When the thing that was meant to change your life doesn’t change your life

Notes on subtle transformation

There are certain things we are set-up to believe will change our lives. When we finally get the dream job, when we take that trip we’ve always wanted, when we met our significant other.

But what happens when we do these life-changing things and find our lives unchanged?

I was reflecting on a trip I took to Italy last year. Just before leaving, I’d lost count of how many times I was jokingly told it would be my Under the Tuscan Sun or Eat, or Pray Love experience. There would be life-changing food and life-changing love affairs and life-changing inspiration that would no doubt become a best-selling novel with a film adaptation.

Part of me knew that we take ourselves wherever we go, but another part of me started to believe the hype. Yet when the trip was over, even with the delicious food, love affairs and inspiring vistas, I had this distinct unchanged feeling.

You are just you, again

A similar unchanged feeling came with publishing my first book. I thought being a published author would change my life, but I’m still the same me.

I can relate to this comment by mary g. on a George Saunders post about being published—you are just you, again.

“I know how lucky i am to ever have had a book published in the first place. I really do. But like anything, the thrill comes and goes and you are left with yourself again. My personal takeaway is that doing what you love is a great way to live a satisfying life. But it's all in the doing and not in the having done.”

Publish a book? You are just you, again. Spend a few months in Italy? You are just you, again. Fall madly in love? You are just you, again.

Part of this unchanged feeling can be attributed to the hedonic treadmill, which is the tendency for our brains to adapt to our improved circumstances and search for the next thing that might be improved so we never feel like we’ve arrived—or notice how much we’ve changed.

Reflecting now, I think another part is that we can make the mistake of thinking that if we change our life circumstances, we can change ourselves.  

But change doesn’t necessarily work like that. It’s not like entering an elevator and pressing the button “Italy” or “Book Deal” and coming out on another floor a different person. The thing doesn’t change us—at least, not in the way we might think.

Changing oneself requires an inner transformation that is far more subtle. 

Can people change?

There is a scene in the final episode of Ted Lasso where the blunt Roy Kent asks if he can be a Diamond Dog. 

For those who haven’t seen the show, Diamond Dogs is the name given for the informal support group the characters Ted, Coach Beard, Nate, Trent and Lesley have created to sort out their respective relationship quandaries. Roy has previously resisted invitations to be a Diamond Dog, so it’s a big character development moment when he comes forward with this question about change.

Roy: For the past year I’ve busted my fucking ass trying to change. But apparently I haven’t done fucking shit because I’m still me.

Ted: Wait, did you want to be someone else?

Roy: Yeah. Someone better. Can people change?

It’s a good question. In my own attempts to change, sometimes I feel like I’ve made leaps and bounds, and sometimes I feel like I’m circling around the same issues I’ve had since always. 

But maybe that’s part of it. To risk sounding like both Helen and Annie in their hilarious tête-à-tête in the film Bridesmaids, we are growing and changing all the time, and staying the same. 

People can change—sometimes in an instant—and there are as many approaches to change as there are ways to change.

What I enjoyed most about the final Diamond Dogs exchange in Ted Lasso is that each character illuminates one such approach for how we can invite change and subtle transformation.

Acceptance

Trent: I don’t think we change per se, as much as we just learn to accept who we’ve always been, you know?

On the surface it might sound defeatist, but there is a freedom in asking ourselves what would happen if things never changed.

I remember in my mid-20s, I was complaining to a friend that I would never find a romantic partner. In place of the normal platitudes, my friend asked me: so what if you don’t—what if you never find a fulfilling romantic partnership, can you still find a way to enjoy your life?

The answer was a resounding yes. We can want something to change, but that doesn’t mean that our lives are any less valuable if they don’t. We can even find ourselves settling in to the life we have instead of always trying to change it.

In the years since, I’ve continued to add to a list of things to stop trying to change about myself¹ as a reminder to accept the things we think (or have been told) we need to change.

Accepting whatever we might begrudge creates the space to embrace, explore and enjoy what is good in your life and to put your energy towards enhancing it. 

As Greta Gerwig put it, “You keep learning how to let go and to live the life that you actually have, as opposed to the life you thought you were going to have.”

Sometimes for the worse, sometimes for the better

Nate: No, I think people can change. They can. You know, sometimes for the worse and sometimes for the better.

We don’t always need the thing to change our lives, because change is happening beneath the surface. As May Sarton said, “The most valuable thing we can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of a room, not try to be or do anything.”

Like the changing light of a room, our environments have an impact on our thoughts, feelings and behaviours—sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.

As Wendy Wood, author of Good Habits, Bad Habits put it in this article on change: “So often we try to change our behaviour without thinking about how it’s sustained by the environments we live in, the physical locations in which behaviours occur. An environmental shift, a shift in our context, leads to changes in our behaviour.”

It might not be the thing that was meant to change our life, but the things around us do change us. As cliche as it might be, that haircut can bring us a newfound sense of vitality. There are always a million different forces that are changing us in ways we don't always comprehend on social media and advertisements, in echo chambers and rabbit holes. 

We might not be aware of how these things impact our unconscious, but we can be more conscious of the content we're absorbing, the people we surround ourselves with, the nutrients we feed ourselves and so on. 

That said, even when we are more conscious, it’s important to recognise that change is an upward spiral, not a linear trajectory. We will inevitably feel like we are circling around the same old things, not realising we are moving ever so slightly upward.

There will inevitably be times we descend for a bit, and maybe that’s okay. We figure things out and then forget them all the time. Part of life is to continue to bump up against the same lessons, to repeat the same patterns, to undo the change and change once again. As Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes in Women Who Run With The Wolves:

“It would be inane to think that just because we ate a day ago we shouldn’t be hungry today… It is just as fatuous to think that once we solve an issue it stays solved, that once we learn, we always remain conscious ever after. No, life is a great body that grows and diminishes in different areas, at different rates.”

The point is, I think, to remain open. And virtue researcher William Damon agrees—according to his research, the number one predictor of someone who can positively change is being rigorously honest with yourself, self-reflective, open-minded about the ways you’ve changed—and once again, sometimes for the worse and sometimes for the better. 

Moving towards better

Lesley: Human beings are never going to be perfect, Roy. The best we can do is keep asking for help and accepting it when you can. And if you keep doing that you’ll always be moving towards better.

An interesting tension with attempting to change is that there will be times we need to accept ourselves, and there are times we are fed up with ourselves—we are tired of not changing.

As Elizabeth Gilbert said, “I've never seen any life transformation that didn't begin with the person in question finally getting tired of their own bullshit.”

Sometimes it's only when we acknowledge a lack within ourselves, that we can recognise the need to ask for help—to seek to grow, transform, repair, heal.

Just as we might get a personal trainer to help us achieve fitness goals, we can seek support for our inner transformation—be it in books, in our environments, in our relationships.

A caveat may be that problems arise when the intention for change becomes a gruelling expectation. Like Troy’s desire to be someone different, someone “better”—if we are always fixating on a better version of ourselves, we can set ourselves up for failure as the hedonic treadmill suggests we never feel as if we have arrived.  

It reminds me of when I told my friend Mari Andrew about how I’m not sure I had enough of a life-changing adventure during my time in Italy. She said with her trademark insight, “If your expectation is to change your life, everything will always be lacking.”

Instead, we can make our expectation smaller so that everything can be a bonus. For example, if I reframe the objective of my trip to Italy as being to rest, in that sense I was an overachiever. I can relate to Georgia O’Keefe in a letter to Russel Vernon Hunter. “I have done nothing all summer but wait for myself to be myself again”—and it was glorious. 

Change never looks exactly like how we expect it too, nor will we ever be perfect, so we might as well hold it lightly and find the glorious parts. 

“Life is more changeable than I thought”

Roy: Not me. I’m still the same fucking idiot I’ve always been.

Ted: [Shaking his head] Agree to disagree, big guy. I mean, come on man. You just piped up out of nowhere and finally asked to become a Diamond Dog. Pretty big change, if you ask me. Right fellas?

[Diamond Dogs nod in agreement]

We put so much emphasis on new experiences—be it a job, a trip, moving—to change when often change is composed of hundreds of subtle shifts that cannot be measured.

Often, such shifts go undetected until we bump into one directly—Roy asking to be a Diamond dog, saying no without an apology, finding yourself more buoyed from trying than you are bothered by rejection. We can have moments where we surprise ourselves by who we have become.

As the late poet John O’Donohue said, “There are huge gestations and fermentations going on in us that we are not even aware of; and then sometimes, when we come to a threshold, crossing over, which we need to become different, that we’ll be able to be different, because secret work has been done in us of which we’ve had no inkling.”

When we view change as secret work, we can come to appreciate that inner transformation occurs on a different time scale, and is sometimes conscious, but often unconscious and in ways that surprise us. 

In Sally Rooney’s novel Beautiful World, Where Are You, Eileen reflects on her life in an email to Alice, “And life is more changeable than I thought. I mean a life can be miserable for a long time and then later happy. It's not just one thing or another—it doesn't get fixed into a groove called ‘personality’ and then run along that way until the end. But I really used to believe that it did.”

Even when the thing doesn’t change us, it’s important to remember things are not fixed, we are not fixed. It’s sometimes only when we look back can we see how the various shifts have created a life we might not have imagined for ourselves—and here we are, changed within it.

1. This exercise is featured in this edition of Things from the week, sent every Sunday to paid subscribers.