How to Improve Your Life When Society’s Messaging Holds You Back

I’ve found the hill I want to die on.

Ayodeji Awosika
8 min readDec 8, 2020

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Personal responsibility, self-improvement, and mental toughness have all become counter-culture.

I won’t stand for it.

Even if that means I make less money because I don’t write in a way that agrees with “the narrative,” even if I’m part of a dying breed of people who think you can, in fact, lift yourself up by the bootstraps. Even if most fold into a way of thinking that will eventually degrade their lives.

Maybe you think I sound hyperbolic, but the canary in the coalmine has sung.

You’re being fed messages that are going to produce a handful of outcomes:

  • You’ll become entirely dependent on ‘the system’ — a system that hates you
  • You’ll enjoy some success, but you won’t get close to your potential because you were tricked into giving it away
  • You’re just going to live in this limbo state of increasing anxiety and shrinking prospects. Never totally down and out, but slowly bleeding your soul away until you die

So what the hell am I talking about?

I’m talking about the narrative society feeds you, why it feeds it to you, why even smart people fall…

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