You Do You summary

If some rules are sensible and others are senseless, how do you tell the two apart? Well, if a rule hurts you more than it helps others, you should probably question it. This puts three commonplace commandments – “Do your best,” “Be a team player,” and “Don’t be selfish” – in the firing line. 

Let’s start with the notion that you should always do your best. Constantly giving it your all is exhausting, and that can take a toll on your health. Take it from the author. 

Standing your ground can be tricky, not least because you’ll often be told that you’re “being difficult.” Put like that, it sounds like you’re being childish and petulant, and that’s why it’s often phrased that way – it’s a great method of stopping you from sticking up for yourself. But there’s nothing wrong with digging your heels in and being clear about what you want in life. 

Imagine you’re in a restaurant. You like your steak well done and that’s how you order it. When it arrives, however, it’s rare. You remind the waiter of your order and ask for another steak. If you’ve been in this kind of situation, you’ll know that there’s a good chance someone at the table will accuse you of making an unnecessary fuss. 

Some people are happy following the conventional rules and take the freeway through life. Others prefer the scenic route and stick to quieter backcountry roads. Either way, it’s a personal decision, and that means no one gets to dictate how you’ll be traveling – except you. 

Take the author. As she sees it, having kids is a pretty simple choice. If you want children, you should have them; if you don’t – well, you shouldn’t. The problem, however, is that lots of folks question the legitimacy of the latter choice. When the author decided she didn’t want children, she was constantly nagged and told that she’d regret her decision. This kind of pressure is one of the most common ways in which people are forced to follow norms they don’t actually subscribe to.  

“You won’t get anywhere with that attitude!” Like being told you’ll regret your choices later on, this is one of the ways in which people apply pressure to peers who don’t conform to social norms. What they’re really saying is that the way you’re acting is just too weird and that you should make more of an effort to fit in. But guess what – that’s bullshit too. 

There are no two ways about it: contemporary Western society is pretty down on pessimism. If you want to get anywhere in life, we’re told, you have to be upbeat and optimistic. That’s fine if you happen to have a sunny disposition, of course, but some people – like the author – are natural-born pessimists. 

If you’d visited the author in her office a couple of years back, you’d have noticed something odd: a litter tray filled with sand under her desk, into which she occasionally dipped her bare feet. What was going on here? To explain that, we need to rewind a little. 

The author experienced her first full-scale panic attack at the age of 31. At first, she was highly skeptical about getting professional help to address this issue. There wasn’t anything wrong with her physically, after all, and she didn’t like the idea of being told she was “crazy.” 

We all feel the pressure to look or act in certain ways. Conforming to these social expectations might buy you a little peace and quiet, but it won’t make you happy. The only way you’ll feel genuinely great in your own skin is to do what’s right for you – not what other people say you should be doing. 

This means you can ignore all sorts of arbitrary social rules. Take being nice. Sure, you shouldn’t be a jerk to the folks you come across on an average day, but you’re not obligated to be nice to them either – politeness is more than enough. When the author lived in New York, for example, random strangers in the street constantly told her to smile. But why should you have to put on a fake smile and act upbeat if you don’t feel that way? The truth is that you don’t.