I couldn’t even guess how many quotes I read on my Instagram feed about not settling. I’ve seen countless listicles shared on my Facebook timeline with ways to prevent yourself from settling. These days it seems like everyone is telling us that we need to keep striving. Striving for the perfect love or the perfect job or even the perfect bowl of bolognese, for god’s sake. People are obsessed with the idea of not “settling.” But what even is settling? The quotes, articles and lists I mentioned above sell settling as a bad thing. It’s described as if settling on something means you’ve given up. You’ve stopped working and pushing. Or you don’t think you deserve anything else. Hearing these versions of settling will do one of two things: it will motivate you to strive for what you really want, or it will cause you to feel like a failure. For me, it’s often the later. Settling can be described another way, though, and it’s often overlooked. Think about a dog doing circles in his ...