The Broken Compass: Why trying harder isn’t always the answer

Big Think spoke with author and psychiatrist Elias Dakwar about addiction, rock bottom, and the moment you realize your compass is broken.

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At some point, there comes a wall. Few people will see the wall, but they’ll be walking at such a pace that they’ll smash straight into it — broken nose, cursing, and indignant cries for justice. Why wasn’t I told about this wall?

It might be a relationship, a career choice, or an addiction, but the wall is the point at which you realize you’re going the wrong way. You’ve committed to a path at some point — perhaps you were forced onto the path by someone close — and now you’ve hit a wall. You try again. You gingerly reach for the invisible borders of the wall and push. You strain. You keep trying to make things work, doing things a bit differently. But, of course, the wall does not budge.

A lot of self-help advice gets this moment wrong. It tells you to fix the problem — “Run faster at the wall. Put your shoulder into it!” But change rarely comes from sticking with a broken framework. It comes from stepping back and realizing you need a new one.

You need to walk back from the wall and try a new path.

Human nature, intensified

Earlier this year, I spoke with Elias Dakwar, professor of psychiatry at Columbia University and author of the bestselling book, The Captive Imagination: Addiction, Reality, and Our Search for Meaning. Dakwar spends a great deal of his life working with addiction and during our conversation, he was careful to tell me that “the brain of an addicted person isn’t that different from the brain of a non-addicted person… The person with addiction maintains a freedom. They are exercising a kind of decision-making — it may not be congruent with what non-addicted people pursue, but it is informed by values, by desires, by what they believe will bring them relief.”

When we talk about addiction or “addicts,” many will often assume it’s a kind of pathology or a weakness of will. But Dakwar thinks this is hypocritical, condescending, and almost certainly false. As he puts it, “We insist on calling addiction a pathology, as if the rest of us aren’t constantly chasing illusions of control, certainty, and satisfaction in ways that also fail us. The person with addiction is simply someone whose framework has become more rigid, whose loop is tighter, whose false promise of relief has become inescapable. But structurally, it’s no different from the ways we all organize our lives around habits, coping mechanisms, or belief systems that, at some level, no longer serve us.”

The insight here is uncomfortable: Addiction isn’t some foreign state or incomprehensible dysfunction. It’s just human nature, intensified. And if we concede this, it becomes harder to moralize addiction as something separate — something that happens to them and not to us. It might be an unhappy employee, forcing herself to work in the hope that it will one day pay better or feel better. It might be a relationship that hasn’t been right for years. Both parties try to fix it and move on, but things stay the same.

In the end, we’re all making choices within a framework we rarely question. And we may be walking in a certain direction for years until, one day, with a bleeding and broken nose, we realize our compass is broken.

The need to get lost

“You know, the [Alcoholics Anonymous] 12-step narrative talks about this as hitting rock bottom,” Dakwar told me. “It’s falling through all of one’s illusions and false narratives and false ideals. It’s when you’ve suffered so immensely that there’s nowhere deeper to fall. And you know that narrative arc is one that is important to identify.”

Dakwar uses the language of a relationship. Addiction and feeling trapped, more broadly, are about a relationship you have with an idea of yourself. It’s a relationship with a certain way of life or way of doing things. It’s important to frame it this way because Dakwar is not talking about any essential, authentic “self.” The self is a constructed and chosen reality. I was not born to be a writer. Harriet was not born to be a lawyer. Bly was not born to be an addict. Each is a personality that we form a relationship with. And this “rock bottom” Dakwar is talking about is a kind of creative destruction. It’s the divorcing of some past relationship and finding a newer, better, healthier one.

“There is this transformational experience that many people with addiction have, where they just realize that the life they’ve been living has been fraudulent. And it seems that all at once, they make this decision to do things very differently. And it’s not as if their capacity to appraise things changes — it’s that the very structure of how they live their lives and what they orient themselves around changes. It’s a fundamental shift — a whole new reality. And from that shift, new choices, new habits, and new ways of being become possible.”

The broken compass

The hardest part of change isn’t the change itself — it’s realizing that you need to change at all. When you’ve been following a compass point for so long, it’s not easy to question if it’s right. This is why so many people stay in jobs they hate, relationships that drain them, or habits that make them miserable. They convince themselves that if they just try harder — if they tweak their approach, double down on effort, push past the discomfort — things will eventually get better. But the problem isn’t how you’re walking, but what you’re walking toward.

Dakwar argues that real transformation doesn’t happen by making better choices within the same rigid framework. It happens by stepping outside the framework entirely, which is why hitting rock bottom can feel like an epiphany. When the old way definitively stops working, there’s no option but to seek something new. It’s the moment when a person says, I can’t do this anymore. Not like this.
And yet, this isn’t just about addiction. This is about anyone stuck in a life that feels too small for them, anyone clinging to a version of themselves that no longer fits. The challenge is not just to let go, but to do so before you hit the wall at full speed.

If you feel like you’re forcing something — whether it’s a career, a relationship, or a version of yourself — step back. Question it. Allow yourself to be lost for a while. A broken compass isn’t something to fight against. It’s a sign that it’s time to find a new way forward.

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Jonny is the creator of the Mini Philosophy social network. He’s an internationally bestselling author of three books and the resident philosopher at Big Think. He's known all over the world for making philosophy accessible, relatable, and fun.

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