Writings

Copyright © 2025, Mark Whitaker

There is nothing like the pleasure of an epiphany. The sudden visibility; the new frame in which to understand the world; and perhaps most of all, the alluring prospect of improving one’s life upon applying its wisdom. The application of insight, however, is curiously difficult. And while not all insights are actionable, plenty of them are but remain stuck in thought without ever reaching action. They are merely “known and not lived.”¹

The failure to bridge the gap is not for lack of effort. Many people routinely grapple with complicated and painful ideas in pursuit of clarity. Many insights are hard-won. I wonder, though, if sometimes we conflate the effort required to obtain insight with the effort required to put it into practice. For it is one thing to recognize the need for a boundary, but quite another to actually set it.

Does this mistake sound at all familiar? It’s certainly one I have made. Some revelatory idea infuses me with a renewed sense of purpose. I bask in the afterglow and optimistically envision transforming my life while giving little thought to the grunt work involved in doing so, as if my optimism will naturally blossom into discipline. Time passes, nothing much changes, and I am inevitably confronted by the stark reminder that the application of knowledge is hard. Indeed, behavior change can be rife with discomfort, uncertainty, fear, confusion, disappointment, shame, aggravation, exhaustion, and even grief. It is no wonder that we have devised countless ways to resist it.

One of the craftiest forms of avoidance, one that can be difficult to see and is worth drawing attention to, involves a specific role that we force insight to play. We subordinate action to insight by adopting an if-then model that makes the former contingent on the latter. 

If I’m certain this is the best way to spend my time
If I gain more understanding about my anxiety
If I’m confident I will succeed
If I have a sufficiently robust plan
If I learn more coping skills
If I increase my motivation
If I’m sure I won’t feel uncomfortable
If I’m sure I won’t regret my decision

Then I will act

It is a convenient way to avoid action while maintaining the appearance of doing important work, as it trades in the gnarly work of behavior change for the safer work of thinking about it. This if-then formula bottlenecks action by insisting that we possess an unrealistic and ever-expanding body of knowledge before we’re allowed to move, indefinitely delaying our progress with no recourse other than to gather more and more insights. It expects us to think, rather than swim, our way out of the eddies we’re caught in. And, somewhat ironically, it conditions us to treat insights as objects to be collected, not as the beacons of well-being that we were attracted to in the first place.

How can we overcome this problem? How do we learn to actually live out and embody our insights? There are a myriad of therapeutic techniques for helping people change their behaviors. The aim of this essay is not to list them all here, for there are countless other—and better—resources for that elsewhere. This is merely a reflection on a particular species of avoidance that I’ve noticed in my life and in that of many others. A subtle tendency to shirk action by pivoting to thought. A tendency that misreads the discomfort associated with taking action as a sign of unreadiness.

What can be said, however, is that regardless of which techniques are used, the corrective to this tendency is not to become thoughtless, haphazard decision-makers, or to bulldoze past our personal boundaries. Nor is it to try and change all things at all times. That would be both tedious and impractical. Perhaps it is simply to recognize when we have good enough information to warrant action, and to resist avoiding it by retreating into further analysis. Perhaps we must learn to read the tells of our self-deception. To notice when we rebrand being indecisive as being selective. When we rebrand reluctance as preparation. Or procrastination as patience. To notice when we are channeling the perfectionism of a collector instead of the courage of an explorer. And perhaps in response to this recognition, and all the looming uncertainties that lie ahead, we should conjure the boldness to take a step forward.

Notes

1. Peter Suber, “When We Leave Our Desks,” 1992, https://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/writing/bacc2.htm