25 Things You Should Stop Justifying By Age 25

1. Your significant other’s behavior.

2. Living on habitual autopilot rather than actively choosing what you want to do each day. Your brain will re-wire itself to what you repeatedly do. It will get to know those things as “comfort,” and keep seeking them. Make sure you like what “comfortable” is to you.

3. Needing motivation because you lack discipline. You wouldn’t need to wait to be “inspired” if you did the harder thing and developed the discipline to work even when you didn’t want to. You have to learn that motivation is akin to momentum. It builds when you start, not when you remain idle.

4. “Checking up” on people from your past on social media, which is a thinly veiled excuse to judge them, which is a thinly veiled excuse to feel validated for them no longer being in your life.

5. Hanging out with people you actively dislike, and discuss with others. Be the same person in private as you are in public, as often as you can be.

6. Being consistently overwhelmed by work. Being too stressed or busy is a choice, and most often people make it in order to seem important, or keep themselves distracted. Don’t dig your grave then complain when you end up laying in it.

7. Not being empathetic. The people who seem least deserving of understanding are the ones who need it most.

8. Being mean for the sake of it.

9. Being mean for the sake of bonding with other people. You either need more interests, or new friends.

10. Continuing to put your time, energy and thoughts into a relationship that is clearly not reciprocated. Piecing together “signs” that “prove” why someone cares and it should work. If they aren’t with you, they don’t want to be. Most people aren’t blunt about this because they either want to keep you around for something (sex, loneliness) or just don’t want to be called an asshole. (Which, you know, they would be.)

11. Why you don’t have enough money. Get another job. Get a better budget. Move to another part of town. If you don’t want to be strapped down by your situation, change it. You are the only one who is able to.

12. The ways in which other people are responsible for what you are or aren’t doing with your life. Using them as excuses for not doing what you want to be is a short road that runs in a very small circle. It keeps you moving, but gets you nowhere.

13. How much you eat, sleep, and take time for yourself. You don’t need to make excuses for engaging in basic acts of self-care.

14. Why you should have what you want for the sheer sake of how much you want it.

15. Why you can’t forgive your parents. Their purpose was not to love you perfectly. It was to set up gaps and challenges that would give you the opportunity to become the person you were always meant to be.

16. Not working out, eating at least some sort of vegetable each day, and reading anything other than your newsfeed.

17. Why you don’t want to be with someone. Wanting to leave is enough.

18. Wanting love. It’s a beautiful, perfectly normal part of being human. Intimate connection is chief among our innermost core desires, and seeking that for yourself makes you brave, not pathetic.

19. Being cynical. It doesn’t make you safer, cooler, or smarter than anyone else. It only means you’ve lost your ability to see the magic in life in favor of remaining comfortable.

20. How you’ve changed. Maybe evolving is failing the people who are in love with a particular idea of you, but not doing so is failing yourself. You decide which is worse.

21. Not answering texts or phone calls. Either establish with the people in your life when they shouldn’t expect to be able to reach you on demand, or respond to things when you receive them.

22. What you do to avoid pain. Running from it is what’s creating it.

23. Why you love the stuff you do. Nobody really cares whether you’re into comic books or Joni Mitchell or Tarot cards or crystals or video games or football or cats. People respond far more warmly to genuineness than anything else you can pretend to be.

24. Why you can’t choose what you think. Why you can’t control what you feel. You are not in charge of every emotion and thought that arises within you. You are, and always have been, in charge of how you respond to them.

25. Why you aren’t living the life you want. You have to change your mindset about money before you can expect to see your financial situation change. You have to change your beliefs about love before you can expect to see your relationship status change. You have to change your idea of yourself before you can expect your self-esteem to rise. Your life builds from the inside out. Stop waiting for someone else to start it.