on Passivity, Stress and the danger of almost okay
Feeling stuck in life means nothing is on fire. You’re paying the bills, and the money is there for the essentials, but there’s a constant tension underneath.
Getting through this month means watching expenses, sometimes cutting back, sometimes selling things just to stay afloat.
Life works-ish.
And yet, five or ten years have passed and you’re still more or less in the same place.
The dreams are still there. The plans too. They’re just… postponed.
Feeling Stuck in Life Plays Tricks on You
This kind of financial friction keeps you alert, but not free.
You’re constantly adjusting. Managing. Making sure things hold together, always bracing for the next hit.
And there’s another layer to it. You know that if something breaks — a car, a tooth, an unexpected bill — you don’t really have room for it. So even when nothing is happening, you’re preparing for something that might.
That kind of low-grade stress narrows your thinking.
You don’t stop wanting more from life. You just start playing it safe. And that’s how financial friction quietly turns into mental passivity.
Psychologists call this status quo bias — our tendency to stick with what’s familiar, even when it quietly works against us.
This is why passivity isn’t comfortable — it’s exhausting. It has a way of playing tricks on you. The longer you stay still, the more movement starts to feel risky. Not because you’re incapable, but because passivity slowly convinces you that change has to be dramatic to count.
I’ve lived here myself — for years. Functioning. Responsible. Capable. Yet quietly stuck between what is and what could be.
Long enough to recognize it immediately, in others, and in myself. That space between crisis and comfort. Where things are almost okay, but not good enough to feel free. When life is too stable to force change, yet too tight to allow real growth.
“Maybe later…”
In a full-blown crisis, incentives are obvious. You act because you have to. Here, they’re subtle. Easy to ignore. Easy to postpone. And that’s what makes this state dangerous. Because it’s easy to lean back. To wait. To tell yourself that you’ll move later, when things are clearer, calmer, safer.
But this in-between state isn’t just a trap.
It’s also a rare opportunity.
You’re not in survival mode. You’re still standing. And you still have agency. Which means you can choose to treat this moment — not as something to endure — but as something to build from.
When life Feels Stuck — and How to Start Shaping It
The way out isn’t dramatic. It’s not about bold leaps or radical reinvention. It’s about doing something small enough to be repeatable.
Thirty minutes. Or ten. And one task. One step in the right direction. Start there.
Some days you’ll do less. That’s fine. And some days you’ll do more. Which is a bonus.
What matters is continuity, not intensity. Because the moment you start moving, something shifts. The stress loosens its grip. The fog clears a little. You feel it immediately: you’re no longer just enduring your situation and feeling stuck in life, you’re actively shaping it.
And that feeling matters.
Not because everything is suddenly solved, but because you’ve taken back a sense of direction.
I explore this more deeply in Train Your Mind — How Repetition Builds Mental Endurance, where I write about how capacity is rebuilt through gentle, repeated exposure.
it starts inside you
I believe this state of mind is more common than we like to admit. And it’s also why, before you can build anything new — a digital business, a flexible income, a different way of living — this has to be addressed first.
Not with strategies. Not with tools. Not with hustle. But with mindset.
Because no system can pull you forward if you’re still leaning back internally.
That’s part of why this blog exists — Hamster Wheel Exit is about stepping out of my own head and taking responsibility for my life. Not because I have everything figured out, but because waiting for clarity became a way of standing still. I want to create something small, but real. Something sustainable. Something that slowly turns intention into direction.
Real change doesn’t start with a platform, a business model, or a perfect plan. It starts much closer than that.
It starts inside you.
And then — slowly, deliberately — it moves out into the world.