Why Inspirational Quotes Might Not Be ‘Working’ For Everyone
Lately I’ve had a deluge of inspirational quotes hit my Instagram Explore page, the algorithmic response for clicking and liking one or two choice posts (coincidentally an accidental click is also why I’m getting served a lot of Jonas Brothers content right now too). I’m pretty late to the whole #quotespiration thing – I know people who by now are more or less only following accounts who share words not photography. But in a period where I was looking for answers I climbed aboard the bandwagon and began following these accounts too.
For a short time I drank it all up. Not only did I follow the accounts, picking over the quotes and nodding sagely at the wisdom, I signed up to the mailing lists and pored over the long form writing too. It was a blaze of activity that burnt brightly but quickly – after a month or so I stopped opening the emails, I stopped clicking on the posts. Eventually I realised that when I saw a motivational quote on my Explore page, I was feeling a tiny little stab of resentment – and I want to explore why that was.
To clarify before I really dig in, this is not a stab or a call out of people who curate these accounts and create original quotes. I know that there are many for whom their work is powerful and meaningful. What this post is about is how if your self-awareness muscle isn’t very strong yet, and if you are seeking solutions from a place of desperation (I’m counting myself in this category), then a motivational quote might be more false hope than an agent for change.
I wasn’t able to know why I was starting to resent these quotes until a personal crisis unlocked a trap door to a deeper chasm of understanding that was within me. Until then I’d been trucking along quite happily thinking that I *got* the whole self-awareness thing. I knew enough about it to know when I saw a quote about finding, say, your own version of happiness or success, it wasn’t news to me. In fact, I was confident that I knew what my version happiness was, I just needed some quotes to point me in the direction of getting there.
Until the trap door opened and suddenly there was this deep, dark cave, inky blue and glistening with moisture and minerals in the walls, yawning open to reveal everything I didn’t know. Showing me that even when I thought I was firmly on the path of my own version of happiness, my brain had adopted some happiness should do’s from others and was using those as the model. The cave was the hollowed out space left behind by this realisation, ready to be refilled with something more true.
It is difficult to describe, that dawning moment where you thought you were doing it all ‘right’ and then realise you were eye-rolling at the basic quotes not knowing that they were exactly what you were doing. There was an element of frustration, but mostly it was relief. Pure calm, and a reset. The knowledge that everything you were doing before wasn’t working for a reason.
And this was why I was resenting the quotes. They lack context for application – they are the words, but then you have to figure it out on your own, like the fortune teller who predicts a great disaster but won’t shed light on the circumstances. You cannot, from a few sentences on a pretty background, unpick how those words apply to you, and then take action to follow their message. “Keep looking where the light pours in” is a quote from Morgan Harper Nichols – but what if you don’t see any light? What if you don’t know where it’s coming from? Or what if the light isn’t light at all, but a trick of the mind?
Clearly the purpose of quotes like that is not to have all the answers – nor is it up to the creators to provide that greater depth or context. It’s more on us to be careful about where we seek our salvation. Morgan Harper Nichols herself claims only to ‘make art and write words’, yet we have elevated that art and those words to guru status. We Save them, share on our Stories, send to our friends like these words have the answer. It’s more complicated than that and not fair to anyone involved – the words, the creator, the person in turmoil.
Sometimes you can see a quote and it sparks a revelation in you – but certainly in my experience those moments are once, twice in a lifetime. A quote can make us feel seen, can strike us with its beauty, can make us think regularly – but to open a door into an untapped part of ourselves, to start making positive changes towards fixing a problem? That’s a big ask.
Perhaps it’s a symptom of our quick fix culture that we want the answers as quickly and painlessly as possible. That all we need to do is tap the Follow button and all the answers we seek will be served to us on an unfurled carpet; just pass our eyeballs over some words everyday and the way will become clear. Undoubtedly the boom in these quote posts is down to their infinite shareability and potential to stimulate growth when no one is growing – it’s why I’ve dabbled in a quote-based post myself. A share of a quote is an easy way to cut out formulating your own thoughts and understanding your own feelings because someone has already verbalised it for you.
I don’t believe that solutions can come from passivity. I don’t believe that we can find what we seek without, well, seeking; without strapping on some boots and tramping into the wild – literally and metaphorically. I think we all want to wait for the ‘right’ answer, the ‘one thing’, to knock on our door but I don’t think such a thing is possible. Only by trying on the ok-feeling answers, living with them, evaluating them, making mistakes, hating them, can we start to see what might feel more right. What I’m learning, begrudgingly, is that the key to happiness doesn’t arrive gold-plated with instructions of how to use it – we get some rusty pieces of iron and need to forge it ourselves.
