Don’t Settle for the Wrong Things

The barista at Starbucks made your order wrong. You ordered the almond milk latte, but she made it with soy milk. Which is super annoying, because you read that soy milk is a common allergen and can irritate the intestinal tract and you’re trying to eat clean, damnit.

Don’t let it get to you, girl. It’s okay to settle for the soy milk this time.

Life presents us with a lot of situations where settling is absolutely the right choice. When your order at Starbucks is wrong. When the milkshake machine is down at McDonald's. When you have to wait for 8-day shipping when you’d really like to get that new shirt tomorrow.

Intellectually, we know this. You’re probably reading this article right now thinking duh, Megan.

But, something I’ve observed about people is that we don’t seem to know which things we should settle on. We know we can’t have it all, but instead of picking our battles, we end up throwing a fit at the front counter about the type of alternative milk in our latte and then going home to our boyfriend who’s unemployed for the third month in a row and swallowing our complaints when he’s sitting on the couch playing video games in the middle of the day.

We settle for things, but we settle for the wrong things.

People certainly settle for loser boyfriends and girlfriends and enbyfriends and all the rest, but we seem to be culturally aware of the fact that this isn’t a stellar thing to do with our lives. When we’re teenagers contemplating what we want to do with our lives, our parents dutifully warn us not to stay with losers — but when it comes to other areas of our lives, our parents enthusiastically recommend we settle. Or rather, one area: Our careers.

Nearly every teenager has a “dream” career of some sort, be it a painter or video game programmer or writer or rockstar. But when said teenager declares to their parents that they are going to follow their dreams, the parent is usually standing right behind with a warning. “Pick a practical major,” they say. “Something that’s going to make you money.” Sometimes said teenager is even told to pick a different practical major, as was the case when a female friend of mine was told by a high school guidance counselor that “programming is not a good fit for women.”

Our society reinforces this at every step of our career progression. We get our university or technical training, and then we step into a full-time position, and then another, and then another. The more devoted we are to these positions, the more respectable we are to fellow Americans. As long as our jobs don’t make us f*cking miserable, it doesn’t matter how happy they make us. Misery is bad for productivity.

So, slowly “I want to be an astronaut” becomes “I want to be a scientist because, you know, it’s hard to be an astronaut” becomes “I want to be computer engineer because they make more money than scientists” becomes a desk job we hate while we stare out the window into the night sky, wondering “what if I had really become an astronaut?”

You know what the difference between people who become astronauts and people who don’t is? The astronauts didn’t settle for anything less than being an astronaut.

Astronauts are an extreme example, anyways. Let’s come back to a much more relatable example: marriage.

It’s true that when you are picking a life partner, you’re going to have to settle on something. Maybe she’s put on a few more pounds than you would like, he’s balding when you would prefer a thick head of hair, or has a habit of collecting guitars he never plays. But tons of people settle for the wrong things when it comes to marriage. I don’t need to be a relationship professional to know this; the divorce rate in America speaks for itself.

It’s easy for me to imagine how people get themselves into this situation. They marry someone, thinking they can live with the compromises they’re making, only to realize twenty years down the road that they cannot any longer.

People in happy marriages don’t settle. Before they ever met their spouse, they decided what qualities were truly important to them and which were superfluous. That’s not to say they looked for Mr. Perfect; they settled when it came to things that didn’t matter, such as hair color or guitar collection preferences. But when they were dating around, they never compromised on what did.

It’s really difficult not to settle for the wrong stuff in America because our culture is all about settling for the wrong stuff.

For instance, America is really nuts about making money. Any time someone decides to pursue a career that is not considered lucrative by our culture, everyone instinctively pressures them to choose something that makes more money. In our culture, we make fun of starving artists, not suicidal corporate drones.

I recently turned 25, and in the 10 years that have passed since I started my first business, I have been pressured by family, friends, and strangers into countless strategic maneuvers on the basis of future income alone.

• When I was 16: “Move to the valley, skip college, and get venture funding!”
• When I was 18: “After you graduate college, found another business with a co-founder in town, take advantage of the Ohio startup funding, and start another business!”
• When I was 22: “Use your project management and consulting experience to get a job as a PM at Chase or Huntington!”

These recommendations were not made with me in mind, because anyone making a recommendation with me in mind would have recognized I don’t care about money. These recommendations were made purely because we assume career success is vitally important, even above and beyond people’s individual preferences.

I’m still bitter about this period in my life because if even one adult had sat down with me and talked to me about what I actually want, not what I’m supposed to want, I wouldn’t have wasted so many years and so much money getting academic and professional education for something I didn’t care about.

But I digress. There are lots of other things America pressures us into wanting that we don’t necessarily need…

• 2500 sq. foot houses with granite countertops in the kitchen
• Vacations in coastal cities and on beach islands, complete with family picture taken in white clothes
• Brand-new off-the-lot cars and trucks
• Fast fashion, designer brands, anything bought at a department store or mall
• Meals at restaurants like Red Lobster
• …and a lot more.

Our entire lives, we’re going to be engaged in a fight with our surroundings about determining what’s best for us. Instead of letting our families, friends, and culture determine what kind of choices we should make, we need to put serious thought into what we want, independent of what anyone around us wants for us.

If you want more stories like this, sign up for my weekly digest.