People Don’t Change... Unless They Want To

The trapping momentum of adult life.

Read Time: ~8 minutes

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A few months ago I got into a heated debate with a couple of my friends. The topic of this debate was a classic open-ended question without any real answers, so in other words, great bar conversation. The question was “Do people change?”

At the time, my argument was in favor of a firm no. I felt, while I acknowledge that I had definitely matured and grown up a lot in the last 10 years, that fundamentally people remain the same throughout their adult lives. My perspective comes from an honest source: my parents.

From my mom I got this piece of Bridal Shower advice: write down all of the little things that your fiance does that annoy you. All of them. Do it for a week. After a week reread the list and decide for yourself whether or not you can live with all of those things. If you can’t then you shouldn’t marry them because they will never stop doing them. In other words, don’t expect them to change.

From my dad, I got the direct quote that “People don’t change” as backed up by examples of the friends he had reconnected with from his past who remained the same people from the last time they met up. Even if it had been years since they had spoken.

Actually, I got even more evidence of this from my mom. For the last few years, she has been saying that not only do people not change, but they become more themselves as time goes on. Those little things that are idiosyncratic become a larger and larger part of their personality. Her observation, not mine.

But you can see based on what my two largest role models said, why I would think that people don’t change. However, since that initial conversation with those friends I have come around and now modulate my response to the question at hand. I still believe that people don’t change, but with the added caveat of “Unless they want to.”

People don’t change… unless they want to

What does that mean? I’m sure there are plenty of people that don’t like things about themselves that they wished they could change. There are plenty of people unhappy about their job, their significant other, their weight, or their fill-in-the-blank. While these attributes or habits may not completely define a person, changing them represents a change in that person. This feels significant enough to justify the statement, “This person has changed.”

My newly-realized opinion stems from the idea that we all experience the crushing weight of something I call “Life Momentum” and if left to our own devices without reflection and purpose, we will not change and calcify into a marble statue of who we were when we turned 21.

Let’s unpack that.

Life Momentum

Life momentum carries us through our daily lives whether or not we recognize it. This manifests in our careers, our relationships, our friendships, and even our little daily habits that we don’t even recognize are happening. Newton’s law of inertia states that an object in motion will remain in motion unless an unplanned force acts upon it and that is exactly what happens as we age. The things that we do we tend to keep doing and those that we don’t do we tend to continue to not do unless some kind of outside force stops us or kicks us into gear.

This law of inertia pops up all over the place. In ways big and small we are just as subject to this law as a projectile is to gravity.

As an extreme example, a smoker will keep on smoking unless they are faced with an ultimatum (health, relationship, or otherwise). In a less extreme example, if you wake up every day and immediately check your phone before getting out of bed, that is likely to keep on happening unless you do something about it. A personal example for me is that I have never been in the habit of putting a toilet seat down after I go to the bathroom. A product of growing up in a house with 3 men and a mother who never said anything about it. If I don’t do anything to change this behavior it is unlikely that I will all of a sudden begin to put the seat down after I tinkle.

What my parents were referring to when they said that people don’t change, was the fact that if you are unaware of the life inertia that is acting on your behavior, personality, and habits, it will keep you in that lane for the rest of your life. Not only will you do the same things forever, but you will be the same person. Many people never reflect on how their patterns of behavior will keep going into the future and as a result never make a conscious choice to enact some unplanned force on the inertia that is propelling their lives forward. This, in my opinion, is a mistake. Deciding you want to change is the only way you CAN change. Now, you will always be mostly the same person no matter what you do. Whatever collection of molecules and chemical processes that make me, Eric Brunts, the sentient human being, will not dissipate. Even if I rewire a multitude of neural synapses to change my demeanor enough to solve all of my problems and get into a completely new set of hobbies and activities, I will remain myself. But even if you can’t change at the deepest level (which would be a question of science rather than of behaviors), you can still change a lot about yourself. And if you ask me, that is a worthwhile endeavor.

Deciding to Change

The only way you buck the force of inertia and make desired changes in your life is by understanding what elements of your life are a result of that inertia and making a conscious choice to do things differently. These opportunities for improvement can be found in any area of your life. It could be that you are ordering takeout for dinner every night and are punting learning how to cook for real. It could be that you don’t like how much time you spend on your phone and you want to diminish your screen time. It could even be the collection of stimuli that rile you up to the point where you are spitting mad. Whatever it is, if you don’t accept that you have some sort of ingrained behaviors that are making decisions for you on autopilot, you’ll never be able to take the next step. Which is deciding that you’re ready to change.

There is a plethora of literature about the psychological process of building a new habit so I’m not going to go into that here. My only point is that once you acknowledge what is shaping your behavior, you are in a position to evaluate its value in your life, and then make a proactive decision on whether or not to keep it going forward.

The reason that I thought people don’t change, and why my parents seem set on the idea that people don’t change, is that so many people don’t. Too many of us live our lives with our heads down and never stop to think and reflect on many of the background processes that run constantly without our supervision or sign-off. Practically all of the habits we all have now were at one point a choice, but over time they become the default which then of course shapes who we are.

A reasonable question to ask now might be, “But Eric, I have reached a place of complete self-acceptance and I feel that I am already the optimal version of myself, why would I need to change?”

First of all, if you think you can honestly look at yourself in the mirror and think, “Yep, this is it, this is as good as I’m going to get” then I would suggest that you look harder.

I’m not asking you to strive to find things about yourself that you don’t like, but my suggestion comes from a place of personal experience. Up until a few years ago I truly thought I had it all figured out. I was living my best life in New York and traveling all over the country and world having awesome adventures with friends old and new. I was doing well at work and put a high priority on my physical fitness and diet. If you had asked me in 2018, what was missing from my life, I would have told you not much. I honestly felt like I had matured enough to the point where if I lived the rest of my life that way, I would have done perfectly fine.

Only in hindsight can I acknowledge how naive that perspective was. In the past few years, I have opened my eyes to the number of areas where I was and am falling way short, and only recently have started taking concrete steps to address them. My point here is even if everything is going perfectly for you, and you have no major OR minor complaints about life, still take the time to do some self-reflection. You may be surprised by what you find. Once you uncover a habit or pattern of behavior that you don’t love about yourself, you’ve taken the first and hardest step towards changing it.

I’m well on my way toward becoming the kind of person who puts the toilet seat down every time I go to the bathroom, and that act alone is making life considerably more sanitary (and buying me some brownie points with my girlfriend). No matter how big or small the changes we make end up becoming part of who we are and if you’re honest with yourself, I’m sure that you want to walk a path of constructive development and not auto-pilot momentum.