When the Status Quo Isn't
The Cost of Staying, the Responsibility of Choosing
Every fall, the day after Labor Day, Tulsa Community College holds Convocation. It’s sort of a State of TCC address, with some accolades handed out, and a plethora of breakout sessions that are usually a snore-fest, capped off with a guest speaker who's got a book to sell or a motivational perspective to unpack. You get the gist.
Twenty-two years of these will do a number on your attention span, especially if you have spent your life trying to function in the normal world with ADHD. But I digress. Most of it amounts to rehashed, renamed, regurgitated crap I've heard a dozen times in a dozen different outfits.
This speaker was different. She'd built a career speaking and writing about leadership, but what caught me was the way she talked about where she'd come from—a trailer park, without turning it into some polished rags-to-riches prop for the applause line. She had that particular Oklahoma humor a lot of us carry, the kind that comes from a place where hard work is expected, and the roots you're handed aren't always planted in the best soil. In my language, that trailer park was part of her Pile.
Then she told a story about a phone call with her former boss, one of those pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps conversations. Somewhere in the conversation, he gave her a line I later traced to author Laurie Buchanan:
"Whatever you're not changing, you're choosing."
That quote stopped me from listening. Not because she'd lost me, but because I'd left the room without leaving my seat. My phone was out, Notes app open, thumbing it in while she kept talking to a version of me that was still technically sitting there. I nudged my colleague and said, "THAT is my next article."
We made it through the rest of Convocation, barely, and at lunch we spent thirty minutes on that one sentence, turning it over, asking what was actually underneath it. I already knew it rhymed with something I'd written before — the piece about why nothing changes until you change — but I couldn't say yet how. Agreement and argument, both at once. That's an uncomfortable place for a sentence to take residence in your head, and it's usually the sign you've found something worth chasing.
Well… Sort Of
Whatever you're not changing, you're choosing.
Well... sort of.
Taken at face value, that sentence turns ugly fast. Hate your job? You chose it. Bad relationship? Chose that too. Broke, sick, trapped? Apparently that’s all still on you, somewhere back down the line. Slap it on a coffee mug and call it personal responsibility.
That's not where I'm taking this. I've already argued something that sounds very much like the opposite.
A few months ago, in a piece called Why Nothing Changes Until You Change, I made the case that people don't stay stuck because they're lazy or unmotivated or short on willpower. They stay stuck because the psychological resources it actually takes to change — hope, efficacy, resilience, optimism, the stuff PsyCap is built from — haven't caught up yet to the change they say they want. I wrote about the Pile: the accumulated experience, the beliefs and coping strategies and emotional residue that pile up over time until they quietly set the boundaries of what feels possible, what feels risky, what feels completely out of reach. And I wrote that when those resources are underdeveloped, the old behaviors come back. Not by your choice. They become your default setting.
That article's whole job was explaining why the default persists — why "I've tried everything" is so often true and so rarely about effort. Insight opens the door. It does not walk you through it. Behavioral inertia isn't a character flaw. It's what happens when a pattern gets reinforced long enough that it stops feeling like a pattern and starts feeling like the truth about who you are. Don't mistake being stuck for not trying hard enough — that was the whole argument, and I still believe every word of it.
This isn't that article again. That one asked why we're stuck. This one only gets to exist because the first one already did its job — because once you've built enough capacity to actually see another option, once the Pile stops running the whole show from the background, a second and considerably less comfortable question shows up and doesn't leave.
Not why can't I change. But what am I choosing by not changing?
So which is it? Chosen, or inherited. Default, or decision.
Here's where it gets interesting: it’s both.
When Agency Shows Up
Here's what I didn't say in that first piece, or maybe hadn't fully seen yet.
I didn't choose the pattern. I didn't build the coping strategy I picked up decades ago, and I sure didn't sit down and consciously vote for avoidance as my go-to move under pressure for the next forty years. Most of us didn't draft the first version of our defaults. We inherit them the way you inherit a family recipe or a superstition about walking under ladders — quietly, without a vote, usually before you're old enough to know a vote was being taken.
That's still true. Reading this far doesn't change it.
But something else does change. Not the origin story — that's fixed, that's history, nobody rewrites it with optimism. What changes is what you're able to do with it once you can actually see it.
Awareness is step one, and it's cheaper than people think. You can read a book, sit in a therapist's office, hear a guest speaker say one sentence at a Convocation you'd nearly tuned out of, and suddenly the pattern that's been running your life has a name. That's not nothing. It's also not the finish line, no matter how good it feels in the moment it arrives. Capacity is what comes next — the actual resources, the hope and efficacy and resilience and optimism I spent an entire book and several articles on — and capacity takes considerably longer to build than awareness takes to show up. You can know exactly what's wrong on a day after Labor Day Tuesday morning and still not have what it takes to do anything different about it by Wednesday. Article #2 lived almost entirely in that gap.
But once capacity starts catching up to awareness — even partially, even unevenly — something else shows up that wasn't there before.
Agency.
Not the theoretical kind, the "technically you could always quit your job and move to Bali" kind — the usable kind, where an alternative isn't just conceivable, it's actually available to you, given who you are and what you've built and where you currently stand.
And once agency is sitting there, whether you use it or not, the math on the default changes. It stops being only something that happened to you. Increasingly, you become a participant in whether it continues.
I want to be careful with the word I use for that, because it's not blame. It's participation.
There's a real difference between causing something and participating in its continuation, and that difference is going to matter for the rest of this piece. I didn't cause the culture at the last place I worked. I didn't write the first draft of my own temperament. I didn't ask to inherit whatever particular cocktail showed up in my Pile. None of those starting points required my consent.
But eventually — once I can see it, once I've got some capacity to respond to it, once another option is genuinely sitting on the table — I have to answer a harder question than why did this happen to me.
Am I still just carrying this? Or am I, at this point, helping it stay?
That's the same pivot buried in that phone call from her former boss, whether he meant it that way or not. Not everything you haven't changed, you chose. But at some point — quietly, without an announcement, without a dramatic before-and-after — refusing to reposition yourself becomes a position of its own.
The Cost of Not Changing
Let me make this a bit more real, because I've spent this whole piece more conceptually, and concepts are where arguments go to hide.
As plainly as I can say, I stayed too long in my second marriage. Years too long. I've said as much to the people closest to me. In hindsight, I probably shouldn't have married her at all. But I did, and once I had, some part of me decided that was that. I was going to make it work. Call it duty, if you want the generous read. Stubbornness, if you want the honest one.
Here's what staying protected did. It protected the story I told about myself. A man of my word, I called it at the time: the sense that once you've committed, you don't just walk out on it, especially not right after a first marriage I'd already filed under "failure" and wasn't eager to file a second one behind it. It protected the shared history, the habits, the sheer accumulated weight of "we've already invested so much." And it protected the practical architecture of an entire life: shared assets, dual income, a lifestyle that would take real economic damage coming apart, especially given how unevenly we earned.
That's not a small list. Those are legitimate things to want to protect. I want to be honest about that, because this doesn't work if I pretend the reasons were flimsy. They weren't.
And here's how hard I worked to protect them: I got married to her thirteen times.
Not thirteen divorces followed by thirteen remarriages. Thirteen separate wedding ceremonies during the same marriage, over thirteen years, in twelve different locations—several different states, once in Mexico with an actual shaman officiating. Justices of the peace and ordained officiants the rest of the time. The whole production, repeatedly, as if performing the choosing hard enough and often enough might finally make the marriage into the thing the ceremony kept insisting it already was.
Let that sink in for a second, because it's the entire argument of this article wearing a tuxedo. That's not a man drifting passively through a bad default. That's a man actively staying, repeatedly recommitting, and deliberately choosing to keep something in place. Thirteen times. On purpose. With witnesses.
Which brings me to the side people are much slower to look at: what was staying costing me?
Chronic emptiness. A low-grade depression I didn't have a name for at the time, riding alongside a fair amount of anxiety. Self-worth eroding on a schedule so slow I couldn't feel it happening in real time, only in hindsight. Hope, dying the long, quiet death it dies when you keep waiting for something to become what, somewhere inside, you already know it is not. Resentment, building so quietly I mistook the silence for peace. And eventually, my body wasn't exactly thriving through those years either. I had a heart attack. Sleep stopped working the way it should. Stress was hardly in short supply. And I coped the way people cope with an emptiness they can't say out loud: not particularly well.
Thirteen years is not a renewable resource. That's the opportunity cost stripped of the euphemism: thirteen years spent managing an empty dynamic instead of building something reciprocal, or growing into whoever I was supposed to become next.
There's a line traced to Elizabeth Appell. It says: “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Wow! I used to read that as inspirational. I don't anymore. The bud isn't safe just because it's closed. Staying closed isn't free. It's just quiet about the price, and for thirteen years I mistook quiet for free. The point isn't the blossom. The point is that the bud eventually stopped being the safer place to be.
What does staying somewhere protect? Ask that honestly, and you'll usually get a real answer, and it's usually not a stupid one. But almost nobody asks the question sitting right next to it: what is staying costing me? Because that cost doesn't arrive as one dramatic loss. It shows up exactly the way everything else in the Pile shows up: one unremarkable day at a time, quietly accumulating, until you look down and can't remember what it felt like not to be carrying it.
By the time I was living through most of this, I already had letters after my name that were supposed to explain me to myself. I'm Keirsey-certified (I administer the instrument I'm about to make fun of), so I can tell you my temperament, my four-letter type, my attachment style, my love language, my CliftonStrengths, and, if you push me at a party, probably my moon sign. Somewhere in there I could likely produce a Hogwarts house too. I knew myself extremely well. On paper.
And for thirteen years and thirteen weddings, all of that knowing didn't move me one inch closer to the door.
That was the problem: self-understanding is not self-governance.
Self-awareness becomes another hiding place when it explains the pattern but never interrupts it. I could've described, with clinical precision, exactly why I was staying. More articulately than most. Yet, I just kept staying anyway.
Eventually I left. That wasn't some grand triumph of self-governance, and I'm not going to pretend it was clean or easy or obviously right the moment it happened. It was simply the point where knowing finally had to become something more than knowing. The math got done honestly, after thirteen ceremonies spent avoiding it.
PsyCap, Has a Different Job
I already spent an entire article on Hope, Efficacy, Resilience, and Optimism. I'm not writing that one again.
In that piece, PsyCap's primary job was helping make change sustainable once movement had begun. Here, I'm interested in something slightly earlier in the process: what makes an alternative register as a real option in the first place. Decide to leave the job, PsyCap is what keeps you from crawling back to it three weeks later out of fear. That's real, and it matters, and I stand by every word of it.
But it assumes something. It assumes you can already see the door.
Here, PsyCap has a different job, and it's a quieter one. It's not what gets you through the door. It's what determines whether the door shows up on your map in the first place.
Hope isn't just "things will get better." It's what lets you perceive a path that isn't currently visible to you, standing exactly where you're standing. Efficacy is what lets you believe you can actually do something with the option once you see it. Resilience makes failure recoverable enough that trying no longer feels like betting everything on one hand. And optimism isn't rose-colored anything. It's what makes a better outcome believable enough to justify the risk of reaching for it.
Put those four together, and you don't just get the strength to walk through a door. You get a bigger map. Options that may have existed in principle begin registering as usable possibilities, which is a very different thing.
I didn't lack the willpower to leave that marriage. I lacked the psychological resources to see leaving as a livable option instead of a catastrophic one. The door wasn't locked. On my particular map, for a very long time, it just wasn't drawn.
And here's the part I want to push back on, because it's tempting and it's wrong: the idea that people only change once staying hurts worse than leaving. I lived that math. By the time I finally did the recalculation honestly, I had already had a heart attack, and I don't recommend waiting until life starts sending invoices in that particular font. That's not required; it's just common, because too many of us don't build the capacity to see better options until the current one has already started actively hurting us. PsyCap, developed early, can help you choose differently before your body has to file the complaint for you.
That's this whole section, stripped down: growth doesn't require misery's permission. We just have an unfortunate habit of waiting until misery issues the invitation.
Compassion Without Abdication
Agency is not blame. I want that sentence sitting by itself before we go any further, because it's the one most likely to get misread.
There are two easy readings of everything I've said so far, and both of them are wrong. The first says you had agency this whole time, so whatever happened is on you, full stop, no excuses. That's not compassion. That's just judgment wearing a psychology degree. The second says you were shaped entirely by forces outside your control, so nothing that happened is really yours to own. That's not compassion either. That's abdication with better vocabulary.
Neither one survives contact with how a person actually develops.
The man who married the same woman thirteen times over thirteen years was not a fool, and he wasn't a villain. He was doing what made the most psychological sense to him with the tools he had at the time, protecting things that were genuinely worth protecting, from a Pile he certainly didn't design from scratch and never consciously chose. I understand the man at the first wedding. I can extend a great deal of compassion to the man at the fourth. Eventually, though, understanding what he was protecting had to coexist with another question: what was he now participating in maintaining? Compassion begins with the origin. It has to be, because none of us consent to all the raw material we're handed.
But responsibility enters with the continuation. Somewhere around wedding nine or ten, even I have to admit the evidence file was getting fairly thick. I had enough information sitting in front of me to make an honest accounting, and I reached for the ceremony instead.
Responsibility isn't a switch that flips the moment awareness appears. It grows with usable agency. The more realistically available another response becomes, the harder it is to describe continuation as something that is merely happening to us.
Compassion still belongs there. It just can't be asked to do the work of responsibility. Compassion can explain how I got there without exempting me from what I do once I'm there with my eyes open.
Here's the harder truth underneath all of this: sometimes, after doing the honest accounting, staying actually is the right call. Some tradeoffs genuinely favor the status quo. Some risks aren't worth the reward, and choosing to remain, clear-eyed, is still a legitimate exercise of agency. This isn't an article that ends with "leave everything." Nothing here requires you to blow up your life to prove you have a pulse.
The problem was never staying. The problem is calling a tradeoff “no choice” because naming it honestly would require us to own it.
Self-understanding was never the destination. I said as much a couple of sections back, when I admitted my own self-awareness had become a hiding place instead of a hallway. Self-governance was always the real destination, and self-governance sounds less like an epiphany and more like a short, unglamorous checklist: I understand what changing will cost me. I understand what not changing is costing me. I understand what's realistically available to me, given who I am and where I stand. And whichever one I pick, I'm the one who picked it.
That last sentence is the whole article in miniature. Not "I had no choice." Not "it's all my fault." Just: I know what this is, I know what it costs, and this choice is mine to own.
The Reckoning
I think about that phone call sometimes. Not because I was on it, but because I've had a few just like it.
Sometimes someone hands you the truth in the only shape they have for it. A boss telling a woman to pull herself up. Whatever you're not changing, you're choosing. It sounds like an accusation when you're standing outside of it, disconnected from what it actually costs to hear something true and not act on it. It sounds like something else entirely once you've lived long enough to know exactly what that costs, thirteen years too late.
Whatever her boss intended, I no longer hear the sentence primarily as shame. I hear it as a door.
Back at Convocation, I told my colleague, half-joking, that quote was going to be my next article. It wasn't really a joke. I spent thirty minutes at lunch, and considerably more than thirty minutes since, doing the accounting that sentence demanded of me. What haven't I changed, and what have I told myself I'm protecting by leaving it alone? What's it actually costing me, on a schedule I've gotten good at not checking?
I've decided Buchanan's sentence works far better as a mirror than as a weapon. I know far too little about somebody else's map to tell them what they are choosing. I know considerably more about mine.
There are still parts of my Pile I haven't dealt with. Writing this article doesn't exempt me from that, and neither does understanding, with total clinical precision, exactly how the mechanism works. Insight was never the finish line here. It never is.
But I can tell you this much. You deal with your Pile, or your Pile deals with you. There is, however, a quieter third possibility nobody puts on a coffee mug: you can understand exactly what your Pile is doing, keep responding to it exactly the way you always have, and call that what it actually is.
A choice. Maybe not one you ever announced, maybe not one you even recognized at first. But increasingly yours to own, thirteen ceremonies or one honest sentence at a time.
So here's the only question this whole article was ever actually asking. Not what happened to you. Not whose fault it is.
What are you choosing, right now, by not changing?
Gary L. Keck is an Associate Professor of Management, Marketing, and Psychology and the author of Everyone Has Their Own Pile of S#!t!: How to Turn Life’s Mess Into Psychological Strength. His work focuses on Psychological Capital and applied positive psychology.
