Why do we stay in prison when there’s no lock holding us there?

By David McElroy · September 19, 2019

One of the restaurants where I go a lot lately is badly managed. I really like some of the employees and they talk with me about their frustrations quite a bit.

A few days ago, a couple of the employees had joined me at my table during their break. They were telling me the latest outrages they faced.

“Why in the world do they stay here if they’re so unhappy?” I thought to myself. I didn’t want to say that to them and sound condescending, but I was judging them for staying where they clearly didn’t want to be.

For a moment, I felt a little smug (and condescending), but then the smile disappeared from my face. In a painful flash, I saw my hypocrisy and felt really uncomfortable.

Why do people stay in places where they’re unhappy? I shouldn’t be pointing a finger at them. My smug question should be directed at myself.

I haven’t been able to get this uncomfortable question out of my mind since then. The more I think about it, the more I see this horrible tendency in a lot of people, including myself at times.

We sometimes feel as though we’re in prison. We don’t want to be where we are. We feel trapped. We’re quietly miserable, even though we might not admit that to others.

We have “good reasons” why we stay where we are. We’re envious of other people who can make changes and leave their prisons, but we think something is different for us. We might say we’re staying to protect someone else. We might think we’re protecting ourselves. We might even promise ourselves that we’re eventually going to leave.

But the simple truth is that we continue to endure long-term pain — over and over and over again — because we are unwilling to endure some short-term pain today.

When I used to work for myself, every day of the week seemed pretty much like any other. Depending on what was going on, I might work on any particular day. It didn’t matter whether it was Saturday or Sunday or a holiday. If something needed to be done, I was happy to do the work.

But I was just as likely to take an unplanned afternoon off to visit the zoo. Or go to a movie by myself in the afternoon while everybody else I knew was stuck at an office. Or get into the car and go visit someone I wanted to see, even if she lived hundreds of miles away. Or just take a day off and write whatever I wanted to write.

I had freedom to do what I wanted when I wanted to do it. As long as I got my work done — on my own schedule, for the most part — I was free and I was happy.

I don’t have that freedom today. I’ve tied myself to being at an office on someone else’s schedule. It’s not an unreasonable schedule. I can’t complain. I can get time off or re-arrange things when I really need to. But unless there’s a very good reason, I’m going to be in that office — doing work that matters to someone else — for those hours five days a week.

When I used to work for myself, Fridays were nothing special to me and I didn’t dread Mondays. Today, I live for the weekend. I feel like a prisoner who goes on parole each Friday at 5 p.m. and has to return on Monday.

Nobody forces me to do this. It was an opportunity that was handed to me and I took it. I’m certainly not unhappy with the person who offered me the job — who happens to be a long-time friend — but I know I’ve trapped myself in a velvet prison.

So why don’t I make a change?

That was the question that hit me pretty hard as I sat there and judged those restaurant employees the other day. Why don’t I make a change?

There’s inertia, of course. This is a well-established pattern. The company has come to depend on me, so I suppose I like to believe it would hurt my friend if I left. I don’t have to make a new plan to stick with this. I just get up each day and go solve problems for someone else — instead of myself.

I could ditch that job and keep my real estate license. I could go ahead and get a broker’s license in the next couple of months if I wanted to. I could replace the income from what I’m doing internally at the company — probably more easily than I want to admit — but it’s easier to just keep hating weekdays and praying for the arrival of the weekend.

I’m unhappy with myself about this, but so far, I haven’t done anything about it.

Everybody has done this. Most of us are doing it right now — about something. I don’t know what you need to change. I don’t know what your prison is. But I do know that your reasons for staying in your prison are terrible. I know the door is really open. All you have to do is screw up your courage and walk through the door which has been open all along.

You can either leave — and go do whatever else you ought to be doing instead — or you can waste more months or years or even decades of your life in this unlocked prison.

Eventually, it will be too late for whatever it is you want to be doing instead. You and I both need to find the courage to take action right now — not tomorrow or next week — to start walking through the prison doors which have held us in.

If we don’t, we will forever regret staying imprisoned in a place we could have left at any time.

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There was a time when I was idealistic enough to believe that if a writer expressed his thoughts clearly and simply enough, any bright and honest person would understand his point. I know better now. We all bring so many unconscious assumptions to the things we read that we often see what we expect to see instead of what the writer intended. This is incredibly frustrating to me as a writer, but I’m trying more and more to just say what I need to say — as clearly as I know how — and then ignore the inevitable responses which show that others perceived something which was not intended. I have to write for those who “get” where I’m coming from, not for those who see my words through personal filters that change my meaning. I hope my intentions are clear to you and I hope what I write can be useful to you, but if not, maybe my work just isn’t right for you. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

I found out this evening that someone I casually knew killed himself last Wednesday. I didn’t know him well — and I never found him personable — but he had started work a couple of months ago at a restaurant where I go. He was a 26-year-old who struck me as a confused and unhappy person, but I didn’t think much about it since he stayed to himself and resisted my efforts to chat with him. It turns out that he had a history of depression and had a lot of gender confusion. He seemed very androgynous to me and I learned today that he presented himself as female in some situations. He was rejected by a romantic interest last week, so he went to the woods and killed himself. His body wasn’t found for three days. It’s tragic how miserable people around us can be and how we so rarely know the truth about things they struggle with.

I’ve been with people for most of this day, but I feel lonely tonight. I’ve had things on my mind for the last few days that I feel the strong need to talk about. I need someone to share my thoughts with — someone who’s interested in ideas and how they affect us. Someone who gets excited to discover new things and can find joy in seeing new ways those things might change our lives. I feel lonely tonight because I painfully remember what it feels like to have that — and I’m craving that sort of connection. I miss having someone I can call and say, “I’ve been reading something and it’s sparked some thoughts I want to share with you.” Those sorts of conversations have lasted for hours for me in the past — or for thousands of words if it’s an exchange of mail — and it feels wrong that there is nobody who wants to hear such things from me tonight. I used to think being lonely was about being alone, but I understand now it’s a longing for one particular person. The loneliest place to be when you need one person is in a crowd composed of people who cannot be who you need.

I don’t agree with everything the late Neil Postman wrote, but I would argue that no other recent scholar gives coherent structure to the last few hundred years in the way his books do. I’m currently re-reading his book, “Technopoly,” and I’m comforted to have a scholar give structure and definitions to things which I’ve observed and barely understood. I was enough of a technophile when I first read this book that I bristled at much of what it said. I didn’t want him to be right and it was easier to dismiss him as a Luddite. But as I see technology continue to enable an information glut which is changing society for the worse, I find comfort in his explanations for how we got here. I don’t yet know the solutions, but I finally understand the problems more clearly. I suspect that much of what we need to make life more meaningful can be found in things we accidentally threw away in the past to make room for technologies. I strongly urge you to read the book and think about its implications.

I’d like to write a modern version of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” — a more cynical one — with a realistic ending for today’s audience. In this new version, the little boy points out on social media that the emperor is naked but nobody listens to him. Instead, everybody keeps posting grander and grander praise for the emperor’s non-existent clothes. The cognitive dissonance makes the people unable to hear the child who tells them the truth, because they’re getting social media praise — likes and so forth — for their lies. The confused child eventually feels so defeated that he shuts up and walks away. He’s so hurt and disappointed by this that he withdraws from the world and spends years in therapy, trying to figure out whether the rest of the world is crazy or if he’s the crazy one. Ever since I was a child, I wanted to be that little boy, but few want to hear the truth today. Either I’m crazy or else our culture has gone insane.

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