I second this. From my experience you have to START WITH ACCEPTING the status quo and honestly looking at it without judging or being ashamed. It helps me to tell myself: "This is not terrible. I am alive. I have a job. My body is still working OK."
From there FOCUS ON THE DELTA: What can I do today that will bring me into a slightly better position tomorrow.
Avoid thinking about the past ("I ate too much today.", "I did not exercise all week."). This is done. No way to change it.
Don't set high expectations. You only need to know where you want to be, and that you are going into the right direction. It does not matter much if you arrive there in one week or in five years.
- you set the delta of “what can I do today to achieve” to be low enough that it’s actually realistic and not what you wish it was (while still being high enough to actually mean something), and,
- if you still fall short, you don’t kill yourself with shame & guilt, recognising that you actually lose more time in that process.
Not easy to learn, and not easy to stay in that space. Meditation helps (after a long long time of doing it).
(Oh and if you have ADHD - undiagnosed or otherwise - please forgive yourself for it, and forgive yourself each time you get thrown off the rails because of it - yes, even if that is multiple times per hour. Everything else flows from that forgiveness and self acceptance.)
This[1][2] is what he has to say about depression. It's largely about acceptance.
Mark Manson says The Uncomfortable Truth is that our lives are meaningless and when we die, nothing we did will have mattered. That the human condition requires hope so we invent narratives, as individuals and as society, to create a mental framework that makes life worth living.
That's all well and good, I was hoping to get some solution or suggestion but I got to the end of the essay and it was essentially "now buy my book to understand more".
I'm going to assume link [1] is of similar quality and conclusion.
Tell a college kid to lower his expectation and he will feel like a "unmotivated" person, tell a 30's/40's that and he will feel like a failure, all his struggle for nothing, and tell a late 20's to lower his expectation and that goes against every self-motivation influencer and (probably) what his surrounding successful peers suggest.
I think most people understand that the answer is acceptance, but how to reach that point, is so different for each person. Because some people overcome it by sheer grit, while some through therapists, it's hard for a person in the grind to realize what course of action is the best, and before it's too late.
Many of the things that are bubbling up in society seem all too much the same. Whether it's school or employers or whatever, there's this kind of overvaluing phenomenon, where the rich and/or successful get more rich and/or successful and we attribute their [increasingly, given increasing inequities] freakish success to something about them, as opposed to being in the right fitting environment at the right point in their careers, or corruption, or something broken in the system, or what. If you're too old, too black, too caring, worked at the wrong place, the place changed, didn't go to a prestigious enough school, were too rebellious as a young adult, whatever, don't know the right people, you're screwed.
I'm not sure what my point is, except to say this acceptance-struggle tension you're referring to is even more complicated because it's not just about lowering or raising your own personal expectations or standards, it's about everything else as well, about accepting or struggling against what's broken in society (at the risk of sounding too idealistic or self-righteous).
What do you do when it's not self-hatred vs acceptance, but self-hatred vs societal anger vs acceptance?
That might sound obvious, but it's really easy to maintain a large set of relationships without ever talking about those things. Politics, science, arts, sports, etc. are so easy to fill a conversation with that it's a common pitfall to hardly ever broach the subject of who we are and what we're doing.
Nothing wrong with working hard of course, just make sure you like what you do and who you are while doing it.
So the real key to happiness is to set your expectations as low as possible!
Now this "accepting" is not just something you (can) just do, it may be exactly what you need a therapist for. Because you may have to undo years of thinking and redefine your default thought patterns, this is very hard work.
For all the parents, I think this is a pretty important thing to teach your kids. Telling them: "If you work hard you can be whatever you want to be!" Is, imho, damaging, because it is not true, you are setting them up for disappointment in themselves.
In short: Happiness = Reality - Expectation
Don't burden yourself or your kids with unrealistically large expectations.