The Brutal Truth About Personal Change
There is an entire industry built on hope. Seminars, books, coaches, podcasts. Different packaging, same promise: you can change, you can become more, you can finally arrive. The tone is warm, encouraging, almost parental.
Not because change is impossible, but because the kind of change people imagine barely exists. What most people want is improvement without loss. Growth without grief. Transformation without dismantling the life that produced them. That version of change is a fairy tale, just written for adults.
I’m not guessing. I do this for a living. I work with people stuck on welfare for years, people coming off drugs, people whose lives collapsed and then settled there. I’ve seen a few people change. Most don’t. They pull back when it gets uncomfortable. Not because they lack information or support, but because change demands something they are not willing or able to give up.
Real change doesn’t start with insight. It starts with a quiet sense that something is off. Your explanations stop working. Your habits still function, but they feel empty. The roles you play still make sense on paper, but they don’t quite feel like yours anymore.
At first, you try to fix this. You add routines, optimism, maybe a new framework. That often works for a while. Then it doesn’t.
What comes next isn’t clarity. It’s confusion. The old reflexes fall away before the new ones show up. People who used to know how to deal with you suddenly don’t. You hesitate. You sound less sure of yourself. From the outside, it looks like you’re going backwards. From the inside, it feels like the floor quietly gave way.
This is where most people stop. Not because they’re weak, but because the price becomes visible. Change isn’t about becoming better. It’s about becoming unfamiliar. First to others, then to yourself. That part rarely gets mentioned, because it doesn’t sell very well. No one lines up to hear that progress can feel like losing competence, status, and social air at the same time.
Responsibility shows up here, not as empowerment, but as weight. People like responsibility as long as it stays abstract. Once it becomes concrete, it’s heavy. Taking it seriously means giving up the comfort of explanations. It means noticing that your life didn’t just happen to you. It formed around what you tolerated, repeated, avoided, and chose, usually quietly, over years.
That realisation isn’t freeing. It’s uncomfortable. You start to see your own fingerprints on your constraints. Not on everything, but on enough. And once you see that, it doesn’t go away. Victimhood may still be partly true, but it stops being useful.
This is why responsibility is often repackaged as mindset. Mindset is light. Responsibility isn’t. One fits neatly into workshops. The other follows you home and sits there when the house gets quiet.
Anxiety lives in the same territory. It’s usually treated as a problem to be fixed or eliminated. But a lot of what people call anxiety is simply contact with reality. The future is unstable. Social bonds are conditional. Bodies fail. Effort doesn’t guarantee outcome. Being aware of that is uncomfortable. Of course it is.
The promise of permanent calm isn’t freedom. It’s anaesthesia. A life without anxiety would require a life without stakes. Many attempts to get rid of anxiety aren’t about living better, but about feeling less. Distraction, optimisation, endless self-soothing. Some of it helps. Much of it is avoidance in nicer clothes. Anxiety doesn’t disappear when you think correctly. It fades when you stop postponing what you already know needs doing.
At this point, many people turn to systems for an explanation. Society, capitalism, bureaucracy, history. These forces are real. They matter. But they also offer something quietly attractive: someone else to blame. If the system is responsible, then your life isn’t entirely yours. That can feel like relief.
Actual freedom isn’t exhilarating. It’s exposed. There’s no structure to hide behind when choices fail. No one to accuse when the path narrows. People don’t only cling to systems because they’re constrained. They cling to them because systems absorb responsibility. Chains are heavy, but so is standing on your own.
The hardest truth comes last: no one is coming. Not to rescue you. Not to push you. Not to confirm that the effort you’re making in private is worth it. Insight doesn’t accumulate interest. Awareness doesn’t turn into action on its own. You can understand all of this and stay exactly where you are.
Because change isn’t just painful. It’s lonely. It separates you from the version of yourself that fit easily into the world you knew. It costs you excuses that once protected you. It removes the comforting idea that suffering will eventually be redeemed by meaning. Often it isn’t. Most people stop here.
Why are you still reading? Nothing follows. No encouragement speech.