I’m writing this from Rome, where my children and I have spent the last couple of days walking approximately 47,000 miles in 37-degree heat under an “Extreme High Temperature Warning” because apparently that is what one does in Rome.
At various points, one of us has said, “Can we just go back to the hotel for a few hours?”
And then immediately followed it with:
“But we’re only here for two days. We should make the most of it.”
Which got me thinking.
Should according to who?
Because there seems to be an invisible rule book somewhere in the sky that we all consult without realising it.
We should keep sightseeing because we’re in Rome.
We should eat pizza and pasta because we’re in Italy.
We probably shouldn’t eat sushi because that would somehow be a criminal waste of geography.
We should see all the important things because that’s what ChatGPT said we should do.
We should get up early, even though we’re on holiday.
We should walk because “it’s only 25 minutes away,” even when Apple Maps has failed to factor in the fact that the pavement is approximately the temperature of the sun.
We should queue to see things we’re not particularly interested in because they’re famous, even if what we actually want to do is sit somewhere shady with a cold drink.
We should spend two and a half hours being politely herded through room after room after room of the Vatican Museums because apparently wanting to see the Sistine Chapel does not mean you are allowed to simply go and see the Sistine Chapel.
We shouldn’t spend half the afternoon lying around the hotel because, technically, we could lie around at home.
Although I would argue that lying around in an air-conditioned hotel room in Rome after walking around the Vatican in 36-degree heat is a culturally enriching experience in its own right.
I have a phrase I say to my children quite a lot:
“According to who? The rule book in the sky?!”
Usually when they tell me they should do something, or shouldn’t do something, and neither of them can actually tell me where the rule came from.
And the more I think about it, the more fascinating I find this.
Because we like to believe that we’re making our own decisions.
That we have free will.
That the thoughts going through our head are ours.
But so much of what we think is simply the result of what we have repeatedly seen, heard, experienced and absorbed over the course of our lives.
What a successful person does.
What a good mother does.
What someone your age should look like, dress like, act like.
What is sensible.
What is irresponsible.
What you are too old for.
What you are too young for.
What people like you do.
What people like you don’t do.
And after a while, those ideas stop sounding like rules someone else gave us.
They just start sounding like us.
And of course, some of our most deeply embedded rules are about money.
How hard we should work.
How much money is ‘enough’.
That we should be sensible.
We should be grateful for what we have.
We shouldn’t want too much.
We should work longer hours if we want to earn more.
We should charge what feels reasonable.
We should choose the safe option.
We should wait until we’re more experienced, more established, more qualified or more certain before we make the bigger move.
And perhaps the strangest one of all: if making money feels too easy, there must be something slightly suspect about it.
According to who?
I think this is one of the reasons I’m so fascinated by wealth.
Because earning more money is rarely just about learning another strategy.
It also means becoming aware of all the invisible rules you’ve absorbed about what money means, how it should be made, how much you’re allowed to have and what sort of person you’re supposed to become in order to have it.
And most of us never consciously chose those rules either.
We simply inherited them, absorbed them, repeated them and eventually started calling them common sense.
That’s the really interesting part.
We can feel as though we’re making a completely independent decision while our brain is simply running an old programme in the background.
The neural pathways that influence our decisions were not all created through conscious choice in the first place.
They were built through repetition.
Parents.
School.
Culture.
Friends.
Workplaces.
Advertising.
Social media.
Things people said to us once that, for reasons nobody can quite explain, our brain decided to store permanently.
And then years later we find ourselves making decisions based on them without even noticing.
Which makes me wonder how much of what we call “personality” is actually just familiarity.
How much of what we call “being realistic” is simply conditioning.
And how many things we say we want are things we’ve never actually stopped to ask whether we want at all.
Even on holiday.
Maybe I don’t want to see absolutely everything Rome has to offer.
Maybe I want to see some of Rome, eat something delicious, laugh with my children, go back to the hotel when we’re tired and not turn a two-day city break into an endurance event.
Maybe we’ll even eat sushi.
I know.
Reckless.
But I think there’s something quite liberating about noticing the word should when it pops into your head and asking:
According to who?
Sometimes there is a very good answer.
And sometimes there really does seem to be nothing behind it except that mysterious rule book in the sky.
Until next Saturday…
Expect Extraordinary.
Guinevere