If everything in your life seems virtually perfect, you may feel like you don’t have the right to be unhappy.
After all, so many boxes are ticked, those around you talk about how fortunate you are, and you should be happy with everything you have, right?
So why aren’t you?
Anyone who looked into your world would think everything was perfect, but that doesn’t mean that it’s perfect for you.
In fact, if the following things resonate with you, it’s understandable that you keep wanting to escape.
8 reasons you want to escape a life that looks completely fine on paper:
1. You didn’t choose this life.
Countless people just “go along” with what others decide for them when they’re young because it’s so much easier to go that route. But the problem is that they then can’t ever seem to gain control of the ride they’re on. They spend years living a life that they didn’t actually want.
This often happens when people’s parents push them to pursue careers to make them proud or continue family traditions, such as being the 20th person in a row to become a doctor or following several centuries of military careers.
Their parents chose their college majors and career paths, their friends introduced them to their partner, and then their partner and extended family planned their wedding and even chose their kids’ names for them.
These individuals have essentially become passengers in their own lives, with little to no say in anything.
If this sounds familiar, you may have a great job, successful spouse, lovely kids, and full social life, but you didn’t choose any of that for yourself. There is probably nothing overtly wrong in your life, but that doesn’t mean that things are right for you.
On paper, your life may look perfectly fine to anyone who peers in on it, but internally you feel like you want to scream and claw your way free from it.
What’s more, the problem here is often that you don’t even know what other things you’d choose if you had the option to do so: you simply know on a cellular level that you don’t want this.
2. “Fine” doesn’t mean “fulfilling.”
If your life revolves around a safe, predictable routine, then it may be comfortable and reliable while simultaneously lacking real challenge, growth, or spontaneity.
You may feel that there isn’t anything technically “wrong” with your life, but that doesn’t mean that you feel happy or fulfilled in it.
You may look at your life and wonder why you feel like you want to run away from it when nothing about it is actively harming you.
Your spouse is kind and supportive, you might have great kids, and your job is comfortable and not particularly stressful. You get to spend time with your friends and work on your hobbies, but deep down you feel like you’re just going through the motions on autopilot.
Your life is fine, but it isn’t feeding you or expanding you. It’s just happening.
3. You’re so burned out, you’re practically crispy.
I have a family friend whose life looks amazing from the outside. She has a prestigious career, she’s finishing her PhD, she has talented, intelligent, well-adjusted children, and she’s also an athlete who’s in better shape at 50 than many people are in their twenties.
And she’s had three nervous breakdowns in the past couple of years because she is utterly and completely burned out.
She’s admired by everyone around her like she’s a paragon of everything that a woman can achieve, yet they have no idea that she’s drowning in all of her commitments and obligations.
She often talks about how much she wishes she could just run away from everything, or go back in time to make radically different life choices, but she can’t.
Instead, she’s trapped in the web of overachieving that she has woven for herself, and can’t see a way out for herself.
Similarly, you may find yourself fantasising about leaving it all behind, because the “good” life you’ve created is simply impossible to maintain without burning out.
4. It feels like you’re lacking purpose.
If your life is cozy, comfortable, and reliable, you may spend your days taking care of all the basics without any sense of real purpose behind your actions.
For example, you may spend your days doing office work you don’t care much about, or perhaps you’re a homemaker who spends your days cooking and cleaning but isn’t fulfilled by it.
When your days revolve around taking care of everything that needs to be done purely for the sake of survival — your own, as well as those close to you — it may seem like you have no real purpose other than to keep everyone’s lives in order.
Deal with that for long enough, and it’s no surprise that you dream about swimming away from the ennui you’re dealing with.
5. Things just don’t feel “right” to you.
Many of us have experienced situations that seemed perfect in every way but still didn’t feel “right” for some reason.
We might never have been able to put a finger on why, but we just knew that things weren’t the way they should be.
When things like this happen, it’s usually a sign that whatever we’re doing isn’t in alignment with our authentic selves. It might have worked well for us in the past, but we’re no longer the person we were when this endeavor began.
As such, when the thing in question doesn’t match your current self or your values anymore, it’s completely understandable that you’re looking for a way out.
6. You may not remember what it feels like to be happy because you’ve been in survival mode for so long.
If you’ve been going through the motions to keep things afloat for a long time, you may not remember what it feels like to be truly happy.
This often happens when you’ve spent years living in survival mode, even when it doesn’t look that way from the outside.
You’re doing what needs to be done, meeting everyone’s expectations, keeping life stable, and your nervous system has slowly shut down anything that isn’t essential.
You may ruminate about pleasant things you’ve experienced that brought you joy, but you can’t quite drum up the sensations you felt during those times.
It’s like looking at old photos of other people’s joy, in which you can see that they’re having fun, but you don’t share their memories.
In fact, when you look around at the life you’re currently living, you may not feel much of anything at all.
You may not necessarily experience anger, sadness, or resentment, but nor do you feel joy or contentment.
You might have resigned yourself to keeping things going because you’ve committed to do so, but you’re so checked out emotionally that if the opportunity arose for you to walk away from it all, you’d probably do so and never look back.
7. You’re depressed, but hiding it well.
Are you familiar with the phrase “functional freeze”? It describes being in a situation where you’re still capable of taking care of obligations like work, domestic labor, parenting, and socializing, while being dissociated from your own emotions.
You might go through all of your daily tasks quite effectively, but you feel like you’re outside of yourself, observing your actions instead of being a truly present, active participant.
This experience often overlaps with high‑functioning depression. Anyone who’s looking in on your life from outside may think that you’re a successful, even enviable individual with an incredibly happy life.
They have no idea that internally you feel hollow and disconnected and that you’re expending a huge amount of effort to maintain a facade that you fear may crack at any second.
If this is the case for you, you don’t have to struggle alone. Reaching out to a therapist or health professional can start to help you unpack what’s happening and begin finding your way back to yourself.
8. All you can think about is “what might have been.”
There’s a poignant line in Jonathan Safran Foer’s book Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, which says: “Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living“.
Your life might look completely fine on paper — enviable, even — but that doesn’t mean that it’s the right life for you.
In fact, you may spend most of your time wondering what your life would be like if you had taken a different path.
While you can’t go back and undo the choices you’ve made, you can change direction now. As such, if you feel caught in “what might have been,” it may be worth booking some time with a therapist or life coach.
They can help you determine what changes you can make now or in the near future that will help to alleviate your desire to escape the life you’ve cultivated, and help you work towards one you’re more excited to live.
Final thoughts…
If you’re seriously thinking about escaping the life you’re living, you may feel anxious or panicky — especially if you feel like you’re “trapped.”
Remember that everything in your life is fixable, though it may take some finagling to do so.
Take stock of where you are now versus where you’d like to be, and decide which things you’d like to discard and what you’d prefer to do instead.
That will give you a good foundation to build upon as you embark on a new, more fulfilling direction.
