If you’ve known someone who chose the convenient path over a staunchly held value or belief of theirs, it’s likely that you’ve seen them change slowly but significantly over time.
But what about when you find yourself in that position?
Should you find yourself consistently choosing comfort and convenience over your values, you may discover that you also change in a similar way. Those changes may be subtle at first, but they’ll happen. Because, unfortunately, that’s the cumulative effect of not living a life that’s true to what you love and honor.
1. Your self-respect erodes bit by bit.
The first time you made a choice that seriously went against your personal values, you likely felt a pang of intense discomfort and anxiety. That was the feeling of a drop of self-respect leaving your body.
The more you choose comfort and convenience over your values, the more your self-respect will erode, grain by grain. This is a very hard thing to deal with, as you often won’t see the degradation until it’s significant.
You might wince or sigh the first few times you do it, but over time, you’ll find yourself having difficulty facing your reflection in the mirror because of your past choices.
It can become a self-perpetuating cycle as well. You feel awful about yourself, which then makes it that much harder to make good personal choices. This then feeds into even greater erosion of your self-respect.
In contrast, when someone feels proud of themselves, it’s much easier to do things they feel are helpful and productive toward their goals, rather than feeling as though they’ve already failed and may as well completely give up on the day and do something short-term and appetitive instead.
2. You find yourself defending choices you don’t actually align with.
There are likely many reasons why you might choose comfort and convenience over your values.
For example, if sustainable clothing or household items are outside of your budget, you might buy things from fast fashion places even though you hate their wastefulness and poor ethics.
As a result, in order to deal with the cognitive dissonance this creates, you may find yourself defending companies that you absolutely do not align with (and even feel contempt for), while being uncomfortably aware of the hypocrisy.
3. Your frustration with your choices may take the form of aggression towards others.
If you feel guilt or shame about choosing comfort and convenience over your values, you may find yourself getting irritated or aggressive towards those whom you feel are behaving the same way.
You might lash out at them for being cowards, for instance, or not having the courage of their convictions. A good example of this would be choosing to skip the exercise you know you need to do, and then condemning others for not being active or for “letting themselves go.”
We see this sort of thing a lot on social media. You’ve probably noticed that a lot of people make seriously scathing comments on posts. Some are belittling or condemning, while others are aggressive and rude.
The thing is, a startling number of these comments are actually self-loathing that’s being projected onto others who are exhibiting the same behaviors that the commenters despise in themselves.
4. You start to lose your willpower.
What often starts to happen as you make the easy, convenient choices is that your willpower will begin to slip.
At first you might try to counteract any less-than-ideal choices by doing better things to balance them out, but those course corrections lessen over time. And before you know it, you’ve lost a significant amount of willpower in various aspects of your life.
Shame, guilt, self-loathing, and even self-anger might make you punish yourself on a subconscious level, so you get passive and are more likely to give in to whatever whim you encounter — yours, or anyone else’s.
5. Your resilience starts to wane.
Over time, when the easy path is always taken, you may notice that your general resilience starts to feel frayed and worn.
What was once easy for you to achieve now seems unobtainable. Similarly, what you used to be able to withstand, such as small discomforts or irritations, may now become unbearable.
It’s one of life’s greatest ironies that when you become at ease with discomfort, it’s no longer uncomfortable.
When you’re very tough on all fronts, then things that would seriously bother or hurt other people barely affect you at all. You harden yourself to life’s constant slings and arrows to the point where they basically just glance off you.
But when you consistently choose convenience and the easy option over your own values, that resilience softens. You choose the easier route, but that ends up hurting you in the long run.
6. You begin to lose your capability.
The most obvious aspect of constantly choosing the easiest path forward is that you start to lose overall capability. It’s the old “use it or lose it” mantra that’s backed by science.
For example, people who always choose to drive when they could walk instead will lose strength in their legs, in the same way that those who always turn to the internet or AI to answer everything for them or to write their work may start to lose the ability to think (and write) critically and creatively.
Learning new skills and maintaining those you already have takes time and effort.
But these tasks often intrude upon more “fun” things we’d rather do, and for many people time poverty and/or other barriers are real issues. Whatever the reason, though, choosing comfort and convenience over personal values almost always comes with a cost, which we’ll end up having to pay eventually.
7. You become more and more risk-averse.
You’ve likely come across the quote: “Comfort zones are beautiful places, but nothing ever grows there”.
It’s true. The cozy bed nook where we might like to curl up and rot on our days off is one of the most comfortable places imaginable, but unfortunately we aren’t going to gain in strength, flexibility, health, or mental fortitude by lying there.
And the longer we stay there, the harder it is to leave
Similarly, if we consistently choose comfort and convenience over the things we value, we can become seriously averse to anything that causes us discomfort, or has the risk of causing discomfort.
For instance, take a person who values fairness but chooses the comfortable path of not speaking up instead of having a difficult conversation.
Over time, they may find choosing the easier path more and more until they start to feel intense anxiety about the thought of having to address injustice. They feel intense discomfort about the possibility of social awkwardness, and choose to avoid that risk entirely instead of facing it and growing from it.
8. You fall into a victim mentality and see the external world as a barrier to choosing your values.
If you choose comfort and convenience at the expense of your own values, you may end up choosing a more victim-based mentality in order to explain away your choices.
For instance, if anyone questions why you’ve chosen comfort or convenience in a given situation instead of choosing something that aligns more with your values, you may now convince yourself that you can’t.
You may begin to believe you’re incapable of making other choices despite wanting to, and hope to elicit sympathy rather than condemnation.
For example, you might have always been a stalwart proponent of justice but now remain silent at work when your superior treats your coworkers unfairly, steals things, or forces people to work unethically because you don’t want to risk losing your position.
As you get used to a life of comfortable security, it gets harder to risk that by standing up for your values. As such, adopting the victim mentality is the brain’s natural way of dealing with the cognitive dissonance that it creates.
Final thoughts…
It’s a difficult truth that our worst decisions are often the ones that define us.
When you consistently choose comfort and convenience over your values, unfortunately, in time, you stop being the person you can be proud of and become a version of yourself that you may barely even recognize.
If you feel that you’ve dug yourself into a hole that you’re unable to climb out of, ask for assistance rather than resigning yourself to decomposing down there.
There’s always a helping hand available to get you out and back onto the path you truly want to walk.
