Sometimes nothing seems worth the effort. Those moments are not moments of weakness. Those moments are moments of our blindness. When we look only at the intended outcome of a process, things will never seem worthwhile. It is the unintended consequences that matter more. Things happen, some initiated by us, some by others. But when they happen, they set many things in motion. Most are unintended and we do not track them. Unseen, untracked, unexpected even, they unfold into entire parallel universes of unintended phenomena. Because these pathways are unintended, they do not reflect our desire.
Wanting to run away from the world is one such unintended pathway which can be imagined at any time. We can imagine what will happen if things happen as we plan, but can we also imagine what will happen if they do not work out? We always make do. Whether things work out or they do not, we make do. We never feel at such a high point that we feel thoroughly fulfilled, and we never feel so dejected that we feel like running away from everything and starting afresh.
This managing of things through an annoyingly middling way holds us back. We play safe. We do not have capacity to truly disrupt things. So we do not realise what is truly worth risking everything for. The alternative pathway, the one where we abandon everything and start fresh, remains perpetually available but perpetually untaken. It functions as a pressure valve we never open, a door we keep glancing at but never walk through. Our lives become elaborate strategies for avoiding both ecstasy and devastation, both of which demand responses we have not rehearsed.
The tragedy is not that we fail to achieve our intended outcomes. The tragedy is that we succeed at creating lives so carefully calibrated to avoid extremes that we lose access to the unintended consequences that might have mattered most. We build systems of perpetual compromise, each decision designed to prevent any subsequent decision of real consequence. The running away we never do becomes the shape of everything we do. We become specialists in almost-enough, in nearly-there, in good-enough-for-now. The infrastructure of mediocrity is invisible because it is everywhere, because we have mistaken its ubiquity for inevitability.
What becomes visible when we stop treating stability as achievement and recognise it as systematic avoidance of meaningful risk? Can a life designed never to require running away ever discover what is worth staying for?