Why being yourself is ruining your life

Just be yourself has become sort of a statement that people venerate these days. People celebrate just be yourself probably because it kind of feels like a warm hug. Just be yourself and everything's gonna be okay. It feels kind of empathetic, understanding. It's like, yeah, you're right, I can just be myself! That sounds fantastic. I don't have to be anything that I'm not. Just be yourself feels like it really cares about you, despite the fact that nobody really follows that advice because you can't really follow it. Everybody is a chameleon of sorts.

When you're around the boys having a beer, you're going to act way differently than you do when you're around your mom. When you're at a job interview, you're going to be all proper and professional and maybe a little bit personable, way more charming than you would if you're just relaxing on the couch, devolving into degeneracy or trying to watch something on Netflix. We do this because we kind of have to. Different situations that we're in recruit different parts of us, different emphases. Sometimes we have to be professional; other times, we have to be very charming and funny.

Like I'm doing right now, I'm not like this in real life, but I've got to film a better ideas video so I sound super smart and personable and relatable. The point I'm trying to make is that are we ever really ourselves? What does it mean to be ourselves, and is it something that we should strive to be? Because just be yourself has become something that we've been conditioned to believe is true based on repetition. Maybe the Walt Disney Company got us all believing that we should just be ourselves, make our dreams come true, follow our heart, find our passion—all of these bubble gum, cotton candy, birthday card sentiments that all sound very comforting but don't really mean anything and are impossible to just apply to your life.

We hear these things so often they've become utterly meaningless. Like nobody's life was ever changed by somebody saying to them, "Hey, just follow your dreams." You know, what does that mean? I've had some pretty [expletive] up dreams in my day, and if we were to follow those dreams, we would all be screwed. God help us all! And follow your passion—like most people that you talk to have no idea what their passion is. They have things they're interested in, probably a bunch of things they're interested in, but there's a lot of pressure in, like, "Oh, find your passion and everything's going to work out."

There's a lot of pressure in that because people get analysis paralysis. They have no idea which passion to pick, what's going to be the one thing that makes everything make sense. And again, I think that we tend to agree with these tag lines not because they're particularly instructional, but because they sound like they mean well. They're very easy to swallow. It's never challenging or uncomfortable to believe that the answer to all of our problems is to just be more of ourselves, whatever that means.

But I think that just being yourself is inherently a defeatist statement because "just" implies that yourself is something to just be. It's a reality to regress back to. It tells you to stop reaching and stop pursuing and just be you because you're just you. It's an inherently pessimistic statement veiled in self-congratulation—a statement that doesn't want the best for you, a statement that doesn't care about your ideals, your conception of a brighter future. It's a statement that encourages you to stop growing.

But riddle me this: why just be yourself when you can be so much more? Now you might think to yourself, "Well, I can only just be myself, right? If I'm always striving to be more than myself, then I will never feel okay with myself. I'll never feel comforted. I'll never feel okay with who I am." And instead, I will hold this future version of myself in front of me like a carrot to a mule, hamster wheeling myself, I guess, mule-mule wheeling yourself right into your grave.

You know you'll never be able to stop and smell the roses. You'll always be looking for the next thing—goals and goals and goals—and you'll be searching for a peace that you could find in the present moment. And while I understand this argument, I also think it's very short-sighted. It doesn't take into account the bigger picture of the human brain, and that is that yes, we do need to feel satisfied and happy with what we have. That's what serotonin and oxytocin and endorphins are for. You know, they're all for feeling good in the present moment; it's a very important system of our psychology.

But potentially way more influential and important for our survival is our dopamine system, and dopamine is all about motivation. If somebody were to delete all the dopamine in your brain right now so you couldn't feel a lick of dopamine, you would lay down in whatever chair you're sitting on because you probably wouldn't have the motivation to sit down, and you would never lift a finger to do anything. You would pee your pants because you wouldn't be motivated to go to the bathroom. You wouldn't get up to eat anything. You would literally lay there and die.

We need motivation to go get things that we don't already have. It's the only reason why you're alive right now. So in a way, motivation is the desire to attain something that we don't already have. It's something that requires us to move in space and time to go get, and that will never go away, right? We will always be motivated to do something. The question is: what are we locking our motivation into? Is it Netflix? Is it social media? Is it buying frivolous things? No judgment, but I'm just saying that it's locked into something.

So since we have this profound desire to achieve things that we haven't already achieved or to get things that we don't already have, what better thing is there to lock our motivation system into than being the best version of ourselves? So that we can be more capable people, capable of helping ourselves get through the hardships of life, so that we can help others get through the hardships in their lives—essentially making the world a better place through being the best we can be.

So I think that two things can be true at the same time. We can both strive for greatness and be the best that we can be—not settling for just being ourselves—but at the same time having honesty and compassion for wherever we are now. But a lot of the time, we have very weird tendencies and behaviors that we think are just a part of who we are, but in fact, they are behaviors that we learned through trauma or the role that we played in our friends group or our family that lead us to do things that don't actually serve us.

They don't serve others, and all in all, they're just a net negative. Even though it's like, "Oh, it's just, that's just me," haha. Like you'd be surprised how many aspects of your personality are improvable. You know, you might think that it's just a little quirk or insanity that you have, but consider the fact that you can improve it. You can modify your behavior and your thought patterns to better serve you.

And things that you previously thought were just part of your personality or you being you are things that are just a result of the way you were brought up and things that don't actually help you in the long run. Don't get self-compassion confused with complacency. For instance, if you had a close friend and he kind of went off the deep end—previously you were really good friends, you got along—and then he started to become kind of toxic. He started pushing you and others away through his behaviors, through his words, and you're kind of like, "What gives? This guy has changed, and I don't know if I want to be around him anymore, but I do really care about him, but for now, I have to distance myself."

If this person were to come up to you sincerely and say, "Hey, look, I realize my behavior was out of line. I didn't really realize it at the time, but it's become clear to me that I need to change. My words and my actions are hurting me or hurting others, and I'm ready to change," would you say, "No, it's okay, just be yourself"? You'd probably say, "I agree; your behavior was out of line. I'm so glad that you can see that, and since I care about you, I really want to help you be the best version of yourself so that you can serve yourself better and, you know, get along with everybody, right? I want you to be the best you can be!"

And it's funny because loving that person isn't just permitting them to do their thing and be who they are, and whatever—that's complacency. Since you care about that person, you want to help them be the best version of themselves. I truly believe that we need to treat ourselves like this. We need to treat ourselves like we have inherent dignity, like we're on our own side and we want the best for ourselves.

A lot of the time, we don't treat ourselves with the dignity that we deserve. Our behaviors and our actions, or maybe habits or ways of thinking or thought patterns that we have, that we've had since the dawn of time, as long as we can remember, are proving with time to not serve us, to be destructive. Maybe we learned these tendencies through childhood, and they're just a part of who we are, but they're leading us to the brink of doom.

We gain no traction in our lives; like nothing's working. Should we just be ourselves then? So ask yourself: are you living a life that reflects your inherent dignity? Are your thoughts, behaviors, and habits serving you? Who do you ideally want to be? And what can you do to help you become somebody of strength?

And the bizarre thing is, when we start caring more about our future, when we have ideals, when we have something to strive towards, we actually start to become more satisfied with the present moment. And especially when you've been on that path for a little while, you can look to your past and you have a track record of growth. You can be comforted that you've come a long way, and you can be excited and motivated by the person that you're becoming. Self-satisfaction can't exist in a vacuum; it's impossible to shake our concept of the true, the good, and the beautiful.

So maybe the answer to life isn't to just be yourself. Maybe the answer is to love yourself enough to become something more.

A big thank you to Athletic Greens for sponsoring this video! You guys know that AG-1 is by far my favorite supplement on the entire planet. It just makes me feel so good throughout the day; I almost can't believe it. Packed with over 75 vitamins, minerals, whole food source superfoods, and adaptogens in every single scoop, AG-1 is like the mother lode of nutrition for your body.

And because the ingredients are sourced from real foods, it has a high degree of bioavailability, which means that your body doesn't just urinate it out. It can actually soak in, and your body can deploy it in its various systems. So I'd highly recommend joining me in this daily habit that I do every single day that I've been doing for about two years.

So if you use my link in the description below, Athletic Greens is hooking you guys up with a year's supply of the Vitamin D3 and K2 complex, which I also have every single morning, as well as five AG-1 travel packs with your first purchase. So make sure you take advantage of that offer by clicking on my link in the description below. Join me on the quest for body and mental dominance, and thank you, Athletic Greens, for sponsoring this video!

If you liked this video, then actually hit the like button because that's always a huge help. It helps the video rank better; it shoves my bald head into other people's home pages, helping them out, which helps me out. So it's a win-win for everybody. If you're lurking here and this is the billionth time that you've seen my face or watched one of my videos, consider subscribing! I don't think it does anything; I don't think it—I don't know, maybe the algorithm likes it or something.

Other than that, thank you so much for watching, and we'll catch you in the next video.