquarium/ocean stuff: It is never too late to un-become. Maybe you are at a point in life where you accepted the fact that you are a bird. I encourage you to find your inner penguin. What can I say, "the ocean is waiting for you!"
Britta Lübbing, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Britta is the founder of Bttrflymovment, a platform, and community dedicated to supporting and connecting people in their 20‘s who are looking for a way to fully unlock their potential. After studying Business and getting a taste of a 9-5 corporate career she quickly realized that this lifestyle would never allow her to „swim in the ocean“ but rather lead to jumping from one aquarium into the next bigger one.
Furthermore, she had friends and fellows around her with great ideas, ambition and talent seemingly stuck not knowing how to make their dreams come true. Britta’s passion for Self Development, true connection, and a fulfilled life eventually led to the vision of a safe space that would allow young people to transform from a caterpillar into a butterfly and also, allow them to connect to like-minded people with shared expectations for life. Bttrflymovement was born.
Britta loves to write, share and inspire through her journey according to the motto: Be the Change you want to see in this world!
