Sliding into the Hell of Inertia

Inertia is a powerful thing - be careful where you use the force of gravity. (PJ Thoughts #10)

Back in April this year, I was in the middle of my morning meditation. On this particular day, I was listening to the Daily Jay series on Calm.

As Jay Shetty’s voice washed over me and I ohmed my way into bliss, he posed this question:

Where are you sliding?

I snapped out of my ohms, wiped the drool off my face, and paused. Where was I sliding? What does he mean?

He closed by sharing:

Decide, don’t slide. When you come to an intersection, stop and evaluate your direction. Don’t continue walking straight just because. Be mindful of your inertia. Be mindful of where you want to go.

I felt pissed after my meditation. For all the equanimity I usually find out of meditation practices, this one made me angry. Because it made me face an uncomfortable truth.

Angry and in denial, Jay Shetty was forcing me to reckon with an inconvenient thought: many of the worst decisions I ever made in my life were the result of this “sliding” without true discernment. Inertia is a powerful force, and it is an especially powerful drug for me. I found (and still find) myself addicted to the feeling of constant motion, to the feeling of making consistent progress.

That addiction made me slide, rather than decide. Because sliding feels like progress, and sitting feels like…well, laziness and regression.

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Humans, especially those who are Coastal Elites, feel addicted to movement. Moving feels like forward momentum. It grants us the illusion we control more than we actually do.

There isn’t anything inherently wrong with forward momentum. But mistaking all forward momentum as “good” is problematic. Inertia becomes problematic when it slides us into the wrong places. This only really happens if we aren’t carefully practicing mindfulness.

Even when you think you’re practicing deliberate decision-making, how often are you actually taking a step back and evaluating your assumptions? I know I struggle with this still. And so do many people.

In practice, the fix seems simple. If sliding happens when we’re not being mindful, the simple solution is to practice mindfulness. This is one of those simple solutions that is ridiculously hard to implement. “Simply be mindful! Wow, what a solution!” But seriously. Can you zoom out and see the forest from the trees? Are you able to slow down and rest in the discomfort of stillness and present moment?

Some signs you aren’t comfortable with present moment mindfulness:

• You feel like life is a game that you will win, so you must continue moving up in a linear direction.

• You are uncomfortable with any sign of slowing down or pausing, such as walking in nature, meditating, and doing nothing.

• You have a set identity of yourself and rarely take the time to meditate or reflect on whether your assumptions about yourself and what you care about are still accurate or not. (Hopefully, you’re not the same idiot you were ten years ago. It stands to reason, then, that pausing to assess the truthiness about your current self-assumptions is a wise thing.)

And here are some areas where inertia might be impacting your decision making:

• You assume you should continue doing the same thing; pivots scare you (for example: you continue to jump job to job, even if 9-5 doesn’t suit you; you stay in your industry, even if you’re unhappy.)

• You do “what is expected of you” (eg you have to get married, have kids, and a white picket fence - or you do what successful people in your culture are “supposed” to do.)

• You are addicted to busyness and continue feeling unsatisfied, sure that it’s the next dopamine hit of achievement that will make you happy! (You know it won’t, but you chase it anyway.)

• You are scared of spending time away from people, technology, and other distractions - you must be the center of your entire world to have purpose, rather than being a very small part of a larger world. The thought that you’re not the center of the world - that you are tiny speck and that life will move on whether you like it or not - scares you. (There are people who feel in awe, not scared, when they feel tiny…so take this as a real sign!)

Here are some practices to help you resist unintentional inertia:

• Take deliberate pauses. Practice mindful breathing. Use random meditation bells or sounds to cue you into present moment. If random bells don’t work, use other cues (like your refrigerator turning on and humming, a creak in your floors, or the buzz of your phone) into noticing the present moment.

• Go to therapy to catch inertia movement. A therapist will help you see where you’re sliding. A coach will, too, if you’re a founder or leader.

• Insert more pausing in your life. Leave your phone alone.

• Ask what you “could” do instead of what you “should” do. Get really wild - out of the box - with your ideas. You might end up surprising yourself — and scaring yourself — with what you come up with. And if it’s scary…good. It’s working. We’re taught to fear whatever is different. If you’ve been sliding this whole time, not sliding is going to be different, so fear is a good sign you’re moving in the right direction.

• Get rid of default behaviors. Ask yourself, what are you doing? What things are on autopilot? It doesn’t have to be drastic: it could be as simple as changing the route you take to work each day, or the kind of work you do week to week. As an operator, I am all about finding really good SOP, but even SOPs need some rethinking. It’s awful to get stuck in the pit of “this is how we’ve always done things.”

Stopping unintentional inertia will help you redefine yourself. You will surprise yourself on how much of a box you tend to live in. It will allow you to confront your fears in a more concrete, constructive way. This will also help slow down time, in a world that convinces you that you just don’t have enough of it.

Every time I’ve made any sort of meaningful change in my life, it’s because I’ve caught myself in inertia, sliding into things I don’t want to slide into, and correcting it by asking: what can I change here to challenge myself in a different way? What feels super uncomfortable, and how can I lean into it instead of running away from it?

This is the way you get to live an interesting story, and discover and recover new parts of yourself constantly.