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Hey, amige.
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Today we're talking about benchmarks, specifically why they're bullshit, because you already knew that.
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You just needed a gentle reminder.
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Buen día, mi gente, and welcome back to La Vida Más Chévere de Childfree Latinas.
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Welcome back to Healing Girl Summer.
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I'm your host and resident childfree Latina, Paulette Erato.
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We're on lesson number four in the book, and if you've been following along, you already know that lesson one was about failure and lesson three was about decisions.
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This one is about a toxic cultural norm we grossly overlook.
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Let's get into it.
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Lesson four is benchmarks are bullshit.
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Success isn't measured by the benchmarks you're supposed to achieve at a certain age.
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Everyone's life script is different, especially if you chose a non-traditional path through life.
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And because this is about college, let's say something like changing your major.
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So what if it takes six years to graduate?
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But even if it doesn't, your milestones are not going to be hit at the same time as your peers.
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The key is to continue moving forward anyway.
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Your success is not measured by how well the person next to you is doing, and their successes are not your failures.
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Stop comparing your life to other people's.
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Even if you were an overachiever early in life, that doesn't have to be your rubric for the rest of your days.
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You don't have to graduate college by 22 and be married by 27 and have kids by 30.
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Worry more about how much money you have in a retirement account by age 29 than whether or not you have a ring on your finger.
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Did your friend make partner at their law firm while you're still working on your graduate degree?
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Or did your next-door neighbor buy a nicer car than yours?
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Fantastic.
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Be proud of them.
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Be happy for them.
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Send them your genuine congratulations.
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But don't bother being jealous, because their path is not your path.
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Here's another secret.
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Success isn't measured in money or material things either.
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It's measured by happiness units.
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If you aren't happy, then you aren't successful.
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It's really that simple.
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The takeaway here is to measure your success in units of happiness.
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How often have we heard these things from our own family?
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Questions like, "Ay mija, cuando te vas a casar?" O, "No tienes novio?" Or the worst one, and I hope to hell none of you ever hear this one, but some of you probably already have, "Y cuando vas a tener hijos?
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Quiero nietos." Ugh.
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It's not just our families, though.
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Capitalist culture is built on making us feel inadequate so that we'll buy more things to make ourselves feel good.
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We even have a saying for that.
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It's called keeping up with the Joneses.
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Sure, buying things might lead to a short-term dopamine hit, yes.
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But then you have to have room for all the stuff you accumulate.
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And as someone who just spent six weeks cleaning out her dead dad's apartment that was full of 30 years of accumulated shit, I am begging you, please don't do that.
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Not to mention the credit card debt it racks up, which by the way is lesson two, which isn't part of this series, but you can read it on your own if you get the full Benchmarks Are Bullshit.
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Link is in the show notes.
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We all know that keeping up with the Joneses is a losing game.
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It's stupid, and yet every other post on socials is a new haul of some sort, a makeup haul.
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Hell, even the thrifting hauls are getting out of control.
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But it's not just stuff that we accumulate, it's accomplishments, too.
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This is where LinkedIn really shines, the long-ass soliloquies about the
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go to college, get married, buy a house.
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In this economy?
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As if turning 30 is some sort of performance review.
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Ugh.
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Here's what I tell my niblings.
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They're all between the ages of 12 and 25.
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Worry more about stuffing your 401(k) in your 20s than marriage.
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Drink water, move your body, and wear sunscreen.
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There's a whole graduation song about this, and that's the last line.
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The other lesson we've been able to model for these Gen Z and Gen Alpha kids is what a content life looks like.
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Because my life is completely different than that of either of my brothers, which is who these kids belong to.
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Load full transcript
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My life is not about accumulating stuff.
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It's about making intentional choices about the kind of life I want to have.
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That's the ideal life.
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That's the vida más chévere.
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Making intentional choices about the kind of life you want to have and recognizing that not all of those choices are life sentences, just to get back to what we said in the last episode, because they're not.
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Decisions are not life sentences.
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You can change your mind.
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But if you want to design your best life, you need to know what works for you.
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Not for your best friend, not for your frenemies.
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For you.
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For example, and speaking to keeping up with the Joneses, these kids know we only have one car.
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That's right, living in Greater LA, we only have one car that we share.
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It's also over 13, 14 years old?
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I don't even know.
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And yes, that's the privilege of working from home.
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They know that we live within walking distance of the things we like to do.
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And that's because we made intentional choices to preserve our happiness.
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One, we didn't have kids.
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Two, we live in an urban core that when we moved here had all the things we wanted to do right in front of us.
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Great neighborhood parties, lots of restaurants, and breweries.
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Yeah, the pandemic changed a bit of that, and then we moved to Puerto Rico, and then we moved back.
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But because of the choices we made, we were able to do those things.
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That's what a happiness unit actually is.
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Not what you own.
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It's how you feel about what you've built in this life.
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The only one of these decisions that was more face tattoos than Brussels sprouts is the not having kids part.
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Everything else was malleable.
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Nothing was set in stone.
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Also, part of designing your best life, your vida más chévere, is who you surround yourself with.
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You should have a circle of friends you don't have to compete with.
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Because when you're satisfied, when your happiness bank is full, you don't bother comparing yourself to other people.
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You just enjoy each other's company exactly as you are.
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Now, back to the argument that you should be married by 30.
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Ay yay yay.
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Did you know that I was 38 when I got married?
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My husband, he was 29, but that's just back to the argument that we are each on our own paths.
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I blew way past that 30 deadline, and I had a really good life as a single woman deep into my mid-30s when he showed up.
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And I really liked my solo girl adventures.
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And then I found an adventure partner who not only added to the experience, he enhanced the fun.
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It didn't feel like I had to make room for him.
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But if I hadn't met him, I'm not sure I would've gotten married at all.
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There's a version of me in a parallel universe that didn't give him my number the night we met, and she is still living her best life anyway.
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Benchmarks?
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We don't need no stinking benchmarks.
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To drive this home, let's talk about another Latina whose life didn't appear to adhere to a plan.
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The one that springs to mind immediately is the one and only Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón, or you might call her Frida Kahlo for short.
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Talk about someone who never tried to fit her life into anyone else's mold.
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She derided beauty standards.
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She lived in pain and turned it into art.
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She wanted to become a doctor, but she became an artist instead.
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She had a tumultuous marriage that she left and then she came back to, affairs with men and women.
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She even became a communist.
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By every sanitized, quote-unquote, metric, she failed at life.
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She didn't go to college.
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She didn't have a stable marriage, let alone any kids.
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Not for this lady.
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Instead, she had a unibrow and the desire to not live by anyone else's rules but her own.
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You know, here's what I want you to take away from this episode.
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Live your life according to your rules, nobody else's.
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You get to make the rules, baby girl, because only you get to live this one life.
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So make it one worth living.
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Make it the kind of life that would have Frida Kahlo wanting to have a drink with you.
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Make it the kind of life where I'd want to have a drink with you,'cause I will always save a glass to cheers a woman who is forging her own path on her own timeline.
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A woman who recognizes she can make mistakes and not judge herself for them.
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A woman that realizes she's her own boss of her life, and she can do whatever the fuck she wants.
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And if she's happy and her immediate needs are met, then congratulations, baby.
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Her happiness bank is full.
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Because what if instead of living a life chasing after bullshit metrics, we designed lives that made women like Frida Kahlo proud?
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What if we lived our lives in such a way that made other Latinas look up to us as not settling for bullshit?
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That is what I want for you.
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And if you are already doing that, I want to hear from you.
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If you are working on doing that, I want to hear from you.
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Send me a text.
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It's right there at the top of the show notes.
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I got a listener text just last week, and it made my whole day.
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So if you've been on the fence about reaching out, this is your sign.
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Hit that text link at the top of the show notes and tell me how you are living a life worth having a drink to.
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I'd really love to know how you're filling your happiness bank.
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And while you're in the show notes, don't forget to get your copy of Benchmarks Are Bullshit.
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And that's a burrito.