You’re 20 years down the road, living paycheck to paycheck, eating ramen every day up until your stove breaks. $200 to fix it, but your savings accounts reek of the negatives, and your light bill just got more expensive. You chose this life, the dark, hungry life. This is your reality, but did it always have to be?
In any sense, your future is not an accident or a curse that’s put on you, but rather a result of the habits, risks, or decisions you’ve either made or avoided. While life can feel suffocating and like you’re backed into a corner, if you aren’t willing to change your life then you are choosing to stay stuck in the same cycle that drags you down. Nothing less, but also nothing more.
The version of you that struggles didn’t appear out of nowhere. Most of the time it’s built. At some point, there were always opportunities for you to grow and do something different. They weren’t always necessarily advertised on a big sign that says “opportunity,” but they were there, and your willingness to take it is the difference between success or cycles.
Big life moments will forever stem from small uncomfortable ones, the ones that are filled with the most amount of uncertainty. However, these uncomfortable, annoying, universal moments, like saving a little more, stepping out of familiarity, or putting in just a little more work, is what makes or breaks the change in your life and truthfully, change will never be convenient. It’s disciplined and consistent and includes the willingness to face discomfort, but change is the only thing that will help you grow; the only thing that shows you the difference of how your life’s could go and choosing not to grow solidifies you in future positions that you’ll want to escape. Lack of change is an active decision to accept whatever comes your way.
This is why, if you aren’t willing to change your life, you are choosing it. This doesn’t mean every struggle is deserved or that the path up will be easy or fair, but it does mean that growth and your life are in your hands, and it requires you to do more with it then just hold it and hope it does something. Rearrangement is difficult, but staying stuck is its own kind of cost.
