You might need to let go of these things for your own benefit.
A lot of people come up with a wide range of excuses as to why they can’t do various things that are important to them, and many of these excuses revolve around things that they feel they can’t walk away from. The thing is, if you want to succeed and find real happiness in your life, then you should be willing to walk away from the tethers that are binding you, such as those listed here.
1. Money.
Don’t make money the be-all and end-all of your existence, as you’ll end up being able to be leveraged by monetary gain or loss. While it’s important to have enough money to get by fairly comfortably, placing too much emphasis on accruing wealth can be a detriment.
This is particularly true if you are someone for whom achieving higher earnings does not make you any happier. As Matt Killingsworth, Senior Fellow at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania says on the Penn Today blog, “if you’re rich and miserable, more money won’t help.”
2. Unhealthy relationships.
Every minute that you spend in an unhealthy relationship will accumulate to damage you in the long term. This includes relationships with toxic family members. Whatever steals your peace is too expensive, so be prepared to walk away from anyone who is stealing your light and energy, depleting you, or otherwise hurting you.
3. Self-destructive people.
If you’ve ever watched a drowning person latch onto a potential rescuer, you’ve likely noticed that they drag their rescuer down with them due to sheer desperation. Self-destructive people will drag you down with them—not because they want to, but because it’s in their very nature to do so.
4. Deceitful narratives.
These include lies about yourself or the world that you’ve been clinging to, or beliefs that no longer serve you, whether you’ve been inundated with them by others, or held onto them willfully until you’ve learned otherwise. Seek out the truth to the best of your ability, and walk away from whatever doesn’t align with it.
5. Existential anxieties over things you have no control over.
There are a lot of things we have zero control over in our lives, and these include the future, the past, and other people’s thoughts and opinions. Let go of your worries about what people might think of you (who cares?), deal with the future as it unfolds, and leave the past in the past.
6. Alcohol or drug abuse/dependency.
Intoxicants cloud our minds, and by extension, our judgment. Your overall health will only benefit if you let go of dependency on things that inebriate you, and find healthier coping mechanisms for whatever it is that made you turn to these things to begin with.
7. Commitments you’ve made that now harm you.
Everything changes, and what you committed yourself to might now be causing you great harm. For one person, the commitment might be wedding vows to a person who’s now abusing them, while another may have committed to a cause that is now anathema to the person they’ve become.
8. Decisions you’ve made before you knew better.
This is similar to the commitment aspect mentioned previously. For example, you may have decided on a particular career path, and only discovered how much you hate that career once you’d pursued it for a while. The same goes for things like home ownership, hobbies, and so on.
9. Sunk cost fallacies.
Just because you’ve poured a fair amount of time and money into a pursuit, project, or relationship, that doesn’t mean you need to stick with it once you’ve come to despise it. You haven’t “lost” anything by walking away: if anything, you’ve gained greater self-awareness, freedom, and wisdom by doing so.
As Christopher Olivola, assistant professor of marketing at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business says in Time Magazine, “There’s nothing you can do to regain money that’s lost—and pursuing something that makes you unhappy not only isn’t going to get your money back, but it’s also going to make you worse off. You’re just digging a deeper hole.”
10. What your younger self wanted.
That which meant the world to us at 20 might be worthless to us at 40. Your younger self might have been dead set on a number of different “bucket list” goals, but if you’ve evolved into a completely different person than you were back then, those goals won’t fit you anymore.
11. Comfortable surroundings that stagnate you.
If you put a wild animal into a cozy, comfortable cage full of everything it needs, it’ll go stir-crazy and try to kill itself because it can’t run, and can’t grow. You may feel comfortable and secure in your current circumstances, but if they’ve made you feel stagnant and smothered, it’s time to move on.
12. Your own desires.
Desire can blind us, and left unchecked it can also damage those around us. It’s better to walk away from what we think we desire than to lose ourselves in blind yearning and then have to contend with atrocious consequences once we’ve obtained those desires and gained shocking clarity afterward.
