Unless you are living under a rock or have the presence of mind to have deleted all of your social media accounts, there’s a meme that you are definitely familiar with: the harsh truth.
Often written as something along the lines of “44 Harsh Truths I Wish I Knew in My 20s,” these posts strike a particular chord and tend to rack up the dopamine. Hell, I’ve even dabbled on the bandwagon and posted some of my own “harsh truths.”
But here’s a harsh truth I’ve been circling for a while now; one harsh truth to rule them all:
We already know.
We don’t need another carousel telling us that time is our most valuable asset or that we should stop people-pleasing or that no one is coming to save us. We already know.
The problem isn’t clarity.
It’s doing the damn thing.
When we work 80-hour weeks chasing some moving target of “success,” we know we’re sacrificing time with our kids and presence with our partners. We know we won’t get those years back. But we tell ourselves we’ll make it up later.
When we haven’t worked out in months and our body feels like it’s running on empty, we don’t need to read another thread about the benefits of lifting weights. We need to walk into the damn gym.
When we’re numbing out with food or Netflix or the fifth mindless doomscroll session of the day, we already know it’s not solving anything. But it gives us relief. Familiarity. An easy hit of predictability in a chaotic world.
And that’s what makes change so hard.
This week, during a mastermind session, I asked Sahil Bloom, bestselling author of The Five Types of Wealth, why he thinks people struggle so much to do the things they already know they should be doing. His book, like many great ones, is full of simple, timeless advice. So why don’t we act on it?
He pointed to something called Skinner’s Law, which loosely says:
“We only change when the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of change.”
And that hit. Hard.
It’s one I’ve quoted often. (As it happens, it’s not actually attributable to B.F. Skinner anyway. Turns out it may have been Tony Robbins. Who knew?)
Most of us have a pretty high threshold for tolerating low-grade misery. We’re masters at living in dysfunction and operating in dissonance. We can coast for years with jobs, relationships, and patterns that are slowly draining the life out of us. But here’s the actual harsh truth: we know how to make them “work.” We pride ourselves on resilience, even when it’s misapplied. We keep going.
This is us.
Meanwhile, change feels like a gamble. In order to change, we have to give something up. This often comes in the form of comfort, identity, or control. You might have to admit that your success came at the cost of something you can’t get back. You might have to see yourself more clearly. And for a lot of people, that is more terrifying than staying stuck.
But there’s another layer too.
I’ll take Skinner’s Law one step further: we will not change unless we identify where we think staying the same benefits us.
When I work with high-performers, it’s not that they don’t want to change or can’t envision a better outcome. So often, when it finally comes to a head, we keep our outdated patterns because somewhere deep down, we think they are protecting us. We believe, subconsciously, that these behaviors are keeping us safe.
The payoff of staying the same is often subtle, but potent. The chronic overworker gets to feel important. The martyr gets to feel morally superior. The procrastinator gets to avoid the risk of failure. The constant helper doesn’t have to sit with their own unmet needs.
In other words, there’s usually a benefit to the behavior, even when we pretend otherwise.
And until we get honest about that, nothing changes.
So if you’re stuck, if you’ve been circling the same goals, same patterns, same “shoulds,” maybe pause before you reach for another podcast or productivity hack.
Instead, ask yourself:
What part of me benefits from not changing?
What identity am I still protecting?
Because the real shift doesn’t come from new information. It comes from reclaiming your agency. It comes when we finally see the cost of inaction clearly. We will only change when we acknowledge that discomfort is no longer a sufficient reason to continue living out of alignment.
You don’t need more harsh truths.
You just need to stop pretending you don’t already know.
-mb
