An Antidote to "Personal Stagflation"

Stagnant lives, inflated guilt and the case for spending on what matters

In this edition:

• Why so many people find themselves in a rut

• The impact of “personal stagflation”

• How spending on a simple hobby could make a bigger difference than you imagine

“When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”

That’s a line written by Haruki Murakami, a fitting one as a storm rolled in on the morning of a man’s long day of wonderful suffering.

But transformation wasn’t on the man’s mind when he struggled to stand.

He stepped out of the truck, or rather descended from it like a sloth inching down a towering redwood tree. Mud and blood streaked his body. He moved as if he’d been hit by a train or was very drunk. Maybe both. To others around the campground — families making s’mores in the waning summer light — he looked suspicious.

He ducked into his tent, wobbled to the showers, then reemerged in a hurry, ripping gear out, stuffing it into the backseat, rolling up the tent and tossing it, unpacked, into the truck bed as if he needed to escape.

Had he committed some kind of crime? Was he running from the cops?

*record scratch*

Yeah — that’s me, the man pictured in your mind. No, I wasn’t running from the cops.

But I’d just spent an entire day running a trail race. Up and down rolling hills, and down again hard after some unfortunate spills. I was wrecked. I felt sick, having lived on sugary gels since before sunrise. My feet throbbed as if John Bonham used them to pound out the most furious version of “Kashmir” with hammers.

I was proud of what I accomplished. It was the farthest I’ve ever run, and I enjoyed the fight. But in the months of hard training — constantly waking up at 3 or 4 a.m. — I’d imagined this moment would have been much more celebratory. Instead, it felt like punishment. I had pitched a tent to “save money” on my little hobby. My body though couldn’t spend another night like that.

It was part of my personal belief that I should make sure my interests don’t infringe on the rest of my life. The pro runner Mike Wardian calls this “invisible training” — squeezing your runs into the cracks of the day so you don’t burden anyone else.

But I learned there’s a line you can cross. The restraints meant to ensure you live within your means in hopes of making your future better can at times make your present miserable.

So I decided to just drive through the night to get home. As I chased down caffeine pills with black coffee on an empty highway, I began thinking about something I’ve come to call “personal stagflation.”

Economic stagflation is when an economy is stuck in a bad combination: growth is stagnant, but prices remain high. Life feels stuck, yet everything still feels costly and constrained.

Personal stagflation is the psychological version of this. Your daily life feels stagnant — the same routines, roles and rhythms — yet you experience an inner “inflation” of guilt, caution and self-policing that makes you reluctant to spend money on the very things that might bring a sense of renewal.

Fugitives in a rut

I’m apparently not the only one who feels this way.

Recently, as I began to take this running thing a little more seriously, I realized I had been wrong about myself. I had thought running was simply a way to stay healthy and feel alive. On the trails I connect with the world unlike anywhere else. As I run I am no longer myself, just body in motion. And in a race, I am privileged to test myself, to push myself to exhaustion, a precipice that feels better than any drug.

But articles were telling me that it was actually a response to middle-age angst and a fear of decline. In other words, I was having a “midlife crisis,” with endurance sports being the modern, two-legged version of a toupee and a red sports car. Younger folks are in on it, too, as the Atlantic labeled it the quarter-life crisis.

The midlife crisis has achieved some kind of mythic status, where anyone wanting to make a change in life must be having some kind of crisis. Yet only about a quarter of adults ever report actually having one.

What far more people report is something quieter: feeling stuck. Life has a sneaky way of becoming stagnant — no matter your age or level of wealth.

Psychologists call this habituation. It’s our tendency to respond less and less to what is familiar. Its evolutionary purpose is to help us adapt to our surroundings so we can be on high alert for new threats. But it can also make us less creative and affect our levels of stress and happiness.

Even pleasurable things in life — money, cars, vacations, whatever — if they’re always there, don’t excite you as much. They don’t bring you as much joy.

Surveys suggest many people feel trapped in routine. In one U.K. study, 59% of adults said they needed a change; 61% felt “in a rut.”

As the social scientist John Gardner aptly described it:

“We can keep ourselves so busy, fill our lives with so many diversions, stuff our heads with so much knowledge, involve ourselves with so many people and cover so much ground that we never have time to probe the fearful and wonderful world within… By middle life most of us are accomplished fugitives from ourselves.”

Zoom out, and this might be a reflection of a wider phenomenon, as culture itself feels stuck too. Derek Thompson has argued that we’re living in a broader cultural moment of stagnation, running out of original ideas as most of the biggest movies are sequels and reboots.

You can’t fix Hollywood. You can, however, change how you live.

As Virginia Woolf wrote:

“A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.”

While it becomes more socially acceptable to take a chance on betting on your favorite sports team or world events in prediction markets, maybe it’s time to start taking a bigger chance on changing up the world within.

An antidote to personal stagflation

There are all sorts of taboos about money. Depending on who you ask, you’re probably wasting it.

Voices on TV and social media constantly shame people for doing things that aren’t “ideal.” The classic example is the Starbucks latte: spend a few dollars a day, and in 20–30 years you could have thousands more in retirement.

Many of these taboos we internalize and enforce on ourselves. People feel guilty spending money on anything that isn’t obviously “productive,” even though these very hobbies and identity shifts are often what keep life meaningful, especially in midlife.

The most elegant description I’ve read comes from the writer Maria Popova:

“This may be the most elemental paradox of existence: we yearn for permanence and stability in a universe of constant change as a way of hedging against the inescapable fact of our mortality, our own individual impermanence. And yet this faulty coping mechanism results not in immortality but in complacency, stagnation, a living death.”

You can’t simply buy your way out of a rut, as you’ll habituate to any new gadget. But you can do things that will free you. Experiences — a race, a concert, a trip, a class — linger in memory and often return as joy. It’s why findings show that experiences give you more joy than material things.

Here’s a telling data point that gets at personal stagflation.

Nearly 90% of Americans report having a hobby. But they are increasingly spending less on hobbies, with the majority spending less than $50 on them in the past month.

It’s the personal version of stagflation: stagnant lives + inflated reluctance to spend time or money on what might actually move us.

And yet the things we hesitate to fund — slow, creative, physical or immersive hobbies — are often the very activities that make life feel richer, calmer and more meaningful.

That may also contribute to greater success in life.

Researchers at Michigan State University looked at over 100 years of Nobel Prize-winning scientists and found that they were far more likely than their peers to have creative hobbies: 22 times more likely to perform, sing or act; 12 times more likely to pursue creative writing; and about seven times more likely to engage in crafts like sculpting or painting.

Einstein working on string theory

You can put these things on hold, persist in personal stagflation, and still live a “good life” by outside measures. But the only metric that really matters is the one you devise for yourself.

The common solution is to backend all the things we want to do, assuming retirement or financial independence will finally offer space to “live.” Maybe. But many retirees struggle to spend even then. They spent decades training themselves to protect every dollar. Sometimes, the habit outlives the paycheck.

There’s risk in spending too much money. But there’s also a risk in holding it for too long. To be “good with money” isn’t simply to end up with the most of it. It’s to walk the fine line of using it for a life you actually enjoy.

Take it from none other than Benjamin Franklin:

“Wealth is not his that has it, but his that enjoys it.”

The thing is, none of us fated to a stagnant existence, a living death. You can renew yourself anywhere, at any age.

The famous artist known as Grandma Moses loved painting as a child but didn’t have the time or means to pursue it. She worked from age 12, married, ran a farm, and raised ten children. In her 70s, she returned to painting — and became a renowned artist until her death at 101.

Grandma Moses. There’s likely a budding artist within you too… if only you look

Sure, she might be an exception. It’s highly unlikely any change or new hobby we adopt will lead to fame. That’s kind of the point.

The antidote is immersion, losing yourself in something that pulls you out of your fixed roles.

This could be something big, like moving to a different place or pivoting to a new career. But it could also be something as small as learning a new sport.

Give yourself permission to get a hotel room. To spend a little extra time or money on that side project. Paint a picture. Take a hike. Grow a mustache.

When life and culture these days seem stagnant, maybe we need to obsess less over productivity and increasing external things — whether it’s money, status or material possessions — and start investing more in the internal.

As Elizabeth Gilbert writes in her book, Big Magic:

“Whether we make a profession out of it or not, we all need an activity that is beyond the mundane and that takes us out of our established and limiting roles in society (mother, employee, neighbor, brother, boss, etc.). We all need something that helps us to forget ourselves for a little while — to momentarily forget our age, our gender, our socioeconomic background, our duties, our failures, and all that we have lost and screwed up.”

In other words, you just might need a storm. Or at least a little rain.

Notes to my future self:

1. Personal stagflation is the psychological version: your daily life feels stagnant — the same routines, roles and rhythms — yet you experience an inner ‘inflation’ of guilt, caution and self-policing that makes you reluctant to spend money on the very things that might bring movement, learning or renewal.

2. There’s risk in spending too much money. But there’s also a risk in holding it for too long.

3. You just might need a storm.