“I’m working on being more patient.” You’ve probably heard people say this before and may have said it yourself, as I have. Naming aloud the virtues we aspire to is commonplace. But in therapy people share about the moments when they failed to exemplify them, and I am always struck by the depth of shame they feel as a result. Being impatient with loved ones and perhaps reacting more sharply than necessary can trigger a barrage of punitive self-criticism from which it is difficult to recover.

Sometimes people fall short of living up to their values because they hold themselves to unattainable standards that no person can ever meet. Regardless of their behavior, goal posts are moved and failures are punished. But other times people have standards that are actually quite reasonable, such as simply wanting to be a bit more patient, focused, decisive, or present. These are oft-mentioned qualities that people want to strengthen, yet they still frequently struggle even when their expectations are modest. Sadly, this can spawn another variant of self-criticism, one not characterized by unreasonably high standards, but by condemning oneself precisely because so little was asked of them.

The struggle to live by one’s core values is not new. The fact that people have been thinking and writing about it for thousands of years attests to that. Still, I wonder if there are aspects of modern-day lifestyles that are ratcheting up the difficulty. Consider the values mentioned above. How likely are we to develop patience while being habituated to devices that offer immediate gratification? Or to improve focus while being aware of everything? Or to be more decisive while having endless options? Or to be more present while being preoccupied with efficiency? There appears to be a mismatch between virtue and lifestyle wherein our lifestyles thwart our efforts to attain virtue.

Perhaps calling it a mismatch is too strong, as there’s nothing inherently contradictory about these virtues and lifestyles. Admittedly, one could argue that the lifestyles in question are themselves driven by other virtues. Fair enough. The claim here is not that being present and being efficient are incompatible in principle, but that an obsessive culture of efficiency can hinder being present in practice. And so too with the other pairings. It’s less an issue of direct opposition and more one of excess and imbalance.

I think this imbalance ought to inspire empathy. People have noble aims and make sincere efforts. And while progress is certainly possible, it requires going against some powerful cultural currents. Currents which make it hard to implement and sustain healthy alternative practices. Moreover, we often forget the practice component entirely and jump straight from naming our aspirations to expecting outcomes, as if by magic.

Notice that we don’t do this with physical health. Sure, we deride our failed efforts to properly diet and exercise, but what we don’t do is expect results without action. We all acknowledge that some kind of lifestyle adjustment must occur—something beyond mere intention—in order to produce results. Why should the cultivation of virtue be any different? Somehow when it comes to being patient, focused, decisive, present, or any other virtue, we mistakenly act as if desire alone is sufficient for growth, only to fall short and berate ourselves. It’s a costly blindspot. For it is unfair to expect us to embody our values if we don’t create opportunities to develop them.

I don’t know what the best path forward is. It would be wonderful if someday cultural currents were to shift in a healthier direction or to at least become less forceful. Until then, I’m afraid the onus is on us and that each person’s path will look different. One intuition I do have is that we’ll need more than a generic “do hard things” approach. I sometimes worry that discipline, a key virtue that’s admittedly lacking in many instances, is over-glorified and incorrectly thought to be the only tool necessary. The problem, however, is that not all disciplinary skills are transferable. Some are, but some aren’t. The difficulty of buckling down through an all-nighter of work does not necessarily prepare one for the difficulty of, say, becoming a better listener to their loved ones. They are vastly different skill sets.

This is not to disparage discipline. By all means, we should marshall our willpower and strive to be more disciplined in our pursuit of virtue, but perhaps it should be in conjunction with other thoughtful approaches that complement our efforts. And rather than swimming directly upstream, we find subcurrents that assist and carry us in the right direction. It might involve modifying device use. Making higher altitude decisions to ease the burden of the daily grind. Engaging in activities that slow us down and have opportunities for delayed gratification woven into them. Strategically limiting options. Curating information consumption. Learning to be artfully inefficient. There’s no one-size-fits-all prescription. You have to fiddle with knobs and experiment. Just watch out for those pesky unfair expectations. Not only do they blind us to granular progress, they add another fuel source for negative self-talk when there are already too many as it is. So while the hope is that these explorations bring us closer to our deepest values, if we learn to be a touch kinder to ourselves along the way, then all the better.