(Link post from my blog; written as part of Halfhaven)
There are some things in life easier to avoid than escape. Life will have enough necessary bullshit that you should strive to avoid adding any extra bullshit on top.
Shift Work. Around 17% of the workforce have unstable work schedules.[1] This problem mostly affects the lowest-paid workers in society. It sucks. Your sleep sucks, you can’t plan anything in your life, and it interferes with relationships. Less than 11 percent of normal workers “often” experience work-family conflict, as opposed to 26 percent of irregular/on-call employees. It’s stressful and you’re more likely to get diseases and injuries. So why does anyone do it? If it pays poorly, and it sucks, then why work such a job? Clearly the people working such jobs must have limited options. In some cases this is unavoidable. Maybe you’re a college student and you haven’t had time to become qualified for better jobs yet. There are a thousand reasons why you could be working a shift-work job and it would be Not Your Fault. But your fault or not, it’s a trap, and it can be a hard one to escape. Trying to figure out how to upskill your way into an educated career when you can’t even book a dentist appointment two weeks out without getting yelled at by your boss is a nightmare. When possible, opt for a regular work schedule, even if it pays a bit less or requires you to work more hours.
Alcohol and Weed. You wake up feeling miserable and have to drag yourself to work. You regret your decisions last night. You swear tonight will be different. You white-knuckle your way through the day, and by the evening, you’re so spent you can’t resist the one thing that makes you stop feeling like shit. Where, in that cycle, is there room for self-improvement? This is not a rare problem. Like 10% of Americans have an alcohol addiction. People talk about that figure like it’s not high, which is kind of scary. If 10% of people who walk down a path fall into a pit, you might wonder if maybe they should fill in the pit, or at least put up some signage or something. Let this be the signage: Daily drug use is a curse. It will not help you. People with both Major Depressive Disorder and Alcohol Use Disorder have a worse prognosis than people with one or the other, because drinking is a trap. If you can easily feel good today, it’s really hard to not do that and instead do something hard that will make you feel good in a few months, like therapy. I’m not saying everyone should abstain completely from all drugs, but you shouldn’t do drugs alone or on a daily basis.
Very Entertaining Technology. I don’t think it really matters if it’s social media or video games or what, as long as it’s stimulating enough that any time you feel a pang of sadness or anxiety, you can get a quick dopamine hit to soothe your feelings. It’s easy to get stuck in the loneliness-dissatisfaction-tech cycle. Everyone has a smartphone, after all. The average person is using it for more than four hours a day, and some people go way past that. Some people try to abstain, but all but the strictest attempts to curtail one’s use seem like temporary solutions, and people fall back into their old patterns. Because the underlying loneliness and dissatisfaction also have to be addressed. It’s easier to address these problems if you don’t get stuck using your phone all day in the first place.
Bad Relationships. Constant fighting is exhausting, nobody would doubt that. But even a stable relationship can be a trap if it’s too comfortable. Your partner should, one way or another, be encouraging you to become better, or giving you the mental energy to become better. If you both spend your evenings smoking weed on the couch together, that’s a lot harder to quit than if you were just smoking weed on the couch by yourself. If that’s how you want to spend your evenings, then Godspeed, but if you want something more, then a relationship is something that can trap you. I think if you’re in a situation like this, you don’t necessarily need to dump your partner, but rather talk to them and resolve to change your dynamic. Hopefully they’re amenable.
Chronic Health Issues. Whenever I get sick, all my good habits go temporarily out the window. If you were sick all the time, this is what it would be like all the time, and you’d be too exhausted to be able to fix it — assuming it can be fixed. Diseases are basically so common now that the average person has one or more[2], whether it’s mental health conditions, gut issues, chronic pain, etc. If you can live a healthy lifestyle, then it’s probably worth it, even if grilled chicken salad doesn’t taste as good as Prime energy drinks. It’s easier to try to make healthy food taste good than to try to fix a chronic health issue. Same goes for exercise. How many people would run a marathon if only it would cure their illness? For many of them, they could have.
Golden Handcuffs. Want to spend the rest of your life doing what you’re doing right now? Well, if you’re making a lot of money doing it, then too bad — you’re probably gonna keep doing it. Choose your job carefully using more factors than just money, or the money might trap you. Golden handcuffs aren’t the only kind of handcuffs that can trap you in a job. A cozy pair of velvet handcuffs can also be hard to take off, so beware jobs that trap you by keeping you too comfortable. Unless you love what you do, in which case neither of these warnings applies to you, and you should stay right where you are.
Long Commute. This one is basically a proxy for anything that consumes a lot of your time and energy, but gives you nothing in return. If you’re one of the ~10% of people with a commute longer than an hour, that alone will make it hard to make changes in your life. If you don’t have enough free time, it’s hard to start a new hobby, sign up for training, buy a book on a subject that interests you, start regularly posting online… Not to mention just sitting around thinking about your life. If by the time you get home, you’re exhausted and just want to collapse in bed, you won’t do these things. Protect your energy so you can put it to good use.
You Want To Move Later But Not Now. Move cities. Move jobs. Whatever. If you want to make a move in life, but you’re not doing it in the next month or two, then you’ll be basically stuck in place until you do. Why make friends in this city if you’re just gonna leave them behind “soon”. Why work harder to get more credit at work if you’re gonna be getting another job “soon”. It’s fine to be in an in-between state like this sometimes, but I think some people get trapped in the idea of things being different “soon” for a long time, without the actual moving part happening in a reasonable timeframe.
Bad Debt. Around half of Americans carry a credit card balance from month to month, with the average balance being $6,730. Getting stuck financially stops you from doing things that cost money and can improve your life, and there are a lot of things like that. Lots of people don’t get therapy because they can’t afford it, but the outcomes are great (majority of therapy patients have successful outcomes). My friend insists getting a personal trainer, even if just for a while, makes going to the gym much easier. You can get a life coach. The better the coach, the more expensive. Or a style coach, if you’d rather have someone tell you what to wear than figure out how to be fashionable yourself. Or a speaking coach. University educations cost money, also. Get your teeth straightened out and take advantage of the halo effect.[3] If you want to level up in life, it probably won’t be free, or won’t be as easy if you do it for free.
Not subscribing to my Substack. Honestly the biggest trap on this list. I just saved you from nine dead-ends that could have ruined your life, all in a single blog post! Most of my blog posts are not self-improvement listicles, but that’s all the better.