Everyone Is Locking In. I’m Trying to Build a Life I Can Actually Live In

I understand why this particular version of discipline feels good right now. Everything is expensive. Everything is noisy. There is always something else asking for our attention, another subscription quietly leaving the bank account, another hour lost to a screen, another task we were supposed to have done three days ago. When the outside world feels increasingly difficult to control, controlling yourself can feel almost comforting. Here is the budget. Here is the meal plan. Here is the morning routine. Here are the books I will read, the hours I will study, and the number of steps I will walk. A life reduced to a series of promises you can keep.

Some of that is useful. I need structure. I like knowing when I am going to study rather than carrying the vague guilt of needing to study around with me all day. I would rather plan meals than repeatedly discover at six o’clock that everybody needs feeding. I want to look at my spending properly. I want to read more, get enough sleep, keep my home reasonably organised, and stop letting small administrative tasks accumulate until they become disproportionately irritating. None of this feels oppressive to me. In fact, done properly, structure creates space.

What bothers me is how recognisable discipline now looks. I know what the woman who has her life together is supposed to look like before anybody shows me her.

I watched this recently and it caught me at exactly the right moment. Not because I agree with every part of it, but because I had already been wondering how much of my desire to “get my life together” was actually about making my life better, and how much was just another standard I had learned to measure myself against.

Everywhere I look, somebody is locking in. We are waking up earlier, spending less, exercising more, reading more, cleaning more, working harder, becoming better versions of ourselves before the year ends. And honestly, I understand the appeal. There are parts of my own life I want to take more seriously.

I have postgraduate work to complete. I want to be more thoughtful with money. I want to feel less scattered. But I do not want to become so disciplined that I disappear from my own life.

Become smaller. Become quieter. Consume less. Eat correctly. Look better. Work harder. Keep the house nicer. Be financially responsible. Be emotionally regulated. Do not waste time. Do not waste money. Do not waste your body. Even leisure can be pulled into the project. Reading becomes a target. Walking becomes steps. Sleep becomes optimisation. Rest has to improve something before we are allowed to take it.

So then I find myself falling into a spiral where I continually ask, "Am I failing?" My life also does not behave well enough for that kind of rigidity. I am a mother and a student. There are days when I can protect a quiet block of time and get through exactly what I intended. There are other days when somebody needs something, something breaks, I am tired, dinner takes longer than expected, or my brain simply refuses to cooperate with the beautiful schedule I made for it. I could treat those days as failures of discipline. I have before. It has never made the following day any easier.

Something has to give, right? I have to find a way to either outsource or I could just do less, meaning fewer promises, made more seriously. Studying when I say I will study. Know roughly where my money is going. And reading for pleasure, oh I do miss reading for pleasure, maybe that would ease the guilt I feel looking at the bookshelves that line my home.

This is probably still a form of locking in. It just does not photograph particularly well. There is no dramatic transformation at the end, and I am not particularly interested in becoming unrecognisable by December. I would quite like to recognise myself. I would just like that self to be a little less overwhelmed, a little more deliberate about what deserves her attention, and less willing to turn every desire for change into another opportunity for punishment.

I am not trying to become harder to live with. I am trying to become more present in the life I already have.