Do we have to live this way?

Discounting, Wall-E, and the moving sidewalk

By the time she noticed it, she’d walked five blocks past the restaurant. It wasn’t just exhaustion from that overpriced climbing gym day pass; the sidewalk felt like it was literally moving beneath her feet. 

And she noticed she wasn’t alone. Everyone around her glid effortlessly, scrolling phones, sipping lattes. The whole scene reminded her of the humans in Wall-E, slouched in their hover-chairs, Food-in-a-Cup in their right hands, and limpid smiles on their rotund faces.

But there were no hover-chairs on Amsterdam Avenue. No hidden motors. No hologram chat screens.

Just the quiet thrum of everyday inertia pushing her, and everyone else, along, insensate, unnoticing, dully numb. 

It was almost like she’d unwittingly made a left-hand turn on a Tuesday in 2016, and she’d been shopping at the same grocery store for the nine years since; like she didn’t exactly pick this direction, but here she was, gliding forward anyway.

It felt, honestly, like she’d been on a decade-long moving sidewalk.

Sound familiar?

It should, because chances are you’ve been where she was. We all do it. 

We stick to routines that no longer serve us, to jobs we barely tolerate, to relationships that have all the passion of a DMV waiting line in central Texas, and decisions we vaguely regret—but keep making anyway. 

We follow paths without resistance; stick with choices made by our younger, more idealistic, and definitely more caffeinated selves; and when the Sunday scaries hit, we post about them on Instagram. 

“That’s just life, right?” we assure ourselves.

Wrong. 

So gloriously, wonderfully wrong.

Why Life Feels Like an Airport Terminal

In researching my book, Solving for Why, I started calling this phenomenon the moving sidewalk. And that’s because it’s not dramatic, like the quicksand the cartoons warned us about, nor is it a forceful tidal wave. 

It’s way worse—it’s subtle.

Our lives build moving sidewalks under our feet, constructed from obligations, routines, past choices, and that niggling sense of what you “should” do. Those sidewalks look a little like this:

• Jobs we stay in because leaving feels “risky” (we ignore the risk of spending 80,000 hours doing something that makes us miserable)

• Cities we live in because, well, our stuff is already there

• Relationships that have evolved from “passionate love” to “roommate I sometimes sleep with”

And despite fantasizing about different lives while scrolling real estate listings for cities we’ll never move to, stepping off those sidewalks feels impossible. 

“Next year,” we promise ourselves, as if Future Us will magically sprout some superpower that Present Us doesn’t have—and forgetting that Present Us is just last year’s Future Us. 

The Science Behind “Meh” Decisions

Our brains are really efficient (which is a fancier way of saying “lazy”). Because change is exhausting, they love shortcuts.

Which makes sense: from an evolutionary standpoint, change equals danger, and routine equals survival. Your ancient brain doesn’t care that you’re bored at work; it cares that no brontosaurus has stepped on you in the last nine years. 

We’ve talked about some of our brains efficiency tricks before:

1. Energy conservation: Your brain uses about 20% of your body’s energy despite being only 2% of your body weight. It’s an energy hog that will take shortcuts whenever possible. New decisions require glucose. Routines don’t. 

2. The Sunk Cost Fallacy: “I’ve already spent three years getting this degree, so I should use it,” says everyone who’s ever remained miserable in a profession they hate. How do I know? I’ve been there. We cling to investments of time and money, even as we become a squarer and squarer peg in a world of round holes.

3. Loss Aversion: Humans feel losses roughly twice as strongly as equivalent gains. That promotion might increase happiness by 30%, but leaving friends behind might decrease it by 60%. The math seems clear — until you realize we’re terrible at predicting how either will actually affect us.

Together, these forces create psychological inertia. We are, after all, not just creatures of habit. We are creatures of inertia. 

Isaac Newton would be impressed—and then probably depressed.

Sacrificing Future You on the Altar of Today

But there’s something else going on as well, something Aesop once told a fable about. It goes like this:

There was once a Countryman who possessed the most wonderful Goose you can imagine, for every day when he visited the nest, the Goose had laid a beautiful, glittering, golden egg.

The Countryman took the eggs to market and soon began to get rich. But it was not long before he grew impatient with the Goose because she gave him only a single golden egg a day. He was not getting rich fast enough.

Then one day, after he had finished counting his money, the idea came to him that he could get all the golden eggs at once by killing the Goose and cutting it open. But when the deed was done, not a single golden egg did he find, and his precious Goose was dead.

Aesop’s moral? “Those who have plenty want more and so lose all they have.” 

Which, ok, yes. Greed is bad. 

But that’s way too boring. There’s something a lot more interesting going on here, something that goes far beyond the simple moralizing of a guy who probably never existed in the first place.

Let me ask you a question. Which would you prefer: Either I give you a $100 bill today, or I give you that $100 bill in five years?

Chances are, you want the $100 today. I know I would.

That’s because those two $100 bills aren’t worth the same thing to you. A hundred today feels somehow, almost inexplicably, more valuable than a hundred in five years. 

And that, in turn, actually makes sense. The future is uncertain: who knows where things will be in five years, right? Maybe I’ll have forgotten my $100 promise to you. Heck, maybe I’ll be dead. Maybe you’ll be dead. Maybe the US economy has collapsed and a dollar isn’t even worth anything anymore.

So, taking the hundred dollar bill today is just a good bet.

That’s what the clueless Countryman was doing with his goose, too. He didn’t want to wait for the golden eggs to come, one day at a time. The future was uncertain. He could, as the fable says, “get all the golden eggs at once.”

But! Let me flip the question: Would you rather pay me $100 today, or pay me $100 in five years?

Notice how your answer changed? Notice how you wanted to get the money today, but you wanted to pay the money later? 

Notice how you take advantage of the uncertainty of the future in a very different way when it comes to paying something? 

It turns out that we devalue the future, compared to today, no matter what. (It’s something decision scientists call discounting.) 

And that causes us to make some pretty poor decisions. It makes us want to get all the benefits today—and to push all the costs onto Future Us.

To put it differently, Present Us wants to pay nothing, and get everything—and we’re willing to sacrifice Future Us to do it.

You see how that keeps us stuck?

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Back to our protagonist on her moving sidewalk. She’s comfortable, sure. Because that sidewalk is easy. One of the most alluring things about her moving sidewalk is that she’s good at it. She knows how to meet its demands. She knows how to meet its day-to-day—even if that day-to-day is slowly wrapping its tentacles around her.

She sees the other possibilities, the side streets filled with color and options—paths that might lead to joy, growth, and purpose. 

But actually jumping off that moving sidewalk, putting down the Food in a Cup, and walking down those paths means disrupting what’s been smooth ride. 

It means a hefty cost to Present Her, for only the possibility of a benefit for Future Her. 

And that’s exactly what she’s programmed to avoid.

How often do we do the same?

How often do we miss opportunities because the initial activation energy feels too high? How often do we not apply for the job that excites us, not move to the city that calls our name, not write the book that’s been living in our heads? 

We assume that staying put is neutral. But it’s not. It protects Present Us, for sure, but the cost of inaction is just as real as the cost of action. The price of inertia is a life that stays smaller than it could be.

The good news is, we’re not chained to the moving sidewalk. Sure, life’s inertia feels real (because it is). 

But, as Newton taught us, there are two sides to inertia: a body at rest stays at rest and a body in motion stays in motion. 

Do you have to stay on your moving sidewalk? Do you have continue to sacrifice Future You on the altar of today’s security? Do you have to keep living this way? Nope. 

You can choose to stay at rest. 

But you could also choose the other half of inrtia. You could take that first step off the moving sidewalk.

And you could let that change absolutely everything.

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