Resisting the natural
I heard once the following sentence “Change is the only constant in life.” This is something that can look like a simple thing to understand, something that almost every human being would tell you “yeah, such a big truth”, or even “well, it’s obvious”. Yes, it’s obvious, the world around us changes constantly, our daily life changes, if you take a look 20 years back and see the development of Internet, the smartphones, TV on demand… but it also changes in terms of personal relationships, probably you keep a bunch of good friends from school or high school, but other people just vanished from your life, these people can play a very important role in your life, so important that, eventually, you even get married, and after a while, you might split up. And yes, of course, the constant change affects also dramatically to your working life.
If you analyse the previous changes I mentioned, adapt to the technology was probably not very difficult to the most of the people, because it’s here to help and entertain you and just makes your life easier. Now we can even have food at our doorstep just tapping on the phone a couple of times, or have a bank account opened in less than 20 minutes. It’s easy to adapt to the comfortable changes, it’s so easy, that sometimes, you dont even realize you are adapting to something or doing any effort.
When we talk about the personal relationships, we can start to see some signals of resistance to the natural, maybe that old friend of yours was not that such a good friend, if we started to see each other less and less along the years, maybe it just happened and there’s no problem with it, but some people tries to keep relationships alive for some reason more than true friendship, maybe they have fear to be alone or not having the same social life as before, or maybe they just don’t like changes. This is even more visible if we talk about romantic relationships, people creates a life plan towards a person, and no matter how toxic and uncomfortable the relationship is, you try to stick to this person, because you dont want to change your plan, or your current life, just in case the hassle that comes later, divorce, lawyers, looking for a new partner… eventually the idea on people’s brain is “better the evil you know”…
If we talk about your career or working life, the things are not going to change for better, the other way around, for sure is going to become worse. At the workplace is where the people tends to be more resistant to changes and averse to embrace new ideas to explore. Usually the working environment is a rat race to have the best results, to be right, and eventually get a promotion (and more money and power). Embrace new ideas on a competitive setup is quite complicated, in fact, you would need a collaborative setup instead. In the other hand you also have people that directly doesn’t participate in any rat race, they just passively resist to change just doing nothing and assuming they will work forever in a dull place justifying themselves to not change job.
People resist change on their jobs in many levels, they don’t hear advises from other colleagues, or they refuse to use something like Scrum, because learning a new methodology and process it’s a hassle, and people doesn’t want to learn new stuff because, apparently, the results are going to be the same. You also have that CTO that will refuse to renew the company’s technological stack because… why to touch something that is working? we can save the budget for different things, as marketing (retches here…), and I can get another medal. Or simply, a person that should change a job, whether because he’s working with idiots, or just is time to learn somethin new and discover other ways of working, but they like thaaaaat much that coffee machine they have at the office, or the conmute is soooo easy or… again… better the evil you know… Any excuse to not change, is acceptable, and of course, you must understand it.
And here comes the paradox, the world that surrounds us is in constant change, we DO know it, BUT we refuse to adapt ourselves in a lot of situations. If you ask me why this happens, if we review the previous examples, people adapts more or less ok to new techologies, we embrace the digital change, but we start to not feel well with changing the people we have around us in our daily life, and so on with your working life. So we can easily establish a direct link between the comfortability of the individual and the degree of resistance to change this individual can have. Then, as little effort we should do to adapt to something, more prone we will be to really adapt to it.
So, are we lazy then? Not at all, it’s a combination of factors, many people can do routinary heavy tasks for years and years with no major problems more than complain about the manager, or the salary from time to time, but they will keep living inside their bubble, and yes, with “bubble” I mean the so called “comfort zone”. Usually this comfort zone is not laziness, is just a big lack of self confidence, this lack of confidence produces fear, and when the fear kicks in, our reptilian brain takes control of our behaviour and we enter in defense mode, just trying to avoid the closest upcoming danger, and not making wise decissions in the mid-long term.
One of the big proofs of this reptilian brain taking the control is when you challenge people with logic, imagine this conversation with a relative or a friend:
Friend: I hate my manager, he’s an asshole, I have to do overtime with no extra salary later
You: If it’s so bad, why don’t you talk with him about it?
-Nah, that’s impossible, he won’t listen to me
-And why don’t you look for another job?
-Well… is not that easy, I have a permanent contract, the salary is not totally bad… I have bills to pay and is risky to change now
-So, not everything at your job is terrible, let’s take a look to the bright side…
-Again, is not that easy, you couldn’t understand it…
For me this is not a very strange conversation, actually I had it many times with different people, and when it comes to logic, the conversation turns ugly, and this is just a soft example, but people can feel offended and upset when they are challenged by the logic, and this happens, first, because they know you are right, and second, because they don’t want to admit they are not thinking logically and you are right. They dont think logically becase fear and the reptilian brain are the ones driving there.
People would do literally anything to excuse their illogical behaviour, they will try to excuse themselves in a poor way, they will be condescendent with you kind of “you have so much to learn…” and they will be even upset with you for trying the magic of the logical thinking on them. You won’t find people admitting that they are in a dead end relationship or job because they have fear of change, because if you realize that, you simply act to change it.
Usually people is paralysed by fear and they cannot really reason in a clear way, so everything are excuses, defensive moves and trying that the world adapts to themselves instead doing the opposite, that actually is way easier, although requires some efforts and exposition to the other’s opinion and challenging some kind of social status quo. But the problem for many people is that this efforts are literally unbearable, even very tiny efforts, so they always prefer to be in the comfort area…
At the end, you can show many books, many videos, give many explanations on why you decide to do this or the other to improve your life, it doesn’t matter, because the people don’t want to change their minds, they avoid the effort, as if resiting the natural wasn’t an effort itself… People won’t ever apply to themelves the principle of “no pain, no gain”, because yes, it’s another obvious sentence.
I have had fear, I have had lacks of self confidence, I commited the same mistakes as anybody else, but if you have targets (even small ones, as have less stress at work), and your really want to achieve them, you know that you need to take some actions and risk yourself in different ways. And here comes another thing to bear in mind, we talked about fears and comfortability, but probably, another factor is that we live in a society with no targets more than pay the bills and watch on demand programs, so I can understand it sometimes, how can we ask people to spend their time on embracing the constant change of life, if they have lack of confidence, fears, they tend to be comfortable and, on top, they have no targets defined?
