Are You Living for Others — Or for Yourself?

We spend a lot of our lives trying to meet other people’s expectations — not always because we want to, but because we feel we should. It might be social pressure, cultural traditions, or the image we’ve built around being “responsible” or “reliable.”

But over time, this pressure builds. And in the process, we often begin to ignore our own needs.

Maybe everyone around you is going home, so you feel like you should too. But when you get there, you don’t feel comfort or joy — you feel stress, tension, maybe even resentment.

Your family starts asking the same familiar questions:

“Why aren’t you in a stable relationship?”

“Why don’t you work for a big company?”

“When are you going to have kids?”

It’s not that you don’t love them.

It’s that this trip isn’t really about you.

It’s about fulfilling an expectation you’ve been following since childhood — one that no longer reflects who you are, or what you need.

Or maybe at work, you’ve always been the dependable one. You respond to every Slack message within minutes. You solve problems for everyone. You even eat lunch with one eye on your notifications on your phone.

At first, it felt good — you enjoy helping, you’re proud of being on top of things. But one day, something changes. You don’t want to say yes to that extra task. You want space to think. To rest. But no one knows that your boundaries have shifted — so they keep treating you the same way.

And because you don’t want to disappoint anyone, you keep pushing through.

We’re more like steel than glass. Glass shatters the moment pressure is too much. But steel behaves differently — it holds up under stress, it bends. At first, this bending is temporary, and the steel can return to its original shape. But if the pressure continues or becomes too intense, it reaches what engineers call the yield point — the moment when the steel begins to deform permanently. From the outside, everything might still look okay. But internally, it has passed a threshold, and the change is no longer reversible.

Emotionally, many of us are bending every day without even realizing it. We’ve been so conditioned to perform, to please, to show up for others, which leads to us often ignoring our internal needs.

Why It’s Hard to Speak Up

It’s hard to ask for change. It’s hard to say, “I have other priorities I need to treat in my life before I can meet your need.” Especially if you’ve been silently sacrificing for a long time. People might be shocked, even upset. But that’s only because they never knew , and because you have never told them in the past.

We’ve all heard the instructions on airplanes: “Put on your own oxygen mask before helping others.”

It’s simple advice — but hard to follow in real life.

Most of us do the opposite. We focus on making sure everyone else is okay. We keep giving, keep showing up, keep responding — even when we’re running on empty. And because we’re so focused on helping others breathe, we don’t realize we’re gasping for air.

Until one day, it hits you: you’ve been suffocating in silence.

The truth is, supporting others doesn’t have to mean sacrificing yourself. But it does require checking in with yourself, early and often.

Meeting Your Own Expectations

Here’s the hardest part: when you decide to change, others may not understand — because they’ve gotten used to the version of you who always says yes.

So these conversations might feel uncomfortable. People may be surprised. They might push back and get upset.

But that doesn’t mean you’re wrong for speaking up. It just means the conversation is long overdue.

You may have spent years trying to live up to what it means to be a “good daughter,” a “good friend,” a “good employee.”

But pause for a moment: Have you ever truly defined what “good” means to you?

Often, we inherit those definitions without realizing it. And sometimes, the standards we hold ourselves to are far stricter than what anyone else actually expects.

Because as humans, we tend to overlook what’s already present and focus on what’s missing — a tendency rooted in what psychologists call the negativity bias (also known as the negativity effect). This cognitive bias means that negative events — like unpleasant thoughts, emotions, or interactions — often have a stronger impact on our psychological state than equally intense positive or neutral experiences.

Our brains are wired to scan for problems and gaps, often prioritizing what’s lacking over what’s already working — even when everything looks fine on the surface. Even when we meet incredibly high standards, others may not notice — not because we’ve failed, but because the human mind naturally gravitates toward what’s not there rather than what is.

So in the end, it’s not about pleasing everyone else.

It’s about: staying true to yourself, even when the world expects something else.