31 ways the world tells us to live — and what Scripture says instead
Step one: start the morning with a full highlight reel of every mistake you have ever made. Bonus points for that awkward thing you said in 2012.
Step two: nothing says inner peace like rehearsing disasters that have not happened yet. Add a few apocalyptic extras, just in case.
Step three: compare your blooper reel to everybody else's highlight reel. Their toddler reads Latin. Yours flushed a banana down the toilet. Twice.
Step four: follow your heart, where feelings are facts, truth is optional, and consequences are Future You's problem.
Step five: stay busy. Not productive, not purposeful, just gloriously booked. This one was a big ouch for me.
Step six: open every app and let the opinions pour in. Especially from the prophet charging ninety-seven dollars for a word.
Step seven: assume rejection. Silence means they hate you. A thumbs-up emoji means you are dead to them. Never consider that they were just in Costco.
Step eight: say “I'm fine.” You have said “just tired” eighty-seven times this week and it is only Wednesday. A gentle look at the mask most of us wear.
Step nine: complain. It feels good for a moment, and it quietly rewires your brain to find more things wrong. Israel tried this for forty years.
Step ten: gossip. The only person this post is aimed at is me. It was hard to write, and it did not come together until I repented of a few things.
Step eleven: never be content. Happiness is always one season away — after graduation, after marriage, after the kids sleep. It keeps ghosting you.
Step twelve: do not rest. We have been trained to believe rest must be earned, so we schedule it for roughly never.
Step thirteen: isolate yourself. Decline every invitation with “maybe next time,” ghost the group chat, and call the whole thing self-care.
Step fourteen: procrastinate. Make a to-do list, spend forty-five minutes making it pretty, then alphabetise the spice rack instead.
Step fifteen: hold on to stuff. I walked through my cluttered house this morning thinking I needed more room for my things. That is not the answer.
Step sixteen: be defensive. Spend an evening reasoning with someone whose primary source was a guy on YouTube, and arrive home spiritually irritated.
Step seventeen: stay bitter. It never knocks and introduces itself. It just moves in quietly and starts answering for you in a sarcastic tone.
Step eighteen: resent aging. Birthdays hit differently now, and nobody prepares you for what midlife actually asks of a body. Part one.
Step eighteen continued: marriage in midlife is one person under three blankets while the other stands in front of an open freezer. Part two.
Step twenty: live like there is no tomorrow. Every decade I have lived through came with its own apocalypse, and here we still are.
Step twenty-one: pick a side and draw your sword. No nuance, no conversation, no wrestling with truth. Just divide, dismiss, and unfriend.
Step twenty-two: spiral. One correction at work and by two in the afternoon you are browsing job listings and pricing out a whole new life.
Step twenty-three: rescue people. Jump in after them, skip the life jacket, and quietly enjoy how necessary it makes you feel.
Step twenty-four: adopt everyone else's convictions. Borrowed rules never stick, and when they fall off, the shame arrives right on schedule.
Step twenty-five: keep a double standard. Culture insists it is only physical, so why does a casual fling end up feeling like a funeral?
Step twenty-six: play the victim. Carry a laminated victim card into every conversation, and nothing is ever yours to own or to fix.
Step twenty-seven: love yourself. The irony is that we are not short on self-love, we are drowning in it, and still looking outward for the problem.
Step twenty-eight: do not think too hard. The information is not just out there, it is hunting you down, and giving up on truth feels like relief.
Step twenty-nine: give up. Hollywood taught us every conflict resolves in ninety minutes. Jesus said plainly that we would have trouble, and then said why.
Half of Canadians will face mental illness by forty. This is the longest post in the series and the most honest one, including my own turn with it.
The last step in the series, and the most self-inflicted. What thirty-one days of writing on purpose taught me about the scrolling that started it.