Why we fight shy of stopping

Why do we sometimes fight shy of stopping even when we know what we’re doing isn’t right for us?

When a job or a type of work hasn’t been working for us for some time, and perhaps never did, there are many explanations as to why we might nonetheless find it difficult to let it go and move on. Standard reasons can include: comfort and familiarity; fear of the unknown, of change, or of failure; and practical things such as salary, pension, convenience, terms of employment or lack of viable options.

But there’s another reason that’s both less obvious and less easy to own up to. And this is it: stopping can sometimes feel tantamount to admitting to ourselves that what we’ve been doing was in some way wrong all along.

We don’t want to acknowledge that we have ‘wasted’ our time and energy – our lives, it may seem – on doing it and perhaps trying to make it right.

We don’t want to write off the investment that we’ve made in this thing that isn’t working.

We don’t want to have to admit that we were putting on a good show of it being the right thing.

And so, although at the back of our minds we may be thinking …

 ‘I’ve had it wrong all these years, I made a poor choice in the first place, I’ve never liked it and I should have got out sooner.’

or

‘I thought this job and I would be together forever, but I’ve fallen out of love with it and it’s making me unhappy and unfulfilled’

…  we stick, somewhat counterintuitively, with the thing that we know is not working. We double down.

Because while we carry on doing it, we can kid ourselves that it’s fine, maybe even good, even though it’s not. And we can avoid the day of reckoning that comes with stopping.

But here’s the rub: if it’s the wrong thing, then putting more hours, weeks, years into it will not make it right. Neither will it recoup what we’ve already invested.

Of course, it’s easier to stop and to avoid any kind of reckoning when we have something to move on to. We can say, ‘I’m only stopping that in order to take this other great opportunity instead’.

But it’s not easy to make a reasoned assessment of the alternatives when we’re looking at them through the ‘escapee’ lens: there’s a good risk of jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire.

And we really do need to look hard - with no judgment - at the thing that was wrong, or became wrong, for the data it gives us about what would be right. In that sense, there is no waste.

We all make mistakes. And none of us likes to admit that we got it wrong. We’re only human after all.

By the same token, we’ve only got one life to live and although we can’t rerun it, we can change things within it at any point to make it a happier life to inhabit from now on.

We can direct the energy that we’ve been spending on maintenance and defence towards creating something new. And we can enjoy both the relief and the power that comes with that.

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Photo by Nadine Shaabana on Unsplash