Killing Time Shortens Your Life: When Changing Course Feels Scarier Than Staying Stuck

2 days ago

14 min read

Her message started kindly and lovingly, and I could almost anticipate what was coming after the words I trust you, I know you're right, I'm so grateful that you don't judge me and I know you would never pressure me into doing anything.

Then came the but.

She told me that after our conversation, she wasn't feeling great.

She was scared.

Not because I had said something wrong, or because I had pushed her towards something she didn't want, but because our conversation had opened a door she wasn't entirely sure she wanted to walk through.

She had worked incredibly hard to get where she was. She had made decisions, overcome obstacles, invested years of her life, built things she had once wanted and achieved things she had once thought would make her happy. And now she was terrified of sitting down and examining all of it too closely, because what if she discovered that the life she had worked so hard to build no longer aligned with her?

What if, underneath all the achievements, persistence and years of effort, she discovered that this wasn't actually what she wanted anymore?

What if the person she was becoming or has already become wanted something completely different?

And perhaps most frighteningly: if she admitted that, would it mean that everything she had already done had been for nothing?

I understood the fear immediately.

I also think it is one of the most reasonable fears we can experience when we begin seriously examining our lives.

Because self-discovery sounds lovely when we talk about it in abstract terms. Know yourself. Find yourself. Live authentically. Follow your values. Build a life aligned with who you really are.

Wonderful.

Until you discover something about yourself that is inconvenient.

Until knowing yourself means having to confront the possibility that the career you spent fifteen years building isn't right for you. That the relationship you invested a decade into isn't one you want to spend another decade in. That the city you fought to afford no longer feels like home. That the dream you have been pursuing belonged to a previous version of you—or perhaps was never really yours in the first place.

Self-knowledge is not always comforting.

Sometimes it is deeply disruptive.

But I would still rather know.

What if the life you worked so hard to build is no longer the life you want?

The harder we have worked for something, the more psychologically expensive it feels to question it.

If you try a hobby for a few weeks and dislike it, walking away is easy. It becomes much harder when the thing you are questioning contains years of your life, qualifications, mortgages, children, family expectations, sacrifices, career ladders, relationships and whole identities.

You may have fought to get there. You may have defended your choices to other people. You may have told yourself through every difficult patch that eventually it would all be worth it.

Then one day you find yourself standing in the middle of everything you fought to create and quietly thinking, Do I even want this anymore?

That can feel almost obscene.

But it is okay to outgrow things. We are allowed to change, to learn and shift, to re-evaluate, and to find what we thought we needed has changed, or to find that what we thought we wanted does not seem what we believed it would be like...

The person who made a decision at twenty-five did not have the information available to the person who is now forty. They had not yet lived through those relationships, losses, successes, disappointments and discoveries. They did not know what their future body would need, what their values would become, or which things they once considered important would eventually cease to matter.

Why would we expect them to want exactly the same life forever?

There is something peculiar about treating decisions made by previous versions of ourselves as binding contracts with every future version.

Sometimes integrity means consistency. Sometimes integrity means acknowledging that you know something now that you did not know then and allowing that knowledge to change your direction.

Are you afraid of changing, or afraid of discovering that you need to?

I think this was at the heart of the message I received.

She wasn't frightened of one particular change. She was frightened of looking closely enough to discover what might need changing.

There is a strange comfort in not examining things too deeply. As long as you do not ask whether your relationship is working, you do not have to deal with the answer. If you never investigate whether the career you spent years building still suits you, you do not have to face what happens if it doesn't.

Not knowing can buy us temporary psychological peace.

But it buys that peace with time.

There is a quote I have loved for years which, translated as closely as I can manage it, says: Time is the only victim that avenges its death postmortem.

Time does not protest when you misuse it. It does not interrupt you when you spend another five years somewhere you already know you do not want to be. It does not send you an invoice for the years spent waiting until you feel more certain.

It simply goes.

And its revenge comes later, when the decision is finally made and you realise that the years behind you cannot be negotiated back into existence.

A few years ago I became fascinated by the language we use around time. We spend it, waste it, save it, invest it, buy it and, strangely, kill it.

In August 2023, I wrote a sentence in my notes:

Killing time shortens your life.

It is almost embarrassingly obvious, but I do not think we live as though we truly understand it.

If I waste an hour, I have not wasted some abstract unit called an hour. I have used an hour of my life. If I remain five years longer in a situation I already know is wrong for me because I am frightened of what changing it might involve, those are five years of my life.

This is not an argument for turning every minute into productivity. Rest matters. Laziness can be wonderful. Doing absolutely nothing may be exactly what you want to do with an afternoon.

But...

there is a difference between choosing to do nothing and killing time because you are avoiding your own life.

What are you receiving in exchange for your time?

Money can buy us time in one sense.

If I hate spending Saturday cleaning my house and can afford to pay somebody to do it for me, I have effectively bought myself a few hours. If family matters deeply to me, perhaps those hours are better spent on a hike with my partner than scrubbing bathrooms and doing laundry. I can use money to create more freedom inside the time already available to me.

What I cannot do is add more time at the end.

That is why the line from Dust in the Wind by Kansas stays with me:

“All your money won't another minute buy.”

You can pay somebody else to clean your house and regain Saturday afternoon. You cannot reach the end of your life and buy another Saturday.

That transaction does not exist.

And once we understand that, time starts looking a little more like investment capital.

When we invest money, we are constantly reminded that capital is at risk, returns are not guaranteed and past performance does not guarantee future results.

The same is true of life.

You can invest ten years in a relationship and have it end. You can plan a holiday for six months and hate it. You can spend years building a business that fails. You can invest time in a friendship that does not give you what you hoped for.

That does not mean you should stop investing your time.

Risk is fundamental to being alive.

The question is whether the risks you are taking are in service of a life you actually want.

Because doing nothing is also a decision about where your time goes. You can spend ten years refusing to try something because you are frightened it may fail. Those ten years are still invested somewhere.

You invested them in not finding out.

When would you rather realise that you took the wrong path?

I love hiking, and I love the views you get from the top, but I also know that sometimes I may take the wrong turn, or underestimate the hike, or overestimate my ability, energy or stamina on that day. But here's the thing - imagine walking uphill for two kilometres and beginning to suspect something is wrong. You keep going because perhaps this is simply the difficult part. Another kilometre passes. Then another. Eventually you look properly at the map and realise that somewhere behind you, you took the wrong turn.

This hill was never supposed to be part of your route.

Would you continue simply because you had already walked five kilometres?

Of course not.

The five kilometres are gone either way. Continuing does not redeem them. You do not honour the distance already travelled by turning five wrong kilometres into ten.

Yet we routinely do exactly this with life.

I've already spent seven years building this career.

We've already been together for twelve years.

I've put too much money into this.

I fought too hard to get here.

The previous investment becomes an argument for future investment, even when we know the direction is wrong.

I love hiking, and I have abandoned plenty of hikes. There are mountains beyond my capacity on a particular day. Sometimes I am tired, the weather is bad, my body has had enough, or the view at the top no longer feels worth what it will take to reach it. So, I turn around. I do not consider that a failure. Being on the wrong hike and being on the wrong path in life have a lot of similarities....

The bottom line is - our bodies, our minds, our souls - they know when we are on the wrong path and they voice it - the problem is that we don't listen, that we try to push through.

There are many beautiful views in the world. I do not have to suffer my way to every one of them. Life is not supposed to be hard. Life is what we make it. And sadly - sometimes we put ourselves through hell because we've been sold on suffering (and in mental health on diagnoses), rather than on alignment and listening to ourselves so we can get there.

This is not about giving up whenever something becomes difficult. Difficulty and misalignment are not the same thing. There is a huge difference between a) this is hard, and I still deeply want it and b) this is making me miserable, but I have already come too far to stop.

Knowing the difference requires self-trust.

Would you rather know sooner or preserve the comfort of not knowing?

A very ordinary conversation with a friend recently brought this into focus for me in a slightly ridiculous way. We were talking about balding and the various creams and treatments people use. He said he might wait and perhaps try something eventually.

My immediate thought was: if this matters to you and you already want to do something about it, why wait?

Later I found myself thinking about the question rather bluntly:

Would you rather be bald sooner or later?

Obviously, with many things, the preferred answer is never. But if something unwanted is already happening and earlier action gives you more options, why is postponing action chosen then? '

Would you rather discover now that your relationship cannot give you what you need, or in five years?
Would you rather realise halfway through a qualification that you hate the career you are pursuing, or after building your entire identity around it?'
Would you rather discover at forty that your life is organised around values you no longer hold, or would you rather live to wake up at sixty, wishing you had given yourself the time and courage to know at 40?

Earlier knowledge can hurt.

But it also gives you more remaining life with which to respond.

Avoidance can protect us from an uncomfortable truth today by quietly reducing our choices tomorrow.

If you managed to build the wrong life, why wouldn't you trust yourself to build another one?

This is the other part of the original conversation that I think matters enormously. Building and staying on the wrong path are different, and staying is way more costly and difficult than abandoning the wrong path early.

If you have worked that hard, persevered that long, solved that many problems and built something substantial while perhaps travelling along a path that did not even suit you particularly well, why would discovering a better path suddenly make you incapable?

People often fear starting from Zero. But there is no such thing. You do not lose the person you were who built the first life. You take them with you. You take the skills, the resilience, the resources, the lessons, the mistakes and the much clearer understanding of what does and does not work for you.

Perhaps getting as far as you did on the wrong mountain should make you more confident about what you could do on the right one.

This is what self-trust means to me. Not assuming that every impulse is correct or every emotion should immediately become a decision, but trusting that you can listen to yourself, tolerate discovering things you may not want to know, change your mind when new information arrives, survive making mistakes and course-correct when necessary.

You do not need certainty about the entire future before you are allowed to respond to what you know about your present.

Why do we so readily decide that something is wrong with us?

This is also where I become frustrated with parts of the mental-health field and our increasing enthusiasm for pathologising ordinary human distress.

I love psychology. I have built much of my professional life around it, and I use it constantly because understanding behaviour, relationships, emotion and decision-making is enormously useful.

But I am scared of how quickly discomfort can become a diagnosis and how many people settle with it as if it's a life-sentence.

Sometimes distress is not evidence that you are malfunctioning.

In fact - most of the time - it is basically pure information that needs you to understand it and change the way you navigate from there.

Sometimes anxiety is telling you to pay attention to something you keep dismissing. Sometimes resentment sits on top of a boundary you repeatedly abandon and people keep crossing. Sometimes exhaustion does not mean you need to become better at coping; perhaps your life requires far more coping than it should.

And I think women, particularly, need to be careful about how quickly we turn internal discomfort into evidence against ourselves. Women have spent centuries being told that they cannot fully trust their own perceptions, emotions or decisions, particularly when those decisions concern their bodies, relationships, sexuality and lives. That history has not disappeared simply because the language around it has become more sophisticated.

I still see women receive a strong internal message that something is wrong for them and respond by asking:

What is wrong with me?
Why am I not happier?
Why can't I tolerate this?
Why am I so difficult?
Why can't I simply appreciate what I have?

Sometimes there may indeed be something happening internally that needs professional support. But before assuming pathology, I think another set of questions is worth asking:

What am I not listening to?
Where am I betraying myself?
What do I repeatedly know and then talk myself out of knowing?
What have I outgrown?
What am I enduring because I have confused endurance with virtue?

Feelings are information, not instructions. But persistent internal information deserves curiosity before it is dismissed as dysfunction.

What if psychology is supposed to help you change your life, not simply tolerate it better?

This is why I love psychology.

I do not want to use psychology only to become more efficient at enduring whatever circumstances I have accidentally built around myself or life has thrown at me.

I want psychology to help me understand why particular environments bring out the best or worst in me, why certain relationships nourish me while others drain me, why something that suited me perfectly five years ago suddenly feels wrong now, and what all of that tells me about how I should live. Then I want to use that information. Self-knowledge that never influences how we live can become little more than an interesting intellectual hobby.

Sometimes the healthiest thing we can do is alter the conditions:

Change the pace.
Change the expectation.
Change the relationship.
Change the job.
Change your mind.
Turn around on the mountain.

The purpose is not to construct a more sophisticated explanation for why we are unhappy. It is to use what we understand to course-correct while there is still life available in which to do it.

And this is what tortures my brain - psychology has been perverted for the interests of Big Pharma.

Because instead of people asking themselves why am I depressed - they have been conditioned to turn to their GP and the GP has been trained to prescribe antidepressants. And this is how people suffer from depression for years and even decades.

If you had gone to your philosopher friend, or your local priest - they'd have been more help than that GP appointment - because they'd ask you questions your GP won't. And then you have to face reality and assess how aligned you are with the life you endure daily. Uncomfortable. But a hell of a lot more useful than the GP appointment - if only you dare to face the music.

But Leah - why did you not say 'turn towards your psychologist friend'?

Go 3 paragraphs up and reread the line in italics...

Not all psychologists are good at their jobs. Many are little more than certified pill pushers who use labels and diagnoses as freely as poets use adjectives in their poems. Many more are nothing more than glorified bins for emotional garbage who zone out half the time of your session and have f*ck all to give you beyond that ''listening'' ear.

And sadly those 'professionals' don't know how to face and deal with their own lives; you only have to be on a FB group for psychologists and therapists for 10mins to understand why I'm so harsh - and justified in those statements. But that's a whoooole other topic.

So, let's focus on:

How often do you stop to check whether your life still fits you?

Perhaps this is why, for me, the year has three beginnings.

January is the obvious one. The calendar changes and reflection happens almost automatically.

June is my midpoint. Half the year has gone, and whatever I imagined in January has collided with six months of actual life. I look at what I thought mattered, what really received my attention, and whether I still want the things I thought I wanted.

Then there is September.

Specifically 15th of September has always felt like another beginning to me. Holidays wind down, schools restart, people return to work and life begins picking up speed again. The machinery starts moving. And I like to stop before getting swallowed by that momentum.

Because it is incredibly easy to become busy enough that you stop asking whether you are busy with the right things.

Then, in November, I begin a much deeper annual review. I look at my work, health, relationships, finances, environment, ambitions, fun, rest and growth. I want to know what took too much from me, what gave something back, and where my time actually went rather than where I imagined it would go. It takes me weeks to go through my deep-dive and process, but it is key and important before I decide what I want from another year. I want to understand the life I am already creating.

What might you discover if you looked at your whole life before planning another year?

That is where 360 of Your 365 came from.

It is my annual reflection and life-design workshop, and in December I will once again take people through a deeper review of the year they have lived and the life they are building.

I am not particularly interested in simply asking, What did you achieve?

I am much more interested in what changed in you this year, what you discovered that you cannot now unknow, what worked beautifully, what repeatedly didn't, where you felt most like yourself and where there is an uncomfortable gap between the things you say matter to you and the way you actually spend your time.

Sometimes the most important thing you can discover at the end of a year is not a new goal.

It is that you are climbing the wrong mountain.

And yes, finding that out can be frightening. It can hurt to look at the kilometres behind you and realise that you worked incredibly hard for something you no longer want.

But I would still rather know.

I would rather look at the map today.

Because continuing along the wrong route does not recover the time already spent. It simply asks you to sacrifice more.

You are not betraying your past self by responding to what your present self now knows. You are using the information your past self spent all those years gathering.

The time behind you is already gone.

The question is what you want to do with the time that is still yours.

If you want to take that deeper look at your own year and begin thinking deliberately about what you carry forward into the next one, you can learn more about 360 of Your 365 and join me here at 360ofyour365.lifesexperts.com.