There is an old saying: better the devil you know than the devil you don’t. I used to think it was about caution. Lately I suspect it explains most of the reasons we stay the same.
Everybody wants to change. Sit at any dinner table long enough and you will hear it: a new job, a healthier body, a calmer mind, a different city. We say it with conviction, and we mean it. Then, sooner or later, we notice how hard it is, and the conviction quietly slips back into the drawer where we keep our good intentions.
I have come to think that real change asks for two kinds of wanting.
The first is the easy one: wanting a different version of yourself. Or, as I prefer to put it, the version that was already there, waiting under the habits.
The second is where most of us stop. It means wanting every single moment that leads there. The boring ones included. Especially the boring ones.
A few examples.
Say you are a teenager dreaming about playing in the Champions League with your favorite team. Wonderful. I believe in you. But are you willing to train on cold January mornings in the rain while your friends are still asleep? To eat the same careful meals for years without indulging in nights filled with binge drinking? To miss birthdays, holidays, the party everyone will talk about on Monday? To sit on the bench for a whole season and still be the first one at practice?
Say you want to become an equity partner in a big law firm. I spent enough years in that world to know the picture: a share of the profits, the name on the door, the respect in the room. Are you willing to rewrite the same memo at 2 am because a comma changed its meaning? To give up weekends for a closing that might fall apart on Sunday night? To be called back from holidays 10 years in a row? To be judged, again and again, by people who remember every mistake you made?
Last one, though I could go on..
Say you want to end a relationship to start a new chapter of your life. Are you willing to have the conversation you have been rehearsing in your head for weeks, sometimes months? To hurt someone you still care about, and to watch it happen? To untangle a life built for two: the flat, the holidays already booked, the friends who will quietly pick a side? To come home to a silent kitchen, and to sit with the doubt that maybe you were wrong? This one might be the hardest of all, because here the devil you know has a face, and sometimes a very kind one.
Truth is, we want the ending. We rarely want the chapters in between.
And so we make peace with what we have. We tell ourselves we are fine as we are. We keep the job that bores us because at least we know its rhythm. We keep relationships that no longer help us grow, and friends who like us exactly as we used to be. None of them are bad people. They are simply familiar. The devil we know has a comfortable chair and remembers how we take our coffee.
While writing this, I tried hard to keep judgment out of it. First, because I don’t like people who judge, and I try to practice what I preach. Second, because I recognise myself in every line. There are changes I have said I wanted for years. When I look closely, what I really wanted was the photo at the end. The months of practice behind it, or the hard choices to make, were somebody else’s problem.
Maybe the question worth asking could shift a little. Instead of “who do I want to become?”, something closer to “which days am I willing to live?” The early alarms, the rejected drafts, the difficult conversations. If the answer is honest, the change often begins right there, on an ordinary Tuesday.
So, what about you? Which devil do you know a little too well to leave?
