Choose Your Hard or Let it Choose You

"Marriage is hard. Loneliness is hard, too. Change is hard. So is staying exactly where you are. Discipline takes effort. Regret lingers. What life does not offer is a clear path around difficulty. That door stays closed. What it does offer is a series of trade-offs, most of them uncomfortable in different ways. Whether we choose deliberately or let things happen by default, we are always choosing something."

"Change disrupts routines. Even positive growth requires energy. That wiring helps explain why people often stay in situations they admit are not working. Psychologists call this status quo bias, the tendency to stick with what is familiar even when something better is available. Research shows that people routinely overestimate how risky change will be and underestimate the long-term cost of staying put (Samuelson & Zeckhauser, 1988)."

"Stagnation rarely looks dramatic. It usually blends into everyday life. It might show up as a low-grade dissatisfaction you cannot quite explain. Or a sense of restlessness paired with inaction. Sometimes it looks like anxiety without a clear source or motivation that slowly fades. Research on learned helplessness helps explain what happens next. When people repeatedly feel that their actions do not matter, they begin to disengage."

People face persistent trade-offs because life offers no clear path around difficulty; doors to effortless solutions remain closed. Choices involve different kinds of discomfort—relationships, loneliness, change, discipline, or stagnation all demand effort and incur costs. Human brains evolved to seek safety, predictability, and efficiency, making uncertainty and sustained effort aversive. Status quo bias causes people to overestimate the risks of change and underestimate costs of staying put. Change produces immediate pain; stagnation imposes quieter, accumulating harm. Repeated experiences of powerlessness can produce learned helplessness, reducing engagement and making escape from unsatisfying situations harder over time.

Read at Psychology Today