Oliver Burkeman’s Lockdown Lessons for Living Life Better… Part 2: Make change stick

It’s been called “the YOLO economy”: the seemingly sudden decision, on the part of millions of people – especially but not only Americans – to quit their jobs, mid-pandemic, in search of freedom and adventure.

You might think a global crisis would cause people to behave more cautiously, rather than less. But for some with the financial cushion to take the risk, the logic runs the opposite way: once you’ve grasped how short and precious life is, how could possibly postpone your dreams any longer? “I realised I was sitting at my kitchen counter ten hours a day feeling miserable,” one lawyer told the New York Times. “I just thought: ‘What do I have to lose? We could all die tomorrow.’”

And of course, many of us who haven’t been tempted to switch careers have had other, perhaps smaller, Covid epiphanies: about the importance of spending time with ageing relatives, or in nature; about the value of socialising face to face – or, in my case, about how much I’d loved singing in a choir, a pastime that in the age of the coronavirus had become, bafflingly, more dangerous than skydiving. Others resolved to get married at last, or, having experienced what it was like to spend day after day at home with their spouses, to get divorced.

Life-shaking events have a way of triggering such insights, after which people swear never again to take life for granted. But it’s equally well-known that those insights rarely stick. Life gets in the way – and the recovering cancer patient who vowed never again to moan about petty things finds herself as annoyed by traffic jams and broken dishwashers as anyone else. “I watch people experience psychological and emotional breakthroughs fairly regularly,” writes the US life coach Martha Beck; but “it’s much rarer to see someone actually putting their new insights into practice.” After all, millions more must have recently thought about leaving a job they don’t love than will have actually done it, even if they were in a position to quit. We fantasise about big life changes, but then the old routines seem impossible to resist. There are, in fact, ways to resist them – to hold on to the possibilities we’ve glimpsed during the pandemic, and turn the fantasy of a richer life into reality. But doing so requires coming to grips with a couple of fundamental truths about the human mind.

The first is that we’re incredibly good at adapting to changes in our circumstances. Far from being a problem, this is frequently a blessing: it’s why we bounce back from shocks like break-ups or bereavements, and why, according to one famous (if contested) study, even people left paralysed by serious injury soon revert to something surprisingly close to their earlier happiness levels. But this also means that positive changes fade into the background, too: a thrilling new home or new car quickly become unremarkable parts of one’s life. (The same study showed that winning the lottery has lower effects on long-term happiness than you’d think.) And it means that we’re built to respond to a crisis like coronavirus, not by wanting everything to be different, so much as by scrambling to get back into familiar grooves as rapidly as we can.

The other deeply rooted truth is that we’re far more used to being influenced by our environments than most of us would care to admit. This surely helps explain the Great American Job-Quitting of 2020-2021: when you’re showing up each day to a busy workplace, surrounded by many others who apparently think it’s worth their while to be there, it can be difficult to imagine another kind of life. Whereas working from home, perhaps in the garden, with the office only a distant mental image, it’s much easier to picture alternatives. And so as Britain stumbles back toward something resembling normal, it’s likely to get much harder to hold on to the desire for things not to return to normal, but instead to seize the moment, and make a major change.

What this means, first and foremost, is that relying on willpower to force a big transformation, in your personality or your circumstances, almost certainly isn’t going to work. Either you’ll just run out of willpower and forget the whole thing, as the inner forces of adaptation reassert themselves; or else you’ll mentally turn it into an intimidatingly big project, for which you tell yourself you need to be fully prepared – with the result that you’ll keep on postponing it to the future, and it’ll never actually happen.

A much more effective tactic is to do something ridiculously tiny, but to do it now – today, perhaps even before you finish reading this article. As the career coach Barbara Sher points out, if you dream of (say) one day becoming a screenwriter, you essentially have two options. Either you can yearn fruitlessly for the day when you’ll somehow magically become a full-time screenwriter; or you can spend an hour this evening working on a screenplay – whereupon you will, by definition, have become a screenwriter, albeit one at a very early stage of their career. The same logic applies to the desire to spend time with your extended family, or focus on your health, or your meditation practice, or your political activism: the only actions that count are the ones you actually take, and we’re psychologically constructed so as to postpone anything that seems too large or difficult, or too out of tune with those who surround us.

(The next step is to take this small disruption to your everyday routine and, well, make it routine, for example by resolving to do a tiny additional amount each day or each week as appropriate. Done right, this becomes a sort of jiu-jitsu attack against psychological adaptation, turning its own power against it: you’re using the power of habit to inculcate a behaviour that, little by little, undermines your old habits and changes your life.)

And if the change in question involves giving up security – in the
form of a job or relationship, money, or just familiar surroundings – it might also help to ask yourself if your current situation is really as secure as it seems. In his book The Wisdom of Insecurity, re-released this month by Rider, the hippie-era spiritual teacher Alan Watts made the argument that most of our feelings of insecurity arise, ironically enough, from the quest to feel secure. (“The desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the
same thing,” was how he expressed it.)

The more you come to rely on your sense of security in a specific job, relationship or other situation, the more vulnerable you become to what would happen if you lost it – so you end up feeling more insecure, not less. By contrast, once you take a leap and it doesn’t destroy you, you’re actually more secure than before, because you’ve reduced the degree to which the search for security dictates your decisions. Taking the leap may actually be the more sober and sensible choice. Finally, it’s worth noting, writes the philosopher Iddo Landau, that when it comes to living a meaningful life, we make things harder than they need to be, by setting the bar – the definition of a life of meaning – much too high. We’re alive for a tiny pinprick of time, and almost none of us have the talents to be a Mozart, a Michelangelo or a Shakespeare. (Indeed, they’re celebrated precisely because such genius is so vanishingly rare.) And yet we tell ourselves – and tell ourselves ever more frequently, in a culture that worships fame – that we must do something extraordinary with our lives in order for them to count. We long to follow Steve Jobs’s advice to “put a dent in the universe” – but that means defining all sorts of other more ordinary activities as not meaningful: raising children well, say, or being a good neighbour, or developing a flair for mixing cocktails, or baking cakes. Yet who’d want to live in a world without any of those?