I’ve spent a great deal of my 28 years of life trying to please everyone. It has been a long, sometimes unpleasant adventure, and one that hasn’t been easy to turn away from. So, how do you please everybody and still maintain a tiny bit of sanity? In the end, you don’t. You slowly lose your sanity, patience, and desire to please anyone until you reach a tipping point where you finally stop caring. And that brings me to this hub, so suck it.

We’re taught at a very young age to please our parents. It’s not a bad thing at this point. Our parents generally want the best for us as children, carefully guiding, advising, praising, and criticizing our choices along the way. They teach us that when we behave badly, they are not happy, and when we behave less badly that they are less not happy. The whole time they are doing this, our parents try to please our grandparents because, well, that’s what they were taught to do. It’s a very difficult balancing act. The grandparents will, from time to time, interject with good and bad parenting advice, contradictions to parental decisions, and constant opinions whether or not your parents ask for it. It’s a vicious cycle, but there is a reason for all of this. You need to grow up to please your parents and make them proud.

Then, something goes horribly horribly wrong. You become a teenager and start to realize your own decision making potential. This throws a pretty big wrench in your parents’ plans for you. You start disobeying, stretching your limits, breaking rules, while at the same time pleasing them just enough to avoid being kicked out or deprived of your measly allowance. You learn to suck up to your grandparents and even play them as pawns to get what you want. Your grandparents probably want you to favor them over your other set of grandparents so they are more than happy to tell you or give you whatever you want to have or hear.

So, you make it through high school, pretty much unphased by your upbringing. You love your parents and you are excited to go to college to please them, but out on your own so only when they can see what you are doing. School is a daze. You meet new people, and try to maintain some tiny bit of popularity by fitting into a group of people you are now constantly trying to please. You also try to please your teachers without sacrificing your entire social life. You study, you earn great grades, you report your grades to your family to please them some more, and you repeat until you’re finished with school.

Then, something scary happens. Now, you’re finished with school without a plan or a prayer. You’re expecting some great revolution after school. Something will change and you’ll get a prize. The top job, the best pay, the accolades, recognition, and appreciation for all of the hard work you did to please other people; it will all pay off. Sometimes that comes for a while right away, and if it does usually loses its luster after a while. Other times it comes later, or not at all. Something doesn’t seem quite right because pleasing people just doesn’t seem to be getting you anywhere. But, if you were so interested in pleasing them, and it was so important to them that you please them—shouldn’t they, don’t they have a plan for you now?

A few more years worth of pleasing others leaves you drained and over it. Now, you’re looking for a way out. But the way doesn’t reveal itself easily. Your comments to your friends, your statement of your new intentions to your family and other loved ones are met with displeasure and general disapproval. And then it hits you again; you feel the need to please them tugging at your leg, your arm, your hair. You can feel the pressure to stay as you are, to move in some undefined direction they have for you. You hear your loved ones telling you about the need to be ‘successful’ in their useless definition of the word and it eats away at your willpower.

Through some divine set of circumstances you are in the midst of the best years of your life left with a torn sense of direction, hope for passion, and a brand new realization that the life you’d made wasn’t really yours at all. It was some strangely unfamiliar, twisted combination of your efforts to please everyone at the cost of pleasing nobody, least of all, yourself.

I understand that this rambling of mine paints a pretty bleak picture for anyone who can relate. It also makes me sound rather whiny and pathetic. Maybe fewer can relate than I expect, but again, I don’t care. And, maybe some of you can relate. Maybe you see a bright spot behind your struggles to please everyone and your eventual realization that everyone will always say what they want and there is nothing you can do to stop it. You will always be bombarded with opinions that really don’t matter, criticisms that you should be mindful of, but not take too seriously, and pressure from society to follow their non existent plan for you. The best and most awesome part of it all, is that if you made it to that (this) point, you can probably finally see past all of the cow crap and simply do more of what you want, be more of who you want to be, and focus on pleasing yourself. It isn't always easy, and sometimes you have to make small steps. You probably look insane to everyone around you and especially your family during this trip. In the end, though you’re the only one with a plan for you that makes any difference whatsoever, and it is the only plan you can carry on with-- without losing the willpower, strength, courage, and determination to reach the finish.

And, if you already can do that and cannot relate to this hub, then why in Gods name did you read the whole thing? Go away!