There’s one feeling nearly every unhappy person shares: A sense of being stuck. Nobody chooses to be unhappy, of course. Our actions might lead us to unhappiness, but it’s never the first thing we want. If we’re in a long stretch of unhappiness, it means that there’s something that’s keeping us from changing our lives.
Some of the most powerful words on this feeling of paralysis come from the Irish author James Joyce. His short-story collection, Dubliners, takes this feeling of paralysis as one of its main themes. The stories’ protagonists often find themselves stuck in a life they can’t stand and dreaming of something else.
Dreaming isn’t enough to escape—sometimes, it can even keep us trapped. Many characters throughout the book find themselves with opportunities to escape but suddenly feel unable to leave for anywhere else.
A Story of Paralysis
In one story, a woman named Eveline (the story is also named “Eveline”) finds herself at a crossroads. She’s spent her entire life in Dublin but has met a man, Frank, who offers to marry her and take her to Argentina. She’s excited to pursue a new life, though afraid of leaving what she’s had behind.
Eventually, she commits herself to leave with him after thinking about just how difficult she finds her life at home. Yet just as she’s about to get on the boat to leave with him, she finds herself unable to move. As Frank tries to pull her onto the boat, he’s pushed away by the crowd, and he slowly moves away as she stands there stuck in place.
It’s uncertain whether Frank was telling the truth—he may well have been lying all along about where he meant to go. But still, Eveline isn’t stuck because she doubts him: She’s kept back because she’s afraid to leave the place she knows. This is a perfect illustration of the paralysis of unhappiness. How often do we find ourselves unhappy yet unable to try anything new? We might see an opportunity to escape a routine but choose not to take it. It’s common and frustrating.
Likely, we’ve all had an experience in our lives of a choice just as significant and difficult as this one. Things like choosing a college, deciding on a job, or taking a chance on a relationship can all lead to this sense of being stuck. We see an opportunity to make a change and move to something better, but we simply feel paralyzed.
We might experience this in small ways as well. Small parts of our routine become stuck in place because we don’t know what we would do without them. We might be unhappy with watching TV, but what will it be like if we try to replace it?
Frozen by Fear
It’s not a secret what causes this: We’re afraid of the unknown. Making a change means taking a risk. All of these changes mean taking a leap of faith and hoping that things aren’t worse than they are now. There’s always a chance of failure and rejection whenever we try to make a change.
When we’re faced with a choice between a familiar, unhappy place and an uncertain chance for happiness, we often choose familiarity first.
Fear, like any other emotion, is one of the human passions. The passions are simply the things that drive us to take action. Things like hunger, boredom, or anger are all sorts of passions. When we experience these things, we’re led to make a change somehow.
We often think that these things are best when they’re controlled. We see the passions as things that are out of our control and obstacles to free choice. When we’re controlled by these emotions, we don’t really have a choice in what we do.
Real freedom does mean finding a way to control these passions. But when we view the passions as simply negative, we miss something significant about what makes us do what we do. We never really act on anything without some kind of passion. If we don’t have this sort of feeling, we’d be just as stuck as we are if we’re ruled by fear.
Fear is a powerful passion. It’s easy to be literally unable to move from fear, whether it’s something significant like fearing death or something small like fearing an awkward conversation. But there’s an opposite emotion that can be just as powerful and just as significant in living life: Daring.
An Antidote to Fear
Daring should be familiar to all of us, though it might not be as common as fear. It’s that feeling that drives us to do something despite the danger. It’s what makes us say with full confidence that we can do something even before we have a good reason to believe it.
Daring is, of course, not a perfect guide. It’s daring that makes teenagers drive 100 miles an hour down the highway and it’s daring that makes gamblers bet $10,000 on red. Always listening to a spirit of daring can make you just as unhappy as always listening to a spirit of fear and doubt.
But the best path is not rejecting both sides. Instead, we should try to find a way to balance the two, looking for how we can listen to reasonable doubt and be driven by reasonable confidence. In the middle is the virtue of courage, balancing the two passions.
Being virtuous always means finding a median between two extremes. On the one hand, we have paralyzing fear that stops us from making a change. On the other hand, we have reckless daring that doesn’t think about the consequences. Neither of these is a good path, and neither of these is the way to happiness.
Happiness can’t mean remaining perfectly the same. The simple fact of the matter is that we can’t stay the same forever, no matter what. Things will always change. In the end, we can’t beat change through fear.
Instead, we need to find a strong spirit of daring and hope that brings us to go on in spite of the risk. We need to learn to find the opportunity in tomorrow instead of the danger. When we are offered a chance to get out of an unhappy routine, we can’t just hold ourselves back while the crowd moves on.