Why you shouldn’t “do you”
You do you.
It’s the battle cry of personal freedom and autonomy we’ve all come to love (and hate). We see it in clothing adverts. We see it in self-help books. We even see it in Frozen’s Queen Elsa as she unleashes her icy powers in the wilderness: “No right, no wrong, no rules for me”.
However, underneath this harmlessly playful self-acceptance, there’s a more insidious force at play. I’m not talking about the kind of freedom to wear socks with sandals or put ketchup on pasta; I’m talking about the worldview that says: you are the master of your own destiny — you know best and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
In a way, this makes sense. After all, who better to know what we want and what we’re capable of than ourselves? But as harsh as it sounds, we don’t always know best.
Hear me out.
Humans need other humans. That’s what separated us from our Neanderthal cousins as we elbowed our way past them in the survival of the fittest (despite the fact they were much stronger and had bigger brains). We are wired to rely on others emotionally for things like friendship. Sometimes we need others physically — for safety or when we’re sick. But perhaps most importantly here, we need other people to bring out the best in us.
Take my life. If all I ever received was unquestioning acceptance — whether from parents, friends or partners — I would be terrible person. Never being told I was wrong would mean I’d never have learnt to be kind, to share, to think about others’ feelings. In fact, it’s because friends and family have intentionally not let me ‘be myself’ that I have half-decent emotional intelligence today.
Even though sometimes it’s painful, we need people to tell us the truth, and this is especially the case when making the big decisions, like what we’re going to do with our life.
There has been a massive change to the average person’s career prospects in recent history. Until a few hundred years ago, people would just do what their parents did. This was incredibly restrictive and a disaster if you weren’t naturally good at your family trade.
Now by contrast, we have so much more choice. If you’re a creative born into a family of accountants, you can become an artist. If you’re a boffin whose parents were musicians, that shouldn’t stop you being an astrophysicist. The world’s your oyster.
But here’s the catch — this amount of choice is not only unprecedented, it’s frightening. What if I get it wrong? What if I waste my one shot at life?
We then add to this stress when we listen to the Disney-style mantra “you can be anything you want to be”, because now not even our abilities hold us back — there’s literally no limit to our options.
So, time for some humble pie: we can’t be whatever we want to be (sorry).
Life isn’t a Hollywood movie where we’re all on our own hero’s journey. Carving out your own destiny is great if you’re Cardi B or Elon Musk — the ones who’ve ‘made it’. But deep down we all know that we can’t do everything we put our minds to. The winner of the gold medal who’s worked their whole life to get to that point may say “If I can do it, anyone can”. But what about the person in second place? What about the one who tried just as hard but didn’t even qualify for the competition? Life is tough and we are flawed.
That’s why we need to lean on others. The kind of people who will say: “maybe that singing contest isn’t for you” (we’ve all seen the fail compilations, wondering why on earth their families convinced them they sounded like Mariah Carey).
If you don’t have anyone like this, seek them out. Give them permission to be honest with you.
Of course, pursue your interests. Don’t just do what others tell you, or what your parents did. But do listen to those who can help you work out where to go in life. The people who care too much about you to lazily say “you do you”.
Chances are, those voices will also be the ones who remind you that even though you might not be — *insert your idol here* — you still matter.
