Inaction is the norm in the first world. It’s hardwired into us since we no longer have to be hunter-gatherers but still have the brains of hunter-gatherers.
Back seat drivers, armchair quarterbacks, and hindsight critics abound.
Paralysis of analysis, has become the new gold standard of inaction origin, in the so called information age. I know I had a detrimental perception of action, doing the work, and getting the reps in on actions, abilities, and ways of life I was passionate about for a long time.
Resistance, as the great author Steven Pressfield puts it, is in all of us. We all have our own unique form of resistance that stops us from self actualizing. The most common terms for resistance are laziness and procrastination.
Laziness and procrastination are as easy as they are deadly. Deadly for our spirit, psyche, and self esteem. They feel so right in the moment of choice. It’s the devil we know. The warm blanket of certainty. What we think we want as long as we’re warm, fed, and dry.
Yet to lack experience is to not know what one wants. We don’t know because we haven’t done.
There is no substitute for experience. First new experiences to find who we really are and what we really like, for ourselves. Not what we inherited or were told or had forced upon us. Then we need repeated experience. We need to get our reps in to gain proficiency and hopefully maybe one day mastery.
Competence breeds confidence.
Action begets more action. Inaction begets more inaction. Inertia.
Fear of failure likes to crash the party when planning and early action gets put into place. Fear of failure is let in by the ego. Again, it’s natural, it’s normal.
“You mean I can try and not only fail but also might find out not only am I not great but that I’m not special?!”
That’s right. Taking right action is only the minimum. It’s the cover charge. Action doesn’t guarantee one’s desired outcome. Taking action guarantees a result. The result could potentially shatter our self perception.
Self perception is often, to put mildly, a delusion. Having the idea of who we think we are popped like a bubble is often what we fear more than external failure. It’s the internal perception atomic bomb that we want to avoid most. And with good reason. We aren’t taught how to handle ego death. In fact culture and society pushes us in the other direction. The more ego the better. Bigger ego = better person.
Better to keep lying to ourselves on the sidelines than face the truth in the arena.
Failing is hard, I know from vast experience. Being forced to see and admit one isn’t as good or as special as one hoped or assumed we were, that’s harder. A lot harder. I know that from experience as well.
Sometimes our mental/emotional cuts callous and we’re tougher, but sometimes they remain open wounds. Life can be hard and complex as it is. Going through life, accumulating more metaphorical open wounds, can make living much harder.
So it’s normal and natural to not even try and invest deeper into the stories in our heads. Double down on identifying with our life situation, our thought streams, our mental movies, our emotional narratives. I understand that. I spent, oh, probably the majority of my life in that space.
It’s still day to day, what isn’t? I know I had to live that way, and experience that way of living to know that that way of living isn’t experience and is no way of living at all.
I would never want to consciously go back there. Yet I’ll wake up in the middle of a day and realize I slipped into unconscious, detrimental habits and have been living on the sidelines instead of the arena for minutes, hours, days, weeks, months…
It’s day to day, action to action, choice to choice… what isn’t?
I’m finding as I get older that the fulfillment, contentment, and satisfaction of effort and action are far greater than the pleasure of passive consumption. Rest, relaxation, and escapism are not to be confused with purpose, but it’s easy to get them mixed up.
Inertia.
Anarchy Journal Constitutional 