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"The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken." —Warren Buffett
I stepped on most of these myself before I even realized they existed.
You know there are many ways you can ruin your life.
You can gamble all your money away in a casino or lose yourself in drugs.
Those are the obvious ones. We all know about them.
But then there are habits that slowly push your trajectory in the wrong direction.
There is no dramatic moment. You don’t suddenly go to jail or lose everything overnight. Instead, years pass, and one day you realize that you’re nowhere near where you actually wanted to be.
I think of these habits as landmines. They’re hidden along the path of life, and sometimes you don’t realize you’ve stepped on one until the damage is already done.
And I can tell you that I’ve stepped on quite a few myself.
Fortunately, none of them caused permanent damage that I couldn’t repair. But fixing that damage took a lot of hard work and, in some cases, years.
So I want to tell you about these landmines, because maybe knowing where they are will help you avoid stepping on them yourself.
Here are the 10 things that slowly ruin your life that I wish someone had told me about earlier.
1. Staying slightly too long in everything
There are many people who don’t leave. Whether it’s a relationship with hundreds of red flags or a job that drains them every single day, they stay until it slowly consumes them from the inside. Being unhappy and disappointed becomes normal. At some point, they stop thinking that something is wrong with their situation and start believing that life just sucks.
Deep down, these people know they should leave. But they never take that step because leaving feels harder than staying.
2. Pretending all the time instead of being who you actually are
Inhaling in the morning before you leave your home and exhaling once you close the door behind you in the evening.
There are people who have been doing this their entire lives. They’re exhausted, sad, and miserable on the inside because they believe their true self won’t be accepted. So they put on that happy face every day, laugh at jokes they don’t find funny, attend events they hate, and say yes when they mean no.
Then, later in life, some of these people wake up one day and ask themselves: Who am I actually?
And that can be a terrifying question when you’ve spent decades being who everyone else wanted you to be.
3. Pleasing everyone around you except yourself
People who please everyone are often the ones who rarely please themselves. They put everyone else’s needs before their own.
Over time, they become angry and exhausted, and they don’t even realize why.
There was a time when I also tried to please everyone around me. It got to the point where I had shaking hands and panic attacks.
And all that effort didn’t even get me the acceptance I so badly wanted. Because what I was looking for wasn’t something I could get from others. I had to give it to myself first.
4. Treating your real life as something that starts later
My parents wanted to go on vacation “next year” their whole lives. But they never went on that vacation.
It can be about anything, though. Your business idea, starting that hobby, booking that flight.
Your life is already happening now, and you’re most likely somewhere in the middle of it. There is no second life waiting for you once you finally have enough time.
If you have the time, money, and health to do something, don’t keep postponing it, because you don’t know how many more chances you’ll get.
5. Expecting from others what you never give yourself
This is a tough one. You make other people responsible for meeting certain needs that you haven’t learned to meet yourself.
For example, my ex-girlfriend expected me to entertain her and constantly come up with new things for us to do, but she rarely did that herself. On the other hand, I expected her to show me unconditional love when I had never learned to give that love to myself.
She was angry at me, and I was angry at her. But we never asked ourselves the relevant question: Do we give ourselves what we expect from each other?
That’s the trap. When you depend on someone else to give you something you can’t give yourself, your happiness becomes dependent on their behavior. And whenever they fail to deliver, you blame them for how you feel.
You can spend years changing partners, friends, or circumstances without realizing that you’re carrying the same unmet need with you wherever you go.
6. Ignoring your health and calling it “enjoying life”
Someone I know used to tell me that he was simply someone who loved to enjoy life. Exercise wasn’t his thing. Eating well wasn’t his thing. But he loved opening a bottle of red wine on a random Tuesday.
Years later, he had a stroke at 41. I don’t know whether his lifestyle had anything to do with it. But seeing someone my age suddenly end up in a hospital changed the way I thought about health.
We tend to treat our health as something we’ll deal with once there’s a problem. The trouble is that by the time the problem arrives, some things are much harder to undo.
7. Always choosing what feels easier right now
It’s easier to stay on the couch than to go to the gym. My mother didn’t go to the doctor because she wanted to avoid hearing bad news.
There is always an excuse not to show up.
But many of the things you want require choosing temporary discomfort over what feels good right now. The good thing is that it’s your choice. You can stay on the couch and feel miserable, or you can get up and do the hard thing.
And this is a habit you can train.
Over time, the hard choice starts to become the easier one.
8. Comparing yourself to everyone and feeling behind
You will always find someone doing better than you. Someone who earns more money, looks better, travels more, has a nicer apartment, or seems to have figured out life while you’re still trying.
I feel it myself when someone tells me they’re moving into a fancy new apartment. Or when I walk through the garage in my building and see all those expensive cars.
But here is the strange thing about comparison: five minutes earlier, I was perfectly happy with my own life. Nothing about my life changed when I heard their news or saw those cars. I didn’t suddenly become poorer or less successful. I simply saw what someone else had and started looking at my own life differently.
That’s what comparison can do. It can turn something that was enough a moment ago into something that suddenly feels inadequate.
And there will always be another garage.
9. Never taking responsibility for your own life
I was there.
My parents, my girlfriends, and my teachers were to blame for my misery. And yes, what they did is on them. But I’m the one responsible for what I do with it now.
I know it’s not fair, and I also hated the idea that I’m the one who needs to clean up the mess after others. But here is the ugly truth: nobody will do it for you. No one is on the way to save you.
So either you stay stuck in victimhood and blame everyone else for your situation, or you start asking yourself what you can actually do about it.
Many people spend their whole lives in that prison and only realize at the end that they had a choice all along.
10. Trying to fill every void by buying something
Technology makes this worse.
You just log into your Amazon account, and within minutes something is on its way that makes you feel a little better.
People try to buy the status they don’t have, the novelty they don’t experience, and the identity they wish they had.
But the pleasure of a new gadget fades quickly, and the emptiness comes back. No Rolex, nice car, bag, or pair of shoes can give you what you need to develop on the inside.
Don’t get me wrong. Shopping is not the problem. The problem is when you try to fill the hole inside you with the next thing you order.
There are many landmines I mentioned above, but you don’t need to start panicking now. These are small hints, crumbs that can help you be aware of them.
And once you’re aware, you can also change your behavior if necessary.
The good news is that nothing I mentioned above is irreversible. You don’t go to jail or lose everything you have because you please everyone around you. But in the long term, these things can impact your life negatively.
It also means that you have enough time to change something before your life starts going in the wrong direction.
I did it, and it means that you can do it too.
Thank you for reading.
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