who told you to want that?

So, I've been starting to ask myself these questions, and I'm going to ask them to you, too. The city you live in right now, did you choose it? Did you ever leave the place or you or do you just never leave or you just ended up in the city that you're in? The career that you're building right now, did you choose it knowing all of the other options that were available to you or did you just choose it because it was an easy path or the path was kind of in front of you and it was very easy for you to get to it?

I'm not judging at all because I feel like I am in the same situation and I catch myself doing this, too. The thing is, I've made kind of objectively unconventional choices throughout my life. I moved to so many different countries. I basically had no stable career and I had a lot of like different sources of income throughout my life.

I'm currently learning sword fighting and karate in the middle of nowhere in Japan. So, I am making very unconventional choices with my life, but I still find myself living off of scripts that I didn't write myself. Living off of ideals and ideas that did not come from myself and most of them came from many different sources. There's a timeline that we've been basically all taught.

By 22 or 23, you graduate. By 25, you have a real job. By 27, you're going to be in a serious relationship. By 30, you should have everything figured out.

You should have a house and you should decide if you want to have a family or not and you should be living in your adult career. And if you're behind on any of these, and I know some people's mental models of these are way lower for pressuring themselves to become billionaires when they're 20, and I was kind of one of those people when I was younger. And yeah, if you don't achieve those, you're going to feel anxious. And it's not necessarily because you decided those milestones matter and that those are important to you, but more because everyone else decided for you that those milestones matter and now it's just in your brain constantly.

I moved to from Romania kind of randomly when I was 18. I wouldn't say I have a stable job or that my job that I will be having for the summer, for example, will exist in the future. I'm not saying my degree will be useful in the future. Feel the spike of anxiety whenever someone gets to one of the milestones faster than me or gets a better milestone than me or gets a better goal than me and it's just this constant jealousy for something that I don't know if I want or not, >> >> but that it's been pressured for me to want.

It's just a script. I don't know where it came from. I cannot pinpoint the exact sources, but I know that >> I have this script of I need to get the best job, I need to find the best relationship, maybe get married, although I don't want to get married, but I still feel the pressure >> and the anxiety when someone else gets married. So, the script is just running in the background, although I'm constantly rejecting it consciously most of the time.

And the thing about this inherited script that you get from your parents or from your childhood or from >> years and years of growing up in a household and in an environment that feels like this is the right way to live and think, you cannot just think your way out of them. They're not necessarily intellectual positions. It's not like an opinion. They're emotional patterns, emotional laws that have been installed into your brain when you were a child.

Knowing they're there, being conscious of the fact that those things are there and they're also it's not going to make them go away, which is the crazy part. And the thing is, most of the old scripts, all of these expectations and goals, probably come from your childhood years, but there's a lot of new scripts that are coming in through algorithms. And what's very dangerous about those is that a lot of people, a lot of very smart people, are working 8 hours a day, getting very well paid to make you have those scripts in your mind. So, it's almost impossible for you to consciously be aware of them and also consciously reject them.

They also feel like discovery and learning new things because that's why we are enjoying scrolling and being constantly on social media all the time. You open TikTok or Instagram and you see a girl with a gorgeous Paris apartment or gorgeous New York apartment with a crazy view and her perfect boyfriend or her perfect morning routine. And even if you don't believe that that can be your life and you don't believe that that is her life either, you do start wanting that. But did you want that before you saw it?

Or did you just want it because you saw it 500 times in the past month? I noticed this with content creation myself. I don't really scroll that much, but when I do scroll, I do end up wanting things that I never thought about wanting before I saw creator having it. And this is why the creator economy is growing so much and the marketing industry is shifting to creator economies because we just trust these people so much.

I want that certain aesthetic. I want that certain filming style. I want that camera quality. I want that book she's reading or heels that she's wearing or whatever apartment that she's having.

One day I want to live in New York, the other day I want to live on an island. And I do sometimes stop myself and I'm asking myself, do I actually want this thing or is this desire mine coming from myself, coming from something like am I actually desiring this or >> was this desire created by something like an algorithm or a person trying to sell me something? And I usually cannot tell. With these new scripts that are coming to me, I really cannot tell.

And I think this is true for most people. It's so hard to separate your genuine interests and desires from what the internet is giving us as interest and desires. Although maybe we're rejecting the idea right now. Like maybe you're saying, "Oh, this doesn't happen to you."

But chances a lot of trends, there's a lot of thoughts, even thought trends that entered your mind and now you just take them as given, but you cannot even pinpoint which ones they are and what they are because you never thought about them as something that is a script, as something that someone tried to sell to you, as something that it was intentionally created in your brain. And I definitely have not solved this. This is one of the reasons why I'm making this video. I do journal and I stop myself and ask myself, "What do I actually want and what do I need?

Like for example, I've been having an obsession with like red bottoms heels from Louboutin, I think, for graduation and I'm graduating in a year and I don't know why it started popping up on my feet and I've been watching like maybe a hundred videos about heels and a hundred seems like a big number, but I'm pretty sure this is how much I've been seeing of this specific type of shoe and I never thought I wanted this shoe. I never thought I wanted it for graduation, but now it is just so ingrained in my brain that I was starting looking for it and I don't it won't make me happy. It's extremely expensive even if I get a second hand. It doesn't make any sense for me to buy it only for graduation, but in my head it's just ingrained.

It's just as something that you have to buy it for graduation. So I tried to journal and ask myself where does this come from? If I notice myself wanting something, I try to trace it back to where it came from and this can be like even the desire to be monetized on content creation and not just keep it as a hobby because content creation is very nice as a hobby, too. It doesn't really need to be only monetized, but I feel like every single person who started in content creation is doing it for getting monetized eventually.

And this was not the case in the past. When YouTube first started, a lot of people were just posting because >> they liked posting. And I feel like asking myself would I still want this if no one knew I had it is such a big question and such an important question because most of the time most of the things that we want are detected by how we think other people will perceive us by us having them. I also feel like as I moved to a different country and I started moving a lot in the past few years, a lot of the thoughts that I have either persist or vanish and the ones that persist are usually wanting to read, dancing, meeting new people, having very deep conversations and one-on-one conversations.

There's a lot of values and desires that I have that persist, but a lot of them also don't persist and their content dependent and their country dependent. For example, when I went to the US, I especially in San Francisco, I had this huge desire to be seen as intellectual. Same in Romania. I go to Tokyo or I go to Buenos Aires, that's not a value that the country has at all.

So, it doesn't really matter for me if people perceive me as smart or intellectual. And so, those things, when you move so much and when you live in so different places, it kind of makes you question which of those things are cultural, which of those things are from your family, and which of those things are actually social media created. And yeah, I think we have to start being a little bit more honest about the scripts that we're following because the only reason we are jealous of other people is because we have these scripts. The only reason we are looking into other's people's lives and saying that we want the things that they have is because someone told us that what they have is probably good for us, too.

Our society would be such a better place if we just followed our own path and supported and helped the people that are doing better than us. Because in any case, even if you're like very close with someone who's doing very well, then you're going to grow with them. It's not like they're going to grow away from you. It's just this inherent this inherent jealousy and fear and desire and human emotions, they're normal, right?

We are born with them, and it's normal to have them, but that does not mean that we cannot trace back to where they're coming from, that we cannot rationalize our way through them and make sure that it doesn't cloud our vision and cloud our decisions and our relationships. I hope you enjoyed this video. I hope you learned something from it, and I hope these opinions kind of make you think about, I don't know, whatever in your life. And if it does, then I would love to hear your thoughts and opinions in the comments.

I would love to start conversations with you. I would love to even hear how you help yourself out of this situation because I feel like we do need to help each other out in this context. If you did enjoy this video, then I'm sure you're going to like this playlist, too. I love you guys so much, and see you in another video.

Have the best day of your life. Kisses. Bye-bye.