Our lives are also saturated with media. We’ve been exposed to thousands of commercials, movies, and televisions shows. How many images have we absorbed of SUV’s powering to the edge of a cliff, awesome rooftop parties in LA, sweet Manhattan apartments miraculously rented by struggling 20-somethings, vacations on private islands, legendary road trips and so on.  The images we consume are full of moments showcasing life at its most vital and extraordinary.

And so our minds are filled with the vast possibilities the world has to offer, and technology makes us feel that all these possibilities are just within our reach. But the realities of our lives really haven’t changed much. Many aspects of our lives have sped up and become easier, but lots of things haven’t. We can instantly chat with our friend in Argentina, but we’re no closer to instantly teleporting there. Tons of information is available on the web but it still takes just as long as it ever did to read and absorb it. We still need to get jobs and pay rent and work at our relationships.

It is this gap, the gap between our expectations about the world and how we really experience it that causes our modern “neurasthenia.”  New media and technology has seemingly brought the whole world just within our reach. But we can never seem to grasp it. We want to magically take it all in and we can’t. And so we feel depressed and anxious. We are sure that unlike us, others have found a way to lay hold of all the good stuff out there. We have this feeling that somewhere beyond our life, real life is taking place. It feels as if they are so many possibilities and choices out there, so many that we’re absolutely overwhelmed by them. We don’t know where to start, where to dive in. We’re thus paralyzed, and don’t do anything. And then we feel shiftless and restless because we feel bad that we’re not doing stuff. Because there’s so much we should be experiencing! But then we feel overwhelmed again, and then, well, you get the idea.

We often feel restless because there seems like there are so many amazing opportunities out there in the world. We flip through magazines and see people scuba diving in the Caribbean, men camping in Yellowstone, and guys partying in New York City. We turn on the TV and see shows where guys are living it up in cool cities, dating hot ladies, and working at a cool job. We’re like a hungry kid window shopping at a candy store. Everything looks so darn enticing but out of reach. And so we feel anxious. We don’t have a net big enough to capture all of these cool possibilities.

We’re drowning in these possibilities, and we need to turn the faucet down. The truth is that we don’t actually want all of those choices. We have to separate what we think we should want to do from we actually want do. You might have been told that you should study abroad, you should backpack through Europe, you should live in a loft in some big city, you should, blah blah blah. These “shoulds” lodge in our subconscious and make us feel anxious; if we don’t do these things we worry that we’re missing out on something. But this anxiousness often prevents from doing anything at all. Afraid we can’t do everything, we do nothing.

But you have to evaluate which things you really want do and own that choice instead of feeling ashamed of it. If you’re a homebody who hates traveling, stop feeling bad about that. If you want to become a carpenter instead going to college, go for it. If you want to hike the Appalachian trail, do it. If you don’t, stop thinking about it and move on. If you hate the big city and love living in the burbs, embrace that. And vice versa. Our anxiousness comes from standing in the middle of a decision. We know we don’t really want to do something but we feel bad letting it go. We’re afraid it says something we don’t like about our identity. But you have to embrace your likes and dislikes or you will forever drown in choices.