The Illusion of Wanting Change: Why Most People Never Truly Choose Differently

We live in a world where the chorus of “things need to change” is louder than ever. Maybe you feel it in your own life, that persistent desire for more peace, less division, deeper meaning, healthier minds and bodies. From kitchen tables to social media feeds, people claim to want a better world. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: most of us who say we want change aren’t ever going to change.

Understanding why that is, and how to break free from the cycle, is the first step toward actually choosing differently.

It’s not because we’re lazy. It’s not because we’re incapable. It’s because we don’t actually choose differently.

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Repetition Is a Form of Programming

The human brain is shaped by repetition. What we repeatedly hear, feel, and absorb becomes our emotional operating system.

Think of the meteorologist who tells you, day after day, how miserable the weather will be, “dreary,” “gloomy,” “brutally cold,” “oppressively hot.” That language doesn’t just describe reality, it infuses it with emotional weight. Over time, you don’t just know it’s raining. You feel heavy, discouraged, limited.

This is energy transference, the subtle but powerful emotional charge that passes from one voice to another through screens, speakers, headlines, and habits. Whether it’s the 24/7 news cycle, social media’s echo chambers, or the background scripts of culture, much of how we feel about the world isn’t coming from direct experience, it’s coming from ambient conditioning.

We feel exhausted by problems we’ve never personally faced. We feel helpless about injustices we’ve never attempted to address. We become saturated with secondhand hopelessness, and we call it realism.

But this isn’t just a passive state. It drains our potential. It dulls our agency. It paralyzes us before we even begin to act.

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The Myth of the Conscious Life

Most people live in a state of profound incongruence, not because they’re hypocrites, but because they’re disconnected.

They say they want health, but live in ways that exhaust and inflame them. They say they want justice, but spend more time consuming outrage than practicing compassion. They say they want peace, but compulsively scroll through a world designed to agitate them.

This is the heart of the problem: we want different results, but we don’t make different choices.

We confuse awareness with transformation. We conflate agreement with commitment. We’re high on good intentions, low on embodied action.

And so we loop.

We loop in conversations that go nowhere. We loop in emotional patterns that repeat decades-old scripts. We loop in systems never built for human flourishing, but we keep feeding them with our attention, our money, our time, our resignation.

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Change Isn’t Complicated. It’s Costly.

Real change costs something. It costs comfort, convenience, sometimes even community.

It often means confronting parts of ourselves we’ve kept hidden, questioning stories we inherited, and unlearning identities that brought us validation.

But on the other side of that cost lies genuine transformation, a life aligned with the values we claim to cherish.

To change, we must choose, not just once, but again and again. Not just with our words, but with our bodies, our calendars, our relationships, our consumption, and our energy.

We must interrupt the transmission of misery. We must ask: → What energy am I about to transfer? → What am I helping normalize? → Is this congruent with the world I say I want to help create?

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Choosing Differently Is a Radical Act

In a world that profits off our outrage, anxiety, numbness, and distraction, choosing calm, clarity, compassion, and courage is radical.

Turning off the news to read a book or call a loved one is radical. Taking care of your nervous system is radical. Speaking from your values instead of your wounds is radical. Refusing to bond through cynicism is radical.

Wanting things to be better doesn’t make them better.

Choosing differently, consistently, courageously, congruently,
that’s the hard work of real transformation.

And if we truly want to change the world, we have to start with the only place we can change: ourselves.