All Change Involves Death

Endless growth is a destructive myth

Justin D. Henderson, PhD

Published in

Better Humans

9 min read6 days ago

People love a good transformation story. The rags to riches tale. That nerd-to-hero movie. The sports team who started behind and made it all the way to the top. An underdog country in World War II that became a world superpower through grit and bravery.

Change and transformation can feel good, and they certainly can make for a compelling story. But change is not a simple process of mere improvement, as we are often told to believe. Most contemporary notions of change espouse the myths of endless, linear, unimpeded growth.

Worse yet, we pursue these kinds of changes, believing they will make us happier and more successful. We apply these myths of change to our personal lives, our businesses, our education, our technology, and our economy.

Consequently, these attitudes toward change and well-being generally lead to discontent and are linked to many of the issues attributed to consumer culture. These models of change that we have are all wrong. Sure they can demonstrate results in the short term. In fact, from our economic models to our personal models of change — the focus seems fixated on the short term.

We want to change our lives, and we want that change now! But we pay a high price for this kind of thinking — a debt paid into our…

This has me thinking about how many of my own changes were paired with insomnia. I'd lay awake at night knowing that I wanted to do X. That was usually easy for me to see. But then I'd realize that doing X meant giving up Y where Y was something…

There's some truth to that. The only thing that's constant is change. We're either creating or disintergrating, growing or dying.

But I agree, we can not go both left AND right, simultaneously. We must choose one, and give up the other.

My…

Change is something I’ve always chased—new places, new experiences, new goals. But I rarely stopped to think about what I had to let go of in the process. The idea that every change involves a kind of death makes so much sense, yet it’s something we often resist acknowledging.