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People-pleasing will slowly diminish your happiness. Do this instead…

Alex Mathers
3 min readJan 12, 2025

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It took me most of my 36 years to realise I was operating on outdated software.

I had downloaded a program into my mind as a boy.

As we all do.

It is the software that guides us in our early years. Most of us never see a system update before we hit the grave.

What’s its name?

‘People-Pleasing V 1.0.’

As children, we are programmed to please the giant, scary, all-powerful adults around us.

Most of them tell us to behave. They tell us to be good. They show us that good things happen when we do the right thing.

We learn, through years and years of pushing our boundaries and seeing the feedback:

We get what we want when we please.

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Later, as we emerge from the hormonal abyss into adulthood, we might find that people-pleasing doesn’t work all that well.

But many of us don’t see it and we people-please harder.

We hope that by being nicer, more impressive, and charming, more people will notice us.

It doesn’t work. People see through it, and it doesn’t connect.

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Alex Mathers
Alex Mathers

Written by Alex Mathers

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