That Infamous "Greener Grass!"
The old saying goes that "the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence," and traditionally serves as a cautionary tale to not put too much faith in those things we don't have that look better simply because we don't have them. Or something like that.
On the other hand, I don't think we should become too stuck on the idea, because going in a different direction is sometimes the best thing we can do for ourselves. Not going for that greener grass is actually doing ourselves a disservice...
Think about it: if we were to take the old truism too literally, we would never set off in new directions in search of things that are better than what we currently have. Everything would become a sort of sad "make-do complacency."
I think part of the point here is also that we all have different personalities; different temperaments and with that, different tolerances for sticking with something that's not working for us rather than just saying "screw it" and heading off in a different direction.
For example, when I moved across the country from Texas to Washington state some 20 years ago, I was on the receiving end of lots of finger wagging and assurances that just because I moved to the Pacific Northwest my life wasn't going to get better.
But I had some very functional reasoning behind moving. Biggest of this was I don't really like hot weather, and I was living in a place where 100° days (that's nearly 40°C for you metric folks) were pretty common half the year and I just couldn't stand that anymore — I needed to get away from it. That was definitely not a matter of pursuing purely figurative "greener grass," it was some very tangible greener grass... at least according to my particular metric for how we measure life.
Part of my point here is that the whole "bloom where you're planted" thing is only a piece of sage advice up to a point. You don't want to be growing cacti in a rainforest just like you don't want to be growing cyclamen in the desert. That just makes you stupid, rather than principled.
I suppose it all goes to show that old truisms are only valid up to a point, after which they pretty much become nonsensical.
We're all individuals, and that means "standards" can only be assigned in a limited way.
That's also something we can probably apply through a fair number of relationships. My ex and I split because we were both of the opinion that there had to be something better out there than what we were having and even though we kept working on our situation for 13 years we were just two very different people wanting to go in two very different directions and we both shared relatively important values wanting to do the same thing with the person we were partnered with.
Again, generic advice is often not very useful because we all have our own metrics for what we consider "good" and what we consider "bad." Some people consider a job good because they're getting a nice paycheck while other people consider a job good because they feel a sense of accomplishment and belonging when they're doing their work.
What becomes the topic for discussion isn't what constitutes "a good job" or "not a good job," but how we each measure what a good job looks like.
This may sound utterly basic to many people... and yet it's remarkable how many allow themselves to become "fenced in" by these conventions, even when they don't suit them at all.
I'm going to deliberately leave politics out of this particular post; suffice it to say that is yet another arena in which we have our very individualized metrics for what the right way to govern something looks like... yet we might be so tied to a particular political party that we can't actually follow what is best for us.
It's all just rather strange... and even bizarre.
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2026.10.13 00:30 PDT
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