Bad Behavior

On giving myself permission to make the irresponsible choice.

As someone who works in the self-care and wellness-adjacent industries, I’m all too familiar with the pressure to craft a healthy, mindful, and overall productive approach to living. We all know that feeling when you’re rotting on the couch after a crazy week of deadlines and obligations and you open up your phone to see someone boasting about their new favorite smoothie recipe/marathon training regimen/week-long meditation retreat. They feel calmer, look fitter, live healthier and generally get to walk around as a human billboard boasting about the spoils of their responsible choices. It’s a lucrative subset of the creator industrial complex for a reason, y’all. And while I admire their willpower to optimize their life at every possible moment, I’ve also grown weary that failing to do so is, well, a failure at all.

I often joke to myself that there is a tangible reason I don’t live in LA (actually there are many tangible reasons, but there’s no need to trash talk New York’s sister city right now), chief among them that I am simply not a wellness girly. I already don’t work out before heading to the office or wear a matching set when I do hit the gym; I don’t journal my life goals or invest in a life coach. I can’t cook a vegetable-forward healthy dish for every meal. Sure, I’m not exactly white knuckling my through life (I have a four year-strong relationship with my therapist after all), but I also often feel like I am the odd man out in a culture that worships at the altar of wellness.

Definitely a New Yorker.

Self-optimization is nothing new, of course. It’s only in the last 13ish years that we’ve been able to broadcast every minute detail of our insignificant little lives (sorry, Facebook of my youth, but Instagram beat you to the creator punch), and alert our friends and followers to our various healthy, rational choices. But after all this time and inevitable comparison to my peers—who are also navigating the incredibly strange landscape of being a mid-thirties adult—I’m kinda sorta over it.

I don’t want to know how yet another person’s sensible decisions helped to upgrade their life. I want to hear about some down and dirty bad behavior.