Seize the moment – don’t wait for anyone to give you permission. – Josette Sheeran
In chess and most other games, you have to make a move. You can’t just pass.
Every Inaction is an Action, in Favor of Inertia
Let’s say on average you make one significant decision every minute while active. Let’s say ten hours a day – 10×60=600 choices.
If you have an idea for an improvement that you know will increase productivity slightly, say 2-3%, like taking a few minutes to organize your workspace. How much time does it take you to execute it? How about 2 days? Seems good by most standards? After all, we have all delayed similar stuff for months.
2 days delay is 1200 bad choices in a row. If you played so badly in any game, you would never ever win.
The Origins of Inertia: Why Do We Feel Stuck in Life So Often?
Like most things, it starts with evolution. Its only goal is to pass your genes on, making stability mandatory. Evolution applies some very simple principles.
Evolutionary Principles For Change
- Do things the way your predecessors did. They survived and procreated – stay stuck to what works.
- Change nothing, except when a threat or reward is visible. Changes in behavior are already tried. If they didn’t become the norm, they were a failure.
- The primary biological motivations for change are Fear or Love in different forms.
Living beings don’t really have a way to fully experience what lays ahead in time. Evolution’s plan to protect our future could only be executed in the present moment. So from every moment to the next, one evolutionary rule of behavior applies. If it more or less works, don’t change it. This is Inertia, the most constant force in your life.
Feeling stuck in life is so familiar that it’s even called “The comfort zone”.
Overcoming Inertia
We need inspiration and motivation to overcome resistance and start making changes.
Many people look first to routines and planning as a way out of feeling stuck in life. But in I Grow Younger, we think structure cannot really help with inertia.
The natural enemies of Inertia are Love and Chaos – the opposite of Fear and Structure!
What to Do When Feeling Stuck in Life?
1. Practice Self-Love
Self-love is key because it makes you feel you deserve the best for yourself. Love is an internal, Game of Self force. It starts with loving yourself in a healthy way.
2. Feel That Future-You Deserves Better
The feeling you’re deserving of change has the power to completely defeat the feeling of being stuck in life. What keeps people feeling stuck in life, is the question of merit – whether they’re good enough and worthy enough of a reward. If something is good for you and moral by itself, why on earth would you think or feel you don’t deserve it? If it’s sharable, share it with ones in need (almost everything is). But to just not take it because of the fictional “merit scale” in your head is a waste for you and the world. There is no merit scale. The world is mostly random anyway. Some people work hard and get nothing, others get good stuff because of their genes, place of birth or pure luck. Fairness is a human concept the universe simply does not support.
Imagine a cheetah chasing a gazelle full speed and suddenly having second thoughts like “Do I deserve to catch it and eat, did I run hard enough this year?”
3. Let go of old beliefs.
Our upbringing, the education system and popular cliches feed faulty beliefs that are the reason why you feel stuck in life. They put invisible chains around many of us that sadly make us miss the amazing random opportunities of life.
We often think everything should be earned by hard work and/or time invested… says who?
4. Take chances and share the benefits
Take the chance if moral, share the benefits if any. This is all you need to follow. If you get the good stuff, you deserve it. If you don’t get it, you at least tried.
If you want the world to be more fair (which it needs to be), just share most or all of the good stuff. And you’re a hero.
Inertia usually wins… But you can still fight to win some of the time.
How does change happen in life?
Most people lack enough self-love and are seriously hampered by the morality and merit barriers. Then how do they ever change?
You may have noticed that certain cycles and rules apply to all human lives. In the case of change, the ways we stop feeling stuck in life can be summed up in these courses of action.
When life forces you to change
We see this happen to people who are stuck for a long time in a cycle of fear-based actions. For example, you suddenly get fired from the job you’ve been gathering the courage to quit for years. Life takes away your current (Sheep) options and forces you to make bold Hunter moves.
When you decide to follow a new life direction
Sometimes an internal change shakes up our own motivations and we end up in Hunter mode. We gradually overcome fears and barriers and follow a course of curiosity and self-love. This reduces damage caused by spending time in Sheep mode and frees us from the harmful influence of Inertia.
When you fall in love
Falling in love, really in love, has the power to replace your regular brain with a superpower mind that sees itself capable of any change. Popular culture often portrays this in romantic movies where the main character has a complete change of heart after meeting someone wildly different from them (Sweet November anyone?).
And there is a fourth, unusual way that change happens. How do downward cycles end if you don’t happen to fall in love, gather courage on your own or life doesn’t happen to shake things up for you?
When you become addicted
It sure is unorthodox but we have to mention it because in practice, many cycles end in some form of light addiction that gives our stuck self a purpose again. The addictions that create the possibility for positive change, contrary to harmful addictions (drugs, alcohol, food, etc), are mental drugs.
This creates the space for healthy thoughts if your environment and the people around you are fertile for those. Mental drugs have limitations since it’s more like hitting a reset button when you’re falling down.
Key Takeaways:
- Every inaction is an action, reinforcing Inertia.
- Change cannot happen without Chaos. You can always breed Chaos.
- You can use powerful chaotic emotions like Love to overcome Inertia.
- The path to Love begins with Self-Love and the feeling that you deserve the good stuff.
- Don’t let anyone tell you that you don’t deserve the good stuff!
