What You Avoid Gets Worse
On the compounding cost of postponed confrontation
There’s a particular kind of knowing that lives in the body before it reaches the mind. A tightness in the chest when certain thoughts arise. A subtle nausea when specific topics come up in conversation. A heaviness that settles in when contemplating certain aspects of life that haven’t been examined in months or years.
This bodily knowledge is trying to communicate something: there’s a door you’ve been walking past, a room you’ve been refusing to enter, a truth you’ve been carefully constructing your days around not confronting.
Everyone has at least one of these rooms. Sometimes it’s a conversation that needs to happen but hasn’t. Sometimes it’s a relationship that’s been dying slowly for years. Sometimes it’s a health concern that’s being monitored through strategic ignorance rather than medical examination. Sometimes it’s a financial situation being managed through the sophisticated strategy of simply not looking at it.
The specific content varies, but the mechanism is universal: what we refuse to face doesn’t politely wait for us to be ready. It develops according to its own logic, following the trajectory that all unattended things follow. It gets worse.
Like mold in a damp corner or rust on exposed metal, neglected problems don’t stay the same size. They grow. They spread. They compound. They transform from situations that could be addressed with a difficult afternoon into crises that require months or years to untangle, if they can be untangled at all.
The Roman Stoics lived in a world where avoidance had immediate and visible consequences. When Cato the Younger faced the choice between compromising with Caesar’s dictatorship or preserving his principles through death, he couldn’t postpone the decision. When Seneca was ordered to commit suicide by Nero, there was no avoiding the confrontation with his own mortality. When Epictetus faced the reality of his enslavement, no amount of avoidance would change his circumstances.
These were extreme situations, but they illuminated a truth that applies to ordinary life: reality continues developing whether we engage with it or not. The choice isn’t between facing something or not facing it. The choice is between facing it now while it’s still manageable or facing it later after it’s metastasized into something far more difficult to address.
A small crack in a foundation doesn’t stay small. Water seeps in. Freezing and thawing cycles widen it. Eventually, the crack becomes structural damage. The cost of repair increases exponentially with each season of neglect. What could have been fixed with sealant and an afternoon becomes a project requiring contractors, engineering assessments, and tens of thousands of dollars.
Human relationships follow similar patterns. A minor misunderstanding left unaddressed becomes an assumption about character. That assumption shapes future interactions, creating patterns of miscommunication. Those patterns harden into relationship dynamics. Those dynamics eventually become “just how things are” between two people, requiring months or years of deliberate work to undo what could have been resolved with a single honest conversation.
The same principle applies to health. The occasional symptom that’s dismissed becomes a pattern that’s rationalized becomes a condition that requires treatment becomes a disease that requires management becomes a crisis that requires emergency intervention. Each stage of avoidance narrows the options and increases the eventual cost.
Financial situations. Professional trajectories. Personal development. Creative pursuits. The mechanism is identical across domains: what gets avoided gets worse, and what gets worse becomes harder to avoid, creating a self-reinforcing cycle where the very act of avoidance makes the thing being avoided more worthy of avoidance.
This cycle reveals that our emotional system is terrible at calculating long-term costs. Present discomfort feels overwhelming. Future consequences feel abstract. The emotional weight of having a difficult conversation today feels heavier than the intellectual knowledge that avoiding it will create larger problems down the road.
But this isn’t a design flaw. It’s a design feature optimized for different circumstances than the ones most of us face. In immediate physical danger, prioritizing present threat over long-term consequence makes perfect sense. When a predator is approaching, thinking about next year’s food supply is counterproductive.
The problem is that our emotional system treats uncomfortable conversations, difficult decisions, and anxiety-inducing examinations of reality as if they were predators. The same fight-or-flight mechanism that evolved to help us survive immediate physical threats activates when we contemplate calling our doctor about a concerning symptom or looking at our bank account or having an honest conversation about a failing relationship.
Our body is trying to protect us from present pain, but it’s incapable of weighing that pain against future cost. This creates a systematic bias toward avoidance that, left unexamined, will reliably choose present comfort over future wellbeing.
The Stoics developed practices specifically designed to counter this bias. They called it “premeditation of adversity” or contemplating the worst-case scenario. Not to cultivate pessimism, but to make future costs feel more real and present in decision-making. When Seneca regularly imagined losing his wealth, his position, or his life, he wasn’t being morbid. He was training himself to see that the discomfort of confronting these possibilities was less costly than the false comfort of denying they existed.
Marcus Aurelius filled his private notebooks with reminders about impermanence and the inevitability of loss.
“Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what’s left and live it properly.”
He was forcing himself to confront what most people spend their lives avoiding: that time is actually passing, that opportunities are actually closing, that postponement is actual loss.
This confrontation with reality wasn’t meant to create despair. It was meant to create accurate perception of costs. When the future becomes viscerally real rather than intellectually abstract, when the cost of avoidance becomes emotionally salient rather than just logically understood, the calculation changes. Confrontation starts to feel less expensive than continued avoidance.
But there’s a deeper mechanism at work beyond just calculation of costs. Avoidance does something to the person doing the avoiding. It’s not just that avoided problems get worse. It’s that avoidance itself shapes character in a particular direction.
Every time someone avoids a difficult conversation, they’re practicing being someone who avoids difficult conversations. Every time someone postpones an uncomfortable decision, they’re strengthening the neural pathways that connect discomfort with postponement. Every time someone looks away from a concerning truth, they’re training themselves to look away.
This training is cumulative. It doesn’t just affect the specific situations being avoided. It generalizes. The capacity for avoidance, once developed, starts applying itself to an expanding range of situations. What begins as avoiding one difficult conversation becomes a pattern of avoiding difficult conversations becomes a personality trait of conflict avoidance becomes an identity built around staying comfortable.
Meanwhile, the opposite is also true. Each confrontation with discomfort builds capacity for confrontation. Each time someone does the thing they’d rather avoid, they’re creating evidence that they can do things they’d rather avoid. This evidence doesn’t make future difficult things less difficult, but it makes them feel more manageable.
The person who has navigated one difficult conversation knows they can navigate another. The person who has looked at one uncomfortable truth knows they can look at another. The person who has made one hard decision knows they can make another.
This is why the first step is often the hardest. Not because the first avoided thing is necessarily more difficult than subsequent ones, but because taking the first step requires acting without evidence that you’re capable of taking steps like this. You’re operating on faith in your own capacity rather than on proof of it.
But once you have proof, once you’ve faced one thing and discovered that the anticipation was worse than the reality, the next confrontation becomes easier. Not easy, but easier. You have a data point. You know what happens when you stop avoiding. The monster in your imagination shrinks to a manageable problem once you look at it directly.
What makes avoidance particularly insidious is how it disguises itself as prudence. Waiting for more information before making a decision sounds reasonable. Giving things time before having a difficult conversation sounds measured. Watching and waiting before seeking medical attention sounds cautious.
But there’s a difference between gathering information and avoiding decision. Between giving things time and hoping they’ll resolve without intervention. Between being cautious and being in denial. The difference isn’t always clear in the moment, which is why examining motivation matters.
Ask: am I postponing this because I need more information, or because I don’t want to face what I already know? Am I giving this time because that’s what the situation needs, or because I’m hoping the situation will change so I don’t have to act? Am I being cautious, or am I hiding behind caution?
The answers to these questions require honesty that’s uncomfortable in itself. It’s easier to believe we’re being reasonable than to acknowledge we’re being avoidant. But that ease is expensive. Every day spent in sophisticated rationalization of avoidance is a day the thing being avoided is getting worse.
The path out isn’t complicated, though it is difficult. It requires identifying what’s being avoided, acknowledging the cost of continuing to avoid it, and taking one small action toward confrontation despite the discomfort that action generates.
The action doesn’t need to be complete resolution. It can be a single step. Opening the conversation you’ve been postponing. Making the appointment you’ve been putting off. Looking at the account you’ve been ignoring. Asking the question you’ve been afraid to ask. The size of the step matters less than the breaking of the avoidance pattern.
Because the pattern is the real enemy, not any specific avoided situation. The situation might be difficult, but it’s finite. The pattern is perpetual. It will keep generating new situations to avoid unless it’s interrupted.
Each interruption makes the next interruption easier. Each confrontation builds capacity for the next one. Each time you do the thing you’d rather avoid, you’re becoming someone who does things they’d rather avoid. This identity is far more valuable than any specific avoided problem is costly.
The goal isn’t to become someone who never feels the pull toward avoidance. The goal is to become someone who recognizes that pull and acts anyway. Someone who understands that the discomfort of confrontation is acute and temporary while the discomfort of avoidance is chronic and intensifying.
📝 Today’s Stoic Gameplan
Notice the bodily signals: Pay attention to physical responses today. When does tension arise? What thoughts create heaviness? These sensations often point toward what’s being avoided.
Name one avoided thing: Identify something that’s been generating background anxiety through avoidance. Write it down specifically. Make the avoidance conscious rather than automatic.
Calculate actual costs: For what’s being avoided, list concrete ways it’s worse now than when avoidance began. Transform abstract future consequences into specific present costs.
Take the smallest possible step: Identify an action so small that discomfort is the only real barrier to doing it. Then do it. Build evidence that confrontation is survivable.
What gets avoided doesn’t stay the same. It follows the natural trajectory of neglected things. It worsens, spreads, compounds, and eventually demands far more energy to address than it would have required initially.
The difficult conversation doesn’t become easier with time. The uncomfortable decision doesn’t become clearer through postponement. The concerning symptom doesn’t improve through strategic ignorance. The deteriorating situation doesn’t stabilize because attention is withheld from it.
Everything avoided is growing in the dark, developing according to the logic of neglect, waiting for the moment when it can no longer be avoided because it’s become a crisis that demands immediate attention.
Face it now while choice still exists, or face it later when crisis removes all choice but one.
Stay stoic,
SW
What you resist persist .. it’s the law of nature. What you resist, persists not because life is cruel, but because attention is fuel. Whatever you fight, you feed. Whatever you accept, you free. Sometimes the only way out is to stop pushing against what’s already asking to be seen.
I needed to read this today.