Every catastrophe in a person's life can be traced to one of two sources: a problem that was never solved, or an opportunity that was never cultivated. When people look back on their lives with regret, they are almost always mourning one of these two things. And both, at their root, share a single cause — avoidance.
The Three Pillars of a Good Life
Before understanding avoidance, it helps to understand what's actually at stake. A meaningful, engaged life rests on three pillars: finance, relationships, and health. Nearly everything that matters will fall into one of these three categories.
- Finance encompasses how you earn money and how you make money work for you — income generation and capital appreciation.
- Relationships include your spiritual life, romantic partnerships, friendships, and transactional connections.
- Health covers how you feed yourself, how you move, and how you care for the one body you have.
These pillars do not stand independently. When one becomes unstable, it places pressure on the others. A catastrophic relationship breakdown — a separation or divorce — doesn't stay contained. It bleeds into finances through legal costs and lost earning capacity, and into health through stress, anxiety, isolation, and loneliness. One crumbling pillar can topple the others if it isn't stabilized quickly. This is why small, ignored problems rarely stay small.
Two Categories of Catastrophe
There is an old phrase worth sitting with: "The saddest words of mouth and pen will always be these — it might have been." This captures the second and often overlooked category of catastrophe. Most people think of catastrophe as something that happens to them. But many of the deepest regrets come not from problems that exploded, but from opportunities that quietly closed.
The two categories are:
- Problems you don't solve — small issues left unaddressed that compound into crises.
- Opportunities you don't cultivate — openings in your finances, relationships, or health that you failed to act on until they were gone.
In both cases, the mechanism is the same. Something required attention. Discomfort stood in the way. And avoidance won.
Creative Tension: The Engine of Progress
A rubber band lying flat serves no purpose. It only becomes useful when tension is introduced — when two points are pulled in opposing directions. This is a precise analogy for how human motivation works.
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Speaker holding a rubber band to demonstrate the concept of creative tension between reality and vision
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At one end of the tension is reality — an honest, unvarnished account of where things actually stand. At the other end is vision — where you intend to go. The stretch between them creates what psychologists call creative tension, and it is the source of dopamine-driven motivation. Dopamine is the approach neurotransmitter: it registers the gap between here and there and compels movement toward the goal.
Without this tension, there is no drive — only complacency. But here is where most people derail: once the tension becomes uncomfortable, they face two and only two options. They can elevate their reality to meet their vision, or they can lower their vision to meet their reality. Most people, when things get hard, quietly lower their vision. They call it being realistic. It is, more often, avoidance.
The Avoidance Loop: How the Brain Automates the Wrong Behaviors
Understanding avoidance requires understanding how the brain builds habits. The cycle follows a simple three-part formula: Trigger → Behavior → Reward. The brain is constantly classifying every experience along two axes: does it feel good or bad, and does it work or not? Whatever combination the brain tags as "feels good and works," it will seek to automate — removing conscious decision-making so the behavior runs on its own.
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Four-quadrant diagram with 'feels good/feels bad' on the Y-axis and 'works/doesn't work' on the X-axis, illustrating how the brain assigns reward value to behaviors
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The problem is that the brain only lives in the immediate. It wants relief now. This is why doom-scrolling on a phone persists even when people know it makes them feel worse and accomplishes nothing — the brain has mislabeled it as a source of relief. It filed that behavior in the "feels good, works" quadrant because it provided momentary escape from discomfort, even though the long-term reality is precisely the opposite.
Avoidance operates the same way. Approaching any meaningful problem or opportunity involves short-to-medium-term discomfort. The brain, wired for immediate relief, steers away from that discomfort and files avoidance as a reward. Over time, this becomes automated. The soul — the part of us oriented toward long-term flourishing — can be drowned out entirely if the body's avoidance loop is never interrupted and reappraised.
Breaking the Loop: Shrink the Entry Point
The exit from the avoidance loop is not willpower — it is specificity. The process begins with honest self-examination across all three pillars of life.
Start by identifying one avoided behavior in your financial life. It might be canceling unused subscriptions. It might be opening a brokerage account. It might be having a difficult money conversation you've postponed. Then identify one in your physical life — overdue blood work, a walking habit you keep meaning to start, a nutritional change you know you need to make. Then one in your relationships.
The key insight is this: problems are never smaller than they are right now. Every avoided problem compounds. Every uncultivated opportunity has a closing window. The investment you didn't make, the conversation you didn't have, the habit you didn't build — these don't wait patiently. They either grow into crises or they expire.
Once you've named the avoidance — said the words "I am avoiding blank" — the next step is to shrink the entry point to the smallest possible immediate action. Not a complete overhaul. One step small enough to take today. Movement breaks the automated loop. The first domino, once it falls, makes the next one easier.
Avoidance is not a character flaw. It is a feature of human neurological wiring. But it can be interrupted — through honesty, through naming what is real, and through choosing to take one small action in the direction of the life you actually want.
