The Ubiquity of “Getting Out of Things”

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Want to make students cheer? Tell them there’s no homework tonight. For office workers, let them go early. How much of our lives wind up dedicated not to where we’re going or what we’re building, but to what we seek to avoid?

Choice by Avoidance

Some time around high school or college, I started thinking seriously about what I wanted to do with my life. As a student with little control of my time or what classes I took, I found it natural to start making decisions about what I definitely did not want to do rather than about some ideal dream job. Being physically inept, I knew physical work and outdoor work was out of the question. As good as I was in English, other languages eluded me. I grudgingly accepted two years of Spanish as the least amount of time in the most-familiar language I could study. Later, I specifically sought out an undergraduate program that did not have a foreign language requirement, which cut down my choices quite a bit.

Mathematics was also a torture for me at the time, and I resolved to do as little of that as possible in the remainder of my life. While I had many good reasons to study Psychology, avoiding math was a bad reason but one of the stronger ones.

Doctoral Delusions

In my own life, I recall working at earning a PhD. PhD studies can be divided into two basic units. The first is coursework done in a classroom. The second is the work put towards writing a thesis: a significant, original piece of research. Somewhere towards the middle of my program, I was not yet done with classes but pushing hard to do the research that would become the substance of my thesis.

Being tasked with both classes and research, I whined to myself how much the classes were slowing down my research and keeping me from making more progress. I looked forward to the day when I had completed my last class and I could dedicate myself full-time to my research. Surely, I thought, my life will become easier, my research better, and my graduation that much closer.

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Then the day came when I had passed my final class. My life did not become easier. Instead I had more time to meditate on thorny problems in my research. It felt like trying to break down a door by slamming into it over and over again. Instead of having courses to distract myself, I sat for hours exhausted and discouraged before plopping myself back down at the computer to have another run at that metaphorical door. In the end (and for reasons outside the scope of this article) I did not end up getting that PhD. Pretty much every benefit I expected to get out of “getting out of classes” failed to appear, and in fact I was no better off for completing the coursework.

After Simplicity

I wonder whether one of the driving forces behind the simplicity movement is also a spirit of “getting out” of unwanted situations without an equal measure of what will be done with the extra time and money liberated. When I see a picture of a tiny house or someone’s worldly possession reduced to a hundred or fewer items, I want to ask, “so now what?” Perhaps part of the allure of simple lifestyles and spaces is found in the comparison to our own cluttered, cramped situations. “If only I had a life like that, then things would be better!” we might say. But I think this is mostly a con we play on ourselves. Life seems to have an endless supply of things to worry about — and should we shed one set, no doubt another, different crop of concerns will arise. Rather than hitting the reset button and throwing everything out, perhaps refining what we’re doing already in our own space and schedule could reduce what’s troubling us as much if not more than pining for someone else’s simpler life.

Completion and Correctness

Part of the push to get out of things comes from our values. We have a natural tendency towards completion. It feels good to be done. The impulse towards completion can be good for us up to the point where it becomes more important to be done than to do something well. This sort of attitude can only exist when our focus leaves growth and mastery, when getting done is more important than getting better.

Another factor that pushes us to get done and on to the next is our sense that our successful completions augment our identity. Carol Dweck writes elegantly about the “fixed mindset” which asserts that our abilities are due to inborn talents. In that case, any failures point to lack of talent and must be avoided lest we lose face. It’s often more impressive, not to mention more psychologically comfortable, to do easy things perfectly than to attempt hard things and fail. Yet Dweck writes about a second, opposite mindset that holds that attempting hard things, failing and learning from the failures is the road to mastery. Research and historical analysis shows that the growth mindset has it right: talent matters much less than practice. Yet it’s hard to sell a college admissions officer or a hiring manager on the idea that your low GPA is due to your challenging yourself and transforming yourself into the better candidate.

It’s hard to quit avoiding the hard stuff in life. It’s easy to do the minimum, to get out of things, to make life easier for oneself. I’ve done it plenty in my life, often without recognizing what I was doing. Yet I often had a pang of conscience that something wasn’t quite right — and now I can say what it is. The biggest problem with structuring a life to get out of things is that too much attention goes to what is being avoided and very little goes to the present moment. Getting out of things does nothing towards improving oneself, making a contribution, or living a quality life.

All clinical material on this site is peer reviewed by one or more clinical psychologists or other qualified mental health professionals. This specific article was originally published by on and was last reviewed or updated by Dr Greg Mulhauser, Managing Editor on .

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