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Humans often prefer stability, even if a better life is on the other side of some temporary discomfort.
Before we get to that, let’s first visualize “stability” as a locally maximum point on a polynomial function, such that changing your environmental conditions or your behaviors, results in less satisfaction in life:
Example: you’re relatively happy with your freelance contractor job. If you took on more work, you might make more money, but you’ll probably get stressed and return to your baseline. It’s the same for if you took on less work, you might get bored and return to your baseline. This is normal: we naturally optimize for general satisfaction.
But sometimes in life we fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your perspective) become aware of a way to live life that’s more satisfying. To get there, however, we have to endure some temporary discomfort:
As you slide to the right on this graph (ie: make changes to your environment or behaviors), you undergo the discomfort of change. That discomfort, if it’s too much to handle, can send you back to your original point of comfort/satisfaction:
But if you’re able to endure it, then you may reach a new stable point with even more satisfaction:
A classic example of this is getting into physical shape. When you haven’t had an exercise routine in a long time, it sucks to start. But once you get into the habit, it’s something you look forward to each day.
If you greatly resist change (e.g., you’re a lifelong drug addict, or, you’ve been in an unhappy marriage for 10 years and can’t imagine leaving), that can make it more likely that you'll revert to your old ways, as visualized by a deeper valley of discomfort:
Alternatively, if you have a clear vision of the kind of person you want to become, and how to achieve that outcome, then the discomfort can be relatively minimal (but non-zero):
The million dollar question is: What determines if a particular change will bring extreme discomfort, or feel relatively easy? It’s