Constantly feel like I'm not good enough

[Yarco]

By all accounts, I'm a fairly successful person. I've been running my own business for 3 years, I own my own house as a millennial. I'm in a stable relationship.

But it never feels like enough.

I set very lofty goals for myself, then when I inevitably fail to meet them I really beat myself up over it. If I'm not working on something productive like earning money or cleaning the house, I feel guilty like I'm lazy and taking too much time for myself.

I want to earn enough money to have complete stability and never have to worry about working for money again. I want to make a meaningful difference and lasting change to the world.

My partner tried to reason with me. Saying we are already probably in the top 10% of income earners in the world. And that the vast majority of people never accomplish anything great in their life and that's okay. Even the person who invented the polio vaccine has helped millions of people but how many know their name? But it still doesn't feel good enough to me.

Like most of these things it probably follows the stereotype of stemming from my childhood... never feeling good enough for my parents, my grades were never good enough to satisfy them, they didn't approve of the career options I wanted, stuff like that.

Being aware of it and the root cause is one thing, but I'm at a loss for how to overcome it.

I just want to be satisfied with who I am. But my expectations are so high and I don't have the willpower needed to live up to them every day.

Instead I see that I'm overweight and want to change it, so I start an overly strict diet, fail, and get disheartened. I feel like I need to be earning $100,000 per year. So I try to start an online business, fail, and get disheartened. I want to make a difference in the world and help millions of people but nothing seems significant enough. I wrote 2,500 words yesterday but I feel like I should've written 5,000 so I beat myself up over it.

I don't know how to accept being mediocre and live an average life and be okay with it. Even if I accomplished relatively great things I still think I wouldn't feel good enough. Anything short of being a Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk feels like a failure.

I've done the Life Purpose Course but now I feel like I'm starting to drift away from my life purpose and it no longer speaks to me. I don't know what's meaningful enough to replace it with and devote my life to.

I want to become enlightened and make all of these feelings go away so I can just chill and go with the flow. But I feel like trying to use enlightenment as a crutch instead of working through these issues will be the very thing that prevents me from ever attaining it.

Edited July 14, 2020 by Yarco

[Shiva99]

Stop torturing yourself into someone you think you need to be, but clearly don't want to be. This post is full of warning signs. You can either listen to them, or ignore them and keep going down the same route. Either way life will always try to give you what you need, not what you think you need/want. Just know that you can't keep ignoring this shit forever. Sooner or later something else will happen, which will bring you exactly back to this point. Life is trying to tell you something. It will keep knocking at your door until you listen. ?

You are doing this with yourself atm:

 

Edited July 14, 2020 by Shiva99

[cnfvm]

OH look i made this i earned this i f ed her i bought this i live there i go there i eat this i wear this  . NOW. Oh now i am satistifed. yeah? is this what you want? LMAO. 

bunch of bs. You should never be satisfied with yourself.  Are you crazy? why would you want to be satisfied with yourself? If you were satisfied with yourself why the f  would you want to do anything? You will NEVER be enough for infinite number of things !

[Farnaby]

Hey!

To me it sounds like you are able to distract yourself from that "not good enough" feeling for a while as long as you're doing something productive. But when there isn't a new thing to look forward to, the "not good enough" feeling bubbles up. So it becomes a rat race where you're running away from a part of yourself. I could be completely wrong though, because I don't know you, so take this hypothesis with a grain of salt. 

What you're experiencing is often experienced by people who had a very goal-oriented/productivity oriented upbringing where the sense of value depends on doing instead of just being/existing. Have a look at your life and ask yourself if you've always felt this way or if it has started at some point, because that can help you find the causes. 

IME the most powerful thing to do is to make space for that feeling of "not good enough", sit with it, breathe into it and make that your meditation. It won't go away through reasoning or chasing goals, at least not in the long run. 

I also think there's a useful side to this impulse to be productive. As you said, you've accomplished a lot and it had probably at least something to do with it. So, IMO the goal is not to get rid of that impulse, but to learn to have control over it so you can use it when you need/want it, but not let it ruin your moments of relaxing, vacation, etc. 

Hope this helps!

Edited July 14, 2020 by Farnaby