A Life That Is “Good Enough” — and Why That May Be the Best Reason to Change It

Why did I want to write about this? Because I had a wonderful professional life — I had a school and preschools, which I had built, nurtured, and cherished for 16 years and loved immensely (and still do!) — and then I decided to leave.

There is a certain kind of stagnation that does not look like stagnation at all. Nothing bad is happening. Your job is great. Everyday life becomes increasingly familiar; you feel that you can relax more and devote more time to yourself (after all, that is so popular these days!). There is no obvious reason to change anything. And yet, something inside you remains restless, quietly asking for more.

Psychologists have a precise term for this particular feeling. Carol Ryff, whose six-dimensional model of psychological well-being is one of the most frequently cited in the field, found that personal growth is not the same as satisfaction. You can score highly in self-acceptance — feel genuinely at peace with your life — and still score low in personal growth, which can manifest as a sense of stagnation, a lack of expansion, and the repetition of the same things. Comfort and growth are simply different ingredients. One does not automatically produce the other.

Here is the second part of the scientific explanation, and it helps us understand why so few people take action when they experience that quiet feeling: status quo bias. First described by economists Samuelson and Zeckhauser in 1988, it is the well-established tendency to stick with what we already have because, in our minds, the pain of a potential loss weighs roughly twice as much as the pleasure of an equivalent gain. This is the loss-aversion phenomenon identified by Kahneman and Tversky — one of the most consistently replicated findings in behavioural economics.

Put simply, staying where we are feels safe not because it is necessarily the better choice, but because our brains are wired to place far more weight on “what could I lose?” than on “what could I gain?”

And there is a third, more insidious trap: adaptation. We adapt — and we do so quickly — to almost anything, good or bad. An exciting new job, a new home, a new stage of life: within a few months, the brain categorises it as “normal” and begins looking for the next thing. This is precisely why “good enough” can feel so deceptively permanent. Your brain is not lying to you when it tells you that the present is comfortable. It simply was not designed to tell you whether being comfortable is the same as feeling alive.

When we put these three phenomena together, we get a fairly precise psychological explanation for that restlessness: it is not ingratitude, nor is it restlessness for restlessness’s sake. It is the growth dimension within you asking for something that your comfort dimension already has in abundance.

Let me share a story I once read. Vera Wang spent seventeen years as a senior editor at American Vogue — a position she entered as the youngest fashion editor in the magazine’s history, at a publication most people would consider the pinnacle of the industry. By any external measure, she had achieved everything.

At the age of forty, while planning her wedding, she realised that none of the dresses available at the time felt right for a woman her age — and she noticed a gap that no one else in the industry seemed to see. She left her secure position and opened a small bridal boutique with no guarantee of success. That boutique became one of the best-known names in bridal fashion worldwide.

She began at forty — not at twenty, not in the middle of a crisis, and not when she had nothing to lose. She simply noticed the gap between “stable” and “mine” — and she moved.

The lesson is not “quit your job.” The lesson is that your life can be genuinely good and still contain space for something you have not yet created — and noticing that space is not a betrayal of the good life you already have.

So, what can you do? Well, I am neither a psychologist nor a life coach, but I do have a fair amount of experience, so I would like to share a few of my own insights.

• Separate satisfaction from growth. Ask yourself two different questions rather than one: “Am I at peace with my life?” and “Am I growing within it?” You may have two different, equally honest answers.
• Name the loss you are afraid of. Status quo bias thrives on vague fear. Write down exactly what you are afraid of losing if you make a change. Often, fear begins to shrink as soon as it is put into simple words.
• Start with something you can step away from. You do not need to make a Vera Wang–sized leap on day one. A course, a conversation, or a small side project will tell you more about that restlessness than months spent thinking about it.
• Expect adaptation. When the new thing begins to feel normal, that is not proof that it was the wrong choice. It is simply your brain doing what brains do. Growth is not a permanent high — it is a choice we make again and again.

“Good enough” is a perfectly respectable way to live. It is simply worth checking from time to time whether it is a place you are actively choosing — or merely a place where you have remained.

When I realised that I wanted MORE, I acknowledged it and spent an entire year thinking about it, learning, and exploring it more deeply. To those who did not see those processes unfolding, it may seem as though the decision was easy and happened just like that. Nothing could be further from the truth. And I am not even going to begin talking about the inner pain, doubts, and questions — of which there are still far more than answers!

But the point is this: do not be afraid. You’ve got this.