Why do we paint ourselves into joyless corners with no way out?

By David McElroy · December 16, 2021

I hadn’t seen Angie for several years. When I had first known her — about five or six years ago — she had been a straight-laced college student working her way through a nursing program. When I saw her this week, everything had changed.

The last time I had bumped into her, it had been about three years ago. She had been in a restaurant on a Sunday evening with a group of people from her church. She had seemed happy and content — looking and acting the part of a beautiful young woman with a bright future ahead of her.

This week, though, everything was different. She’s pregnant. She’s miserable. She told me the father-to-be disappeared as soon as she told him she was pregnant. The guy was immediately living with another woman and wants nothing to do with the baby.

A female friend who was with Angie that night started telling me about the man who helped bring our mutual friend to this point. Between the two of them, they painted a picture of a loser — an arrest record, drug habits, bad character, no future — who Angie had put up with for no good reason.

As I listened to their story, things seemed obvious. Angie had lowered her standards a little bit at first. She had lied to herself about what the man was. She let him lead her — one little step at a time — into things that had been completely foreign to her.

And now she’s alone and miserable. She slowly painted herself into a corner — one tiny bad decision at a time — and now she sees no way out of the hole into which she dragged herself.

In some respects, Angie is still the same person I once knew. She’s still the same beautiful blue-eyed blonde who I met years ago. She’s still bright enough that she could have achieved whatever she wanted.

But she’s changed. She’s hard. She’s cynical. She seems defeated. Her education is a distant memory at this point. Her pregnancy caused her to leave a job she liked in order to take an office job which bores her. She’s unhappy — and she seems to have little hope for the bright future she had once assumed would be hers.

It would be easy for me to feel condescending about Angie. I suspect most people would be likely to feel superior to her in some ways, maybe thinking, “I’d never make those sorts of mistakes.” But as I think about her path, I realize her story isn’t that different than things that most of us have done, at least in concept.

If you’re past your early 20s, there’s a very good chance that your life has gone in directions you wouldn’t have predicted at one time. There’s a good chance there are situations you’ve allowed to develop in your life which you can’t quite explain — people who shouldn’t be in your life or a job you hate — things you would have sworn would have never happened to you.

I have many examples of this pattern in my own life. I can look back at a number of situations in my life — related to career, love, friendships and more — and see some small mistake I made which led to an entire series of additional mistakes. In each case, that series of smaller mistakes left me painted into corners from which I couldn’t extract myself.

They’ve left me in situations from which there was no sensible exit. And in some cases, I’ve simply lived with something I didn’t want, because I didn’t know what else to do.

Even though I know I do this — and I clearly see others do it — that doesn’t stop me from continuing it. As I got off the phone with someone today — someone with whom I deal closely in business — I was annoyed with myself that I’m still associated with that person. It was hard for me to trace how the association actually started. And it was even harder to explain to myself why I haven’t ended it.

When we first start making the bad decisions which will eventually paint us into a corner, we think we still have plenty of options. And we really do, at that point. But that one bad decision makes it harder to avoid the next obvious bad decision. Before we know it, one obvious mistake leads to the next. We take the path of least resistance, certain that we can always back out later if we want.

But then we realize we’ve painted all of our paths of escape — and our back is up against a wall. Suddenly, we find that we’ve left ourselves no options. We feel trapped.

That’s how a beautiful young woman with a great future can end up pregnant, alone and spiraling into a toxic future. It’s how I can end up stuck in a situation I promised myself that I’d never allow to happen.

It’s how you might end up stuck in a miserable marriage to someone you can’t stand. It’s how someone who had had great expectations of life might end up unhappy and stuck in a situation he or she never wanted.

I think most people find themselves in this pattern, but most are too afraid to be honest enough with themselves to admit what they’ve done. And even those of us who gain enough emotional clarity to admit our blame for what we’ve done to ourselves rarely find a way out.

I don’t have a magic solution. I can only point to what I see as a very common problem — for myself and for many I’ve loved — and give you one clue that has sometimes worked for me.

When I’ve found myself in similar situations, I’ve climbed out only when two things came together. First, when I had someone who was willing to work with me to help solve the problem. Second, when I was willing to do absolutely anything to solve the problem — and when I’ve been willing to take sudden, radical steps to break free.

When I’ve painted myself into a corner, I find that measured and reasonable plans to extricate myself don’t work. The only thing that works is when I’m able to metaphorically reach out to someone else and say, “Please hold onto my hand and pull. I’m going to try something crazy — and I hope this crazy escape plan works.”

If you’ve put yourself into an extraordinary trap, it takes an extraordinary move to pull yourself free. And the same sort of safe and risk-free thinking that trapped you into the corner is never going to pull you to safety.

I wish I could say that I’m wise enough — and smart enough — to never make these sorts of mistakes again. But at heart, I’m no better than Angie. I’m no better than you. I’m constantly looking to take the easy and safe ways out of joyless situations.

And most of the time, it’s those “safe and easy” decisions that leave us painted into an unhappy corner, asking ourselves how we’ve made this insane mistake once again.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

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The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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