The call (and why you say no to it)

Last week we left this story on a promise. We said that the half-flame state in which so many people live —functioning without being present, performing without savor— is not the end of any journey, but the beginning of one; and that the ancient map we work with in The Journey tells what usually comes after that zone: a call, almost always untimely, almost always rejected at first. Today it is time to fulfill that promise and talk about that knock. And, above all, about the response that almost all of us give first.

It is worth clarifying right now what a call is not. It is not a burning bush or an epiphany with background music. On the map of myths that we follow in this series, the third step of the path has a much more domestic mechanism: the inner restlessness of which we have already written ends up fostering an encounter, an intuition, a conversation, a reading; something external and seemingly minor that functions, the map says, like a wake-up call. A knock on the door. In adult life that knock has recognizable forms: the classmate from graduation who leaves everything behind and makes you happy and stirs you up in equal measure; the obituary of someone your age; a course you cannot get out of your head; a dinner conversation that leaves you shaken for three days. The distinctive thing about the call is not its size, but its precision: it does not tell you "change your life" in the abstract. It asks you for one concrete thing. And that is why it is uncomfortable.

A knock that arrives when it shouldn't

There is a detail on the map that deserves to be underlined, because it dismantles a common complaint: that the change "caught me at a bad time." The call always arrives at a bad time. It arrives when there is a mortgage, when the children are small, when the project is half-done, when you had finally achieved some stability. It is not bad luck: it is its nature. The knock on the door sounds precisely because inside there is a life already set up; if there weren't, there would be no door to knock on. Anyone waiting for a call that fits into their schedule is, in reality, waiting to receive none at all.

"Now is not the time": the textbook refusal

What the map describes as step four you have said yourself this week, in other words. The protagonist of the stories, upon receiving the call, rejects it: he says he is not the chosen one, that he is already busy with the chores of his mundane life, that this adventure business is just fantasy. Translate it into the language of an adult in their mid-forties and you will get phrases of uncomfortable familiarity: it is not realistic, I'm past that age, when the kids grow up, when this quarter is over, with everything that is going on. Rejection of the call is not a system failure: it is part of the script, as old as the call itself. The scholar who wrote the manual of these stories —of whom we already spoke regarding that strange restlessness— warned of its price: sustained refusal turns adventure into its opposite, and for those who wall themselves in their occupations, life becomes narrower precisely in there. And the map adds a detail of remarkable fineness: the rejected call does not fade; it awakens with more force. Anyone who has said "not now" at some point knows this is true: the course you didn't take comes back every September.

Your brain votes to stay where you are

So much for the myths. Now, the data, because this so-literary refusal turns out to be measured with considerable precision. In 1988, two economists from Boston and Harvard, William Samuelson and Richard Zeckhauser, published a series of experiments that are now classics. They presented hundreds of people with identical decisions with a single nuance changed: to some they presented the options on equal terms; to others they told them that one of them was the one they already had. That nuance changed everything: the option dressed up as "what is already there" swept the board, even when changing cost nothing, and the more mediocre the option was, the more the disguise favored it. According to the authors' own extrapolation, two alternatives that would tie fifty-fifty move to 59-41 as soon as one occupies the position of the established status quo. They named it: status quo bias. And they opened the article with a quote from Dr. Johnson that could preside over this entire piece: to do nothing is within the power of all men.

One of the mentors of The Journey, Javier G. Recuenco, explains why with an unforgettable image: our brain received its last major update about fifty thousand years ago, when change was bad news and uncertainty killed. That equipment rewards the feeling of control and punishes that of incompetence; and any serious change returns you, for a season, to being incompetent. The refusal, therefore, is not cowardice: it is biology with its own agenda. In fact, one only has to look at current workplace conversation to see it operating at scale: where a few years ago people spoke of the Great Resignation, labor market analysts now describe the opposite and have named it —job hugging—, the preventive attachment to the usual job in uncertain times. The public pendulum swings; the underlying bias is the same.

Let us be fair to the bias, because this house does not shoot cheap headlines: in the laboratory, the costs of change could be eliminated, but in real life they exist and they weigh. Staying still is sometimes the sensible thing to do, and no experiment exempts you from doing your math. What the bias proves is not that staying is a mistake, but something more subtle: that your preference for staying is not neutral. It plays with an advantage. And it is worth knowing that before calling it prudence.

22,511 coin tosses

The second measurement is stranger and bolder. Between 2013 and 2014, economist Steven Levitt set up a website for people who had been stuck in a vital decision for months and proposed something outrageous: leaving it to a virtual coin toss. Heads, you change; tails, you stay. 22,511 coins were flipped. The most repeated important question, with more than two thousand tosses, was exactly the one you are thinking of: should I quit my job? Levitt followed the participants for months, with verification from friends and family included. The result, published in 2021 in one of the most demanding economics journals: at two months, those who had made the change were not worse off; at six months they were clearly better off, a good half point on a scale of ten overall, and the entire effect came from the major decisions, with quitting the job and ending the relationship leading the way. His conclusion fits into a sentence from the article itself: we may be excessively cautious when facing life-changing decisions.

Now, the counterpoint, which is mandatory here and is also half the lesson. That sample does not resemble the general population: they were people who had been tied in their decision for some time, so tied that they agreed to consult a coin; many abandoned the follow-up, and happiness was self-reported. Levitt himself lists these caveats one by one. That is why the data does not say what a lazy headline would make it say. It does not say "quit your job": it says that, for those who have already heard the call and have been at a standstill for months, the internal scale is rigged in a known direction, and that caution, at that exact point, is no longer information but bias. If you are not at that point, the coin does not speak about you.

What is truly regretted over the years

There remains the third measurement, the most uncomfortable one, because it does not measure what you do but what you will remember. The psychology of regret discovered a very long-legged paradox decades ago. In the short term, we regret what we did more: in the classic experiment by Kahneman and Tversky, nine out of ten people pointed to the mistake of the one who acted as more painful than that of the one who stayed still. But Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Medvec asked about the long term, and the picture flipped. When they asked dozens of adults —students, administrators, professors emeriti, nursing home residents— about the greatest regrets of their lives, the "I didn't dos" almost exactly doubled the "I dids": 63 versus 37 percent. And when another group was asked to compare the past week with their entire life, the pattern was textbook: in the week, a tie; in life, 84 percent regretted more what they left undone. The authors' explanation has a sad elegance: errors of action hurt a lot and are closed —they are repaired, explained, digested—; errors of omission hurt little and are never closed, because the unlived has no ending with which to make peace. They have, they say, a longer half-life. Caution here too, which the authors themselves sign off on: part of their studies measured intuitions about scenarios, not live emotions, and the pattern could vary across cultures. But the central finding has aged well, and it is worth keeping in mind when "not now" begins to be the answer every year.

This is not a medical consultation

The usual boundary, before the end. Everything that has been said applies to the restlessness that pushes toward a change from a life that, otherwise, works. If what lies beneath is not restlessness but a blackout —weeks of sadness that does not lift, broken sleep or appetite, a malaise that tints everything—, the vital decision can wait and your serious step is another: talk to a healthcare professional. Big decisions are not made with a broken spirit or alone, and asking for that help is not giving up: it is exactly the opposite of living on autopilot.

Saying no is also responding

And now, what this piece is not going to do. It is not going to end with five steps to take the leap, nor is it going to push you into anything: pushing is the business of self-help, and we have come here to think. Another of the mentors of The Journey, Francesc Pujol, teaches something that deactivates the simplistic reading of all of the above: anyone who has worked on their inner self gains a new capacity, he says, to say no or to say yes. There are calls that are not yours; there are noes full of criteria. The difference that matters is not between yes and no, but between the conscious response and the automatic one: between the no of the one who has examined the call and the "not now" of the one who has not even heard it, which is usually the same person who has been saying it in the same words for years.

The map, for its part, tells how the story continues when the refusal becomes entrenched, and it is not a gentle ending: in stories, a misfortune is needed —a loss, an accident, something that was not in the script— for the protagonist to understand that the call was irrevocable. Life, sometimes, also collects payment this way. There is no need to wait for that. It is enough, for today, with something much smaller: the next time something knocks inside you —a conversation, a reading, an obituary, a course—, do not answer yet. Neither yes nor no. Stay at the door for a moment, with your hand on the doorknob, and ask yourself only who is going to answer: you, or your inertia. About what happens when one answers yes and crosses —the threshold, the valley, the fear that comes after— we have already begun to write in this notebook, and we will continue.

Cover image generated with artificial intelligence.