A few years ago I bought into a mining stock at 2.4 cents. It climbed to 7 cents. On paper I was sitting on something close to $40,000 in profit. And I knew, with a quiet but persistent certainty, that I should sell.
I didn’t sell. Instead, I started reading forums. I found people who were convinced the stock was heading to 20 cents, maybe higher. I let their certainty crowd out my own. I fantasised about what $40,000 might become. And underneath all of that, I did nothing. Which felt, at the time, like a neutral position. A pause. Not quite a decision.
The stock fell to 1 cent. I lost $18,000 of what I’d originally put in.
I’m not writing about this because it’s unusual. I’m writing about it because of what I understood afterwards, and what I keep encountering in my work with clients: that choosing to do nothing is itself a response. It is not a way of delaying the problem. It is the enactment of a particular relationship to knowing, and it has consequences just as real as any active choice would have had.
The question I keep returning to is not why I didn’t act. The more interesting question is what the not-acting was doing for me. Because it wasn’t nothing. The forums, the fantasy, the waiting: all of it was protecting me from having to be in contact with what I already knew. Knowing and then acting on what you know requires you to fully inhabit the moment of decision, to take responsibility for the outcome rather than letting circumstances decide. That is uncomfortable in a particular way. The avoidance, by contrast, had a kind of soft comfort to it. It felt like hope.
I’m often struck by how familiar this is in the consulting room. In my work with clients, the gap between knowing and acting is where a great deal of life gets spent. Someone knows a relationship has run its course but hasn’t left. Someone knows they’re drinking too much but hasn’t said it out loud. Someone knows what kind of work would actually feel meaningful to them but keeps postponing the conversation. The knowing is not in question. What’s in question is what turning towards it would cost.
In psychodynamic terms, what I did with that stock is what we might call a passive enactment: not a conscious decision to stay, but a drifting that preserved the feeling of not having decided. The self is protected from being the agent of loss. If the stock falls on its own, the loss is something that happened to me. If I sell and the stock then falls, I made the right call. If I sell and it climbs to 20 cents, I made the wrong one. Staying in the fantasy keeps both futures alive, and keeps me from having to occupy either of them fully.
This is not a failure of information, or even of courage in the ordinary sense. It’s something more structural. The avoidance is doing a job. It’s managing a particular kind of anxiety: the anxiety of being someone who decides, who is responsible for outcomes, who has to stand in relation to what they actually know. To keep not-deciding is to keep that anxiety at a manageable distance.
I think this is worth sitting with, particularly because our culture tends to frame avoidance as a failure of will. The advice is: just decide. Just act. But the reason people don’t act on what they already know is rarely that they lack information, or even resolve. It’s that the not-acting is in the service of something. It’s carrying something. And until we understand what it’s carrying, the injunction to simply do the thing tends not to reach it.
The question I’d ask you is this: where in your life do you already know? Not suspect, not wonder, but know, with that low-frequency certainty that tends to be there in the background if you let it be. And what would it cost you to act on it? Not practically. What would it cost you internally, relationally, in terms of the version of yourself you’d have to leave behind?
Because here is what I think is true: the moment you turn towards what you already know, something opens. Not easily, and not without discomfort. But the trajectory changes. As long as you stay in the drift, you are subject to what circumstances decide. Only when you move towards the thing do you become someone who is choosing rather than someone to whom things are happening.
I kept the loss I made on that stock. Not as a cautionary tale about investing, but as a reminder about the texture of my own avoidance. The way it masquerades as patience. The way hope can function as a reason not to act on what you already know. And the cost that kind of not-knowing eventually extracts.
The knowing is rarely the problem. The question is what we’re protecting ourselves from, by not acting on it.