Why do humans run away from things we really need the most?

By David McElroy · February 16, 2019

My life isn’t what I want it to be. If I’m honest with myself, it never has been.

I have a narrative that I like to sell myself. It’s based on truth, but I can’t tell whether it’s the complete truth. I doubt any of our personal narratives are the complete truth. But here’s my persistent narrative.

I can see a time in my past when I was on the right track. It was a time when I was doing things I was proud of and I thought I had a great future. Then I got off track. I rebelled against something. Maybe it was against The Man. Maybe it was against my father. Maybe it was against culture telling me what I had to be.

I jumped off the treadmill leading to worldly success and I’ve been running away ever since. My narrative tells me that I’m just around the corner from finally succeeding — my own way — without doing what The Man said I had to do.

You have a narrative, too. It’s probably very different from mine. But we almost certainly share something important. We both know something which we desperately need — something we’ve always needed — and we keep finding all sorts of reasons not to reach out and accept whatever it is.

You can almost certainly have what you need. I can certainly have what I need, one way or another. But we continue sleepwalking through life, acting as though our time is unlimited, acting as though we will always have another day to deal with what we need.

Our narratives are the stories we invent to explain the past and explain our present. My narratives try to explain the present by promising that everything is about to be better. By telling myself tomorrow is about to be great, it gives me an excuse not to do anything about today.

I’m the most afraid of love, because that’s what I need the most. I fantasize about having the love and understanding and acceptance that I need from a woman. I dream of having my phone ring one day and having someone say, “I love you enough that I’m willing to find a way to be with you, no matter what.”

But if that were to happen, I would feel panicked. I would feel like running or distrusting what I heard. I would be afraid of being betrayed. You see, it’s not that I’m afraid to love. I’m just so afraid of not being loved that my mind has trouble accepting that as really possible.

There are other things I want which also scare me. There are business opportunities which I’d rather fantasize about than accept. If I’m honest with myself, I’ve always done that. With so many things, I’ve been so afraid of any kind of failure that I simply didn’t try at all. I just told myself how great it would be — one day.

One of the saddest words in human experience is “almost.” The things I regret the most are the things that almost happened — times when I almost took a chance or someone else almost took a chance on me. It’s sad if I love a woman and she doesn’t love me back. But it’s heartbreaking to love a woman and she loves me, too, but she decides not to take a chance on me.

I don’t know who wrote these words, but they express the idea quite well:

“The saddest word in the whole wide world is the word almost. He was almost in love. She was almost good for him. He almost stopped her. She almost waited. He almost lived. They almost made it.”

If you’re happy with your life — if you’re where you had hoped to be and you’re loved as you want to be loved — this might not apply to you. But for the vast majority of us, there’s a gnawing feeling of regret inside us when we allow ourselves to feel it. We know we haven’t accepted the things we need. We know we’ve been afraid to take more emotional risks. We know we’ve wasted our time — and deep down, we know we’re running out of time.

I suppose there can be a million reasons why we do these things, but they mostly boil down to some form of a fear that we don’t deserve to have our true needs met. Someone wouldn’t think we’re good enough. Someone else wouldn’t understand what we did. Someone else would criticize us. We can find a million reasons to keep running — to continue finding “logical reasons” to reject what we need.

I had a dream a couple of months ago and I didn’t remember all of it when I woke up. But I remembered one line strongly enough that I wrote it down as soon as I woke up. I don’t remember exactly the circumstances in the dream or what I was telling someone not to run away from, but I can remember reaching out for a woman’s hand in a fog. I couldn’t see her face, but I knew who she was. It doesn’t entirely make sense to me, but it felt emotionally true.

“You can trust me and let me help you,” I said, “or you can run away, just as you always have before. But you can’t do both.”

I think I can say that to myself and I can probably say it to you, too. We both need things which require the help of someone else to pursue — and to accept — but we can’t have what we need as long as we run away.

I don’t like thinking seriously about making the changes that I need to keep making in my life. I don’t like the thought of going out and finding someone new to love me. I don’t like the thought of taking some business chances that I need to take.

It’s easier for me to stick with my old narrative — to say that it will all magically change tomorrow or the week after or maybe next year. But sticking with that is a great way to end up alone and unhappy at the end of life — thinking about the love and life that I almost had.

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I’m seeing a lot of simplistic and dishonest explanations right now for the current rioting in France. Those on the populist far right claim it’s all about Muslim immigrants to France disrupting the culture. Their message is that this sort of thing is going to happen in the U.S. unless “we defend the border.” On the far left, socialists and their fellow travelers claim the riots are all about wealthy people in France not paying enough taxes, resulting in cuts to government services. The truth is far more complicated, but it’s rooted in the decline of population growth in Europe. There simply aren’t enough young workers paying into the tax system anymore, so cuts in social services were inevitable. There is genuine cultural tension as more and more people immigrate from other countries, but government cuts to education and other services are even more important to what’s happening. The situation is complicated, so don’t let dishonest people with U.S. political agendas tell you that it happens to support whatever they were already promoting for partisan reasons.

Here’s another reason to appreciate the cats in your life: New research involving 93 countries found that places with more cats per person also tended to have happier people. The researchers say the finding fits with previous evidence that living with pets can reduce loneliness and stress while providing companionship, emotional attachment and social support. The study doesn’t prove that cats cause greater happiness, but it certainly adds to the evidence that sharing your home — and your life — with a cat might be good for you.

The company that owns Facebook and Instagram is heavily promoting its new AI-based software assistant called Muse, but people who are using it as it was designed are incredibly foolish. An early adopter of the software discovered that a few days ago when he advertised an item for sale on Facebook Marketplace — and he inadvertently gave Muse full authority to act on his behalf. The software agreed to a lowball offer made by another Facebook user and then gave that man the home address of the man for whom he was an agent. The software told the buyer that the seller was home and waiting for him. When the buyer showed up and waited angrily, the would-be buyer left an angry review for the man. And this angry man had the seller’s home address. It was only well after that that the software reported what it had done and admitted it had made a mistake. I won’t be putting that much power into the hands of any software. I think anyone who agrees to such terms is a fool. And the software’s user agreement says you’re responsible for purchases the software makes in your name. Nope.

Meet my new girlfriend. Her name is Meg. And she’s my little sweetheart. A couple of months ago, a neighbor across the street told me about a new stray in the neighborhood that she and I were both soon feeding. The cat had been very skittish about contact and she had a lot of scabs and parasites in her fur, but a trip to the vet last week revealed that she was otherwise in good health. The vet estimates her to be 1 to 2 years old. I named her for Meg Murry, the 13-year-old protagonist of Madeleine L’Engle’s wonderful book, “A Wrinkle in Time.” (Please read the book. Don’t watch the horrible movie.) Since we lost Lucy almost a year ago, it seems appropriate that we finally have a new little girl to join the household. She’s already captured my heart, but Alex, Oliver and Sam aren’t there quite yet.

There’s nothing socially acceptable that’s as dangerous as drinking alcohol. Most people grow up being told to “drink responsibly” — and all of us see people abusing this drug in one way or another — but the truth is that drinking alcohol is always a terrible risk. The alcohol in these drinks is toxic and the human liver has to work hard to filter the toxins out. What most people don’t realize is that alcohol is classified as a known carcinogen by the World Health Organization — because of the well-established connection between imbibing and various cancers. Many people have taken refuge behind the idea that light or moderate drinking might be safe, but a new study shows that drinking even one drink a day increases the risks of 10 types of cancer. When I was a teen-ager, I looked around and saw the negative effects that this behavior had on a lot of people and decided not to start drinking, so I’ve never even tried this poison. The evidence keeps piling up that I was lucky to have come to that conclusion early.

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