Existential Psychology

Doing Nothing is Doing Something

By  | 

A rationalization many of us use to let ourselves off the hook for making an important life decision is to tell ourselves that waiting to see how things pan out is the most prudent course of action. We feel a lot of discomfort from the anxiety that accompanies awareness of our inherent existential responsibility, and the clever unconscious solution is to wash our hands of the whole thing, believing that by not doing nothing, taking the wait and see approach, we aren’t responsible for the outcome.

From an existential point of view doing nothing is doing something; a no-behavior is still a behavior. As sentient organisms capable of planning it’s impossible for us to wriggle out of having some say over environmental conditions. Just because we can’t see the effects of our no-acts in the same way that we are able see the outcome of a cause and effect chain where we do act doesn’t change the underlying reality that doing nothing effects your environment too.

This might sound overly philosophical but it’s quite practical. If you think in these terms you lose a powerful excuse to stay in a holding pattern all your life. No matter what you do, even when you do nothing, you are enacting a behavior, and this behavior exerts a strong influence over the course of your life.

Sometimes the wait and see policy is the best policy, but the only way you’ll know is if you stop using it as a rationalization. Individual responsibility is scary; it’s easier to follow than it is to lead. We use all sorts of psychological mechanisms to try to keep awareness of responsibility from bubbling up into our unconscious. We cannot escape it though. Every lived moment is a choice, even if this choice is to do nothing at all.

Related posts:

  1. Indecisiveness The one constant of human existence is that it’s always changing. Some of these changes are outside of our control while others are the direct result of our thoughts and actions. Indecisiveness is a psychological strategy designed to postpone that feeling of existential anxiety that goes along with becoming aware of the responsibility for a […]...
  2. Choices Humans don’t like feeling cornered. We like to know we have options, that our free will is intact, that we are the captains of our own ships. From an evolutionary point of view, the negative emotional reaction that goes along with feeling trapped in our lives is probably due to the fact that being physically […]...
  3. Anxiety Can Be Paralyzing “Concern should drive us into action, not into a depression.” -Karen Horney When we think of anxiety from a physiological standpoint we think of the fight or flight response, where our bodies activate to either run away from a threat or face it to try to overcome it. But when we broaden our definition of […]...
  4. Endings and Anxiety Mortality Lurks in the Background Many of us have a really hard time with endings. Why? Because they remind us, consciously or unconsciously, of our mortality. Death is what all endings have in common. Even in those many endings where physical death isn’t imminent symbolic death still is. The prospect of symbolic death cues off […]...
  5. Running From Responsibility At the superficial level the reason people shirk responsibility is that responsibility implies hard work and implies the possibility of being blamed for bad outcomes. But at the deeper existential level we have to understand the powerful role that anxiety plays. Shirking responsibility acts as an anxiety reducer. Responsibility means the ability to respond. So in […]...
  6. Deciding To Spend More Time In The Here And Now Regressive and Progressive Forces Battle for Supremacy The two most powerful unconscious forces in human life move in opposite directions. They are on one hand to go back to the womb, to go back to paradise, to find safety and security in the known and familiar, to fold in on oneself, and on the other […]...
  7. Drifting Through Life When we say someone is drifting through life we usually mean it in a derogatory way. But aren’t we all drifting through life in the sense that we had no control over being born, can’t control that we will die, and can only control a tiny fraction of the happenings around us? Existentially speaking, those […]...
  8. The Courage To Cut Off We all know it takes courage to hold on and keep going in the face of various life difficulties. But we rarely think about the other side of the coin, that it takes courage to cut off and keep going in the face of various life difficulties too. The specter that makes the idea of […]...
  9. Putting Off Making An Important Decision If you’ve been putting off making an important decision the culprit is death anxiety. While death anxiety has its root in the threat of the obliteration of our biological organisms we humans experience death anxiety in its symbolic forms too, where it’s not anything technically ‘alive’ on the chopping block but the same existential dread […]...
  10. Controlling Behavior In Relationships Conflict And Power In intimate relationships power will always play some role since underlying values and the wants and needs that stem from those values can’t perfectly align. This inherent friction produces conflict and conflict produces subtle or obvious power plays meant to resolve it. But relationships that become defined by one person’s need to […]...
  11. When a Loved One Commits Suicide Painful Feelings Linger When a loved one commits suicide there are usually lingering, painful feelings of resentment, hostility, and outright rage towards that person. “How could they do this to me? How could they be so selfish?” We want to suggest that while these feelings might seem justified they’re also a defense mechanism meant to […]...
  12. Dying Regrets For several years an Australian nurse named Bonnie Ware worked with dying patients in the last twelve weeks of their lives and began recording their regrets. We are going to list the five most common and then talk about the existential currents that run underneath them. Thinking about death is uncomfortable and scary but even […]...
  13. Understanding the Masochistic Life Solution Repeated Exposure to Trauma Repeated exposure to abuse, abandonment, or other trauma produces seemingly unbearable amounts of anxiety. The masochistic life solution is one route for dealing with this anxiety. Where some choose to try to dominate their surroundings and the people in them to find relief, and others choose to turn away from their […]...
  14. Cutting Through The Vicious Cycle Of Addiction The Attempt to Reduce Unwanted States of Being The vicious cycle of addiction lies in the fact that people consciously or unconsciously use their drug of choice in order to diminish their isolation, anxiety, depression, guilt, unhappiness, etc. but in the long-term these unwanted states of being are actually amplified, which causes them to consume […]...
  15. Fortune Telling And The Status Quo Predicting the Future With Absolute Certainty Elected leaders intent on maintaining the status quo purposefully employ a faulty thinking pattern that we see clients in the therapeutic situation accidentally fall victim to all the time. This faulty thinking pattern is fortune telling, which is where the uncertain future is predicted with absolute certainty. Fortune telling […]...
  16. Responsibility When most of us think of the word ‘responsible’ what we are really thinking of is ‘culpable’. “Who’s responsible for this?” When something goes wrong the natural inclination is to assign blame to whoever the offending party is and then hopefully feel that justice has been served. But responsible actually comes from the Latin root […]...
  17. Doing Nothing To Combat Anxiety When faced with a threat to our well-being or the well-being of the people we care about we all feel compelled to take action. Existential anxiety is the threat of nothingness. We inherently know the best way to alleviate that threat and the painful feelings cued off by it is by doing something, not by […]...
  18. Moving on in a Healthy Way The Nature of Existence is Impermanence  Given that the nature of existence in general and human existence in particular is impermanence we shouldn’t get overly comfortable with environmental conditions to which we have grown accustomed since sooner or later they will change. But whether we want things to stay the same forever or desperately want […]...
  19. Breaking Out of Your Routine There is a reason why people almost obsessively stick to their daily routines, and it’s that doing so directly combats existential anxiety. As we have written elsewhere uncertainty is a major source of anxiety; since the best way to manage uncertainty is to make everything in your life completely predictable it’s hopefully pretty obvious that […]...
  20. When A Client Asks A Therapist For Advice When a client asks a therapist for advice on an important life issue it’s a no-win situation for the therapist as long as the question is taken at face value because the client is robbed of personal efficacy. If the advice is enacted and things don’t work out it’s the therapist’s fault. If the advice […]...
Related Items