Let’s dive straight in. Here is my micro-theory of ruts:
A rut is what happens when your rational “best” actions are things that do not energise you.
You can get into a rut by being good at things.
You can get out of a rut by being good at more things.
This isn’t a very complete theory, as it doesn’t address the disconnect between your seemingly rational “best” actions and your actually better long-term actions.
But even though thinking hard about your goals and whether your current actions will or won’t lead you there might be the most general approach to escaping a rut, I’m not sure it’s always the most useful. Many of us don’t understand our long-term goals that well, and understanding them is a long process of getting to know ourselves better. Figuring this stuff out is absolutely a worthwhile goal in itself. But I would argue that not only is it not necessary to deeply understand your goals to escape a rut, but that understanding your goals is usually a much harder problem. Besides this, a lot of us are already stuck in our heads far too much of the time, so I think a solution that involves less thinking really hard and more doing stuff is often more helpful to shake off a feeling of stuck-ness.
So although the model above is incomplete, I think it’s often closer to how we experience a rut in the moment. If so, it could also be more useful in helping us to escape them.
With that said, let’s look at the model more closely. If your supposedly “best” actions do not energise you, you’ll probably keep doing them while feeling intensely dissatisfied, and spend a lot of time zoning out to escape the feeling. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon to get into this situation by becoming very good at things that don’t energise you. This can happen for any number of reasons, and it can end up skewing your judgement as you get reliably decent results by following the same old pattern.
If you find yourself in this situation, the escape route entails two things:
Do less of the thing your good at but find un-energising
Do more of <other things>
The first one is hard, because it cuts against the grain of your life and tends to feel like failure. But it’s essential. Ultimately, you want to stop being known for being good at this thing you do not care for. This is not failure (real failure is heroic) it’s making a choice.
The second part is superficially easier - most of us have sufficient general curiosity to try new things once in a while. But the goal here isn’t simply to try new things, it’s to build new skills and integrate them into your identity. This is hard, because any random thing you try probably won’t take. At the same time, trying to be too directed here will tend to fall prey to your existing skewed judgement. (ayy lmao)
Actually solving this would be a life complete problem on a par with fully understanding your goals. Gah! We’ve come full circle.
Fortunately, I don’t think you need to actually solve this to start feeling your way out of a rut. Instead, I’d suggest trying the following loose algorithm:
Do less of the thing your good at but find un-energising
See what arises to fill the gap
Do more of that
and iterating on it until the stuck-ness recedes.
So, that’s my micro-theory of ruts, and how you might use it to escape from them. I hope it will be of use to you!