How to get out of the mud?

14 Jan, 2025

We all know a person who has screwed their life beyond recognition. The difference between who they were and who they became is so stark that they themselves struggle to recognize it. When you care about someone, you notice these details—what went wrong, where it all went wrong, and whether there is a way to recover from this tragedy for them. There is no definitive answer to this because life doesn’t work in absolutes. One can only navigate through life in possibilities and probabilities.

So, I want to get on the thinking train and really think hard about how someone can get out of the mud they have pushed themselves into. We cannot get someone out of the mud without their approval. A person has to develop a desire to get out of the mud before destiny extends its hand to help. If you encounter someone who is willing to take even a single step in the direction they think is good—not what you think is good—then they deserve all the help. I am writing for them. If you are in the mud, then I am riding the thinking train for you.

The situations you find yourself in often feel like a literal quagmire where whatever you do makes things worse for yourself. The movement increases the problem. But if you don’t move, you cannot get out. In such conditions, you need external help, and more often than not, people in these situations look for divine intervention because they think they have tried everything on their own.

While I have drawn this analogy to explain what it feels like for a person who is stuck in a bad phase, I also want to highlight that getting out of the figurative mud isn’t the same as being stuck in a literal quagmire. It’s simpler than that.

We need to start with how someone would get into a worse position. There are only two ways that can happen: choices and emotions. There is no inherent nature of choices, which is why I didn’t mention “bad” choices. How do we know if a choice is good or bad? We only understand that from the point of view of the outcome. If all choices lead to a favorable outcome, why would you consider any choice a bad one?

I have thought about the behavior of choices and realized that it’s not the categorization of choices that influences us; it’s the idea of longevity behind those choices that matters the most. There are only two kinds of choices, and they can be measured in duration: short-term choices and long-term choices. To be well off in the next decade, you have to make choices that are for the long term. You cannot make short-term choices and expect long-term rewards. Those opportunities are far too few and require the lowest-probability event to materialize, like “being lucky.”

Wanting to be wealthy in the future is a long-term choice and requires a specific kind of behavior to be exhibited until the time you achieve that outcome. You do not know the outcome, but there is a trajectory where arriving at that outcome has the highest probability. So you take that path and let probability do its work.

Wasting your 20s in partying and debauchery is a short-term choice and requires minimum effort to reap maximum pleasure. If you criticize this choice, then you are again thinking from the place of outcome. Many people do poorly in their 20s but end up being successful in their 40s. There is no fixed pattern, so we need to dump the idea of thinking from the place of outcome and start thinking in terms of probabilities.

If your goal is to seek pleasure, then the above short-term choice has helped you achieve that. You had to put in minimum effort in terms of time and work to receive maximum rewards. If you resist thinking from the place of outcome, from the place of hindsight, what is the difference between two outcomes? None. Both are achieving their goals. So, where is the problem?

Think of it from the perspective of math: if all of life and the universe function on mathematical probabilities, then our expectations of the outcome don’t matter. It is what we seek that matters in the end. The path is for the one who seeks and what one seeks. There are no fixed paths designed from the creation of the universe. This is the primary reason why advice doesn’t work—because two paths to the same destiny cannot be the same. Even if two friends are studying in the same university for the same qualification, their journeys will not be the same in the end.

We create our path through what we seek, and the type of choices (long-term or short-term) will be our vehicle leading us to our destination. If pleasure is what we seek, then we don’t need a bigger vehicle or long-term choices. Short-term choices will lead us to what we seek. The pathway will be shorter every time. A person who seeks to be wealthy in their 40s will naturally require a bigger vehicle because the destination is farther. They must make long-term choices. If they make short-term choices, they might not reach their destination because the vehicle isn’t equipped to take them there.

Once we understand the nature of choices, another challenge presents itself: why do some people fall off the wagon of long-term choices? Nobody wants to remain broke, uneducated, uncultured, or unevolved on their own. A lot of people have transformation stories of how bright they once were, as if acknowledging that something went wrong in their life.

What drives a human being to make short-term versus long-term choices? If you observe the transformational journey without focusing on the outcome, you can be assured that transformation is inevitable. It is the outcome through which we determine good or bad transformation. If something is inevitable, then why is it tough to make obvious high-probability long-term choices?

The answer is emotions. Our emotional stability decides our long-term focus. How badly we want something is our desperation—an underlying emotion—but what we are willing to do to arrive at our destination describes our quality of emotions. A multitude of factors influences our emotional depth and long-term stability to be able to make long-term choices. You need discipline to follow through with long-term choices, but without having quality emotions, you cannot maintain stability to inculcate discipline. Just like you need high-quality food to maintain good health, you need high-quality emotions to develop mental fortitude to endure long-term choices without any instant gratification.

What constitutes a quality emotion or good emotional depth? To succeed in life, we need two types of emotions: the ability to decipher beneficial versus non-beneficial and the willpower to execute what we consider beneficial. I have deliberately excluded the terms good versus bad because what is good for one is bad for another, and we consider both from the lens of outcome. So it’s better to label them as beneficial versus non-beneficial. One needs a mental compass to decide what’s good for them with respect to social success and what’s bad for them in the long run.

All success is social. If there were no society to reward success or punish failure, there would be no incentive to succeed. One could have just foraged for food and survived. The parameter for success changes with the times we live in. Hunter-gatherers had to hunt for food to survive. They needed women to procreate and satisfy their sexual desires, and in order to get women, they needed food so they could keep the women with them. The idea of such validation dependency makes success a social construct. The parameters for success have changed a lot since then, but it is still social.

The failure to reach emotional stability is also the failure to follow through with long-term choices with discipline. Our emotional depth and quality of emotions depend on our self-worth, which directly comes from how we see ourselves or what we think about ourselves. If we think about ourselves through the lens of external validation—whatever was passed on from parents or society—then our self-worth would most likely go down to zero.

Our self-worth is directly tied to the formation of our identity. So when we do not consider our self-worth to be great, we will most likely pursue activities that can define us. If an identity is not given to us, then we seek that identity from the world through actions that might not be too helpful. When there’s no internal identity, there is no sense of beneficial versus non-beneficial. Such a construct cannot exist in the mind of someone who does not know who they are.

All forms of mental illness narrow down to exploring your perceived identity. The conflicting self-worth is what causes mental problems. A man of purpose is unlikely to indulge in activities that will bring down his social reputation because, in his mind, his self-worth is more important.

All of our ambitions are tied to an identity that is formed from having an opinion about ourselves—i.e., self-worth. If you are overweight but think of yourself as an athlete, you are most likely to dislike your current state and do everything in your power to change it. This idea of your self-worth will enable quality emotions in you, making you choose wisely between beneficial and non-beneficial options, leading you to make long-term choices. You are most likely to follow through with those choices with discipline.

In the end, if you want to get out of the proverbial mud, you need to develop an internal identity in your mind. When you don’t know who you are, you need to tell yourself repetitively who you are. It can also be who you want to become. The internalization of this identity will add to your self-worth, and you will cease to look toward the world for any gratification. The more you solidify your identity inside your head, the more you will work toward categorizing your choices between beneficial and non-beneficial with respect to the identity you have created.

It is our identity that is behind all the emotions we feel, which then enables us to make choices according to the identity we have built—long-term or short-term. If you feel confused in life, if you feel stuck and don’t know where to go in life, or worse, you think you have ruined your life, the starting point should not be to find the “right” paths. Avoid the mistake of thinking from the point of outcome. Instead, think from the point of your identity. What kind of identity should you build? Who do you want to become? Then work toward internalizing that identity.

This brings us to the pinnacle of questioning: what should be our identity? Is it someone we want to become? If yes, wouldn’t that make us impostors? Your identity is about exploring your inner child. Everything begins in childhood—the desires, the traumas, and the ambitions. Start from there and gradually build your identity according to your experiences. If you eliminate the trauma and hurtful experiences in your life, what traits would you have or not have?

The traits that you remember will define your personality—the ideal personality devoid of all external opinions and biases that you have developed over the years. Your identity is you without the opinions you have imposed on yourself due to the phases you went through. It is not an easy task to discover your true essence from the heavy dirt we have piled upon ourselves, but all things worth having are hard to obtain.

This is how you pull yourself out of the proverbial mud and grow like a flower into a person who knows how to make wise and beneficial choices to achieve success that is not social—one that is independent of society.