I once worked sixteen hours a day to keep a job I hated.

The work was meaningless. The boss was cruel. Every morning I woke with a weight on my chest, dreading the commute, dreading the office, dreading the slow crawl of hours until I could go home and dread the next day. I complained constantly. My wife begged me to find something else. My health was suffering. Everyone could see I was miserable.

But I stayed. For four years, I stayed.

During those same four years, I could not find the energy to apply for better jobs. The applications sat half-finished on my laptop. The networking events went unattended. The skills I needed to learn remained unlearned. I had endless motivation to protect my terrible job but almost none to pursue a better one.

This made no sense. Logically, I should have been running toward opportunity and away from misery. But logic had nothing to do with it. Something deeper was operating. Something ancient and irrational and completely in control.

I was more afraid of losing what I had than excited about gaining what I could have.

My friend Salim stayed in a relationship for seven years with a woman who made him unhappy. They argued constantly. They wanted different things. Everyone who knew them wondered why they remained together. Salim wondered too. But every time he considered leaving, the fear arrived. What if I never find anyone else? What if I regret this? What if being alone is worse than being unhappy together?

So he stayed. He defended his mediocre relationship with the desperation of a man protecting treasure. But when friends tried to introduce him to people who might actually suit him, he declined. Too risky, he said. Too uncertain. Better to keep what I have.

He was protecting a prison because it was familiar. The unknown—even if it promised freedom—felt more dangerous than the known misery.

This is how we are built. Not by choice but by evolution. Our ancestors survived not by chasing opportunity but by avoiding loss. The ones who kept their food, their shelter, their place in the tribe—they lived. The ones who gambled on uncertain gains often died. Over millions of years, this lesson was written into our nervous systems. Loss is emergency. Gain is optional.

The brain treats these differently. Potential loss activates the amygdala, floods the body with stress hormones, creates physical urgency. You feel it in your chest, your stomach, your clenched jaw. The threat feels real even when it is only imagined.

Potential gain activates different circuits. It requires imagination, faith, patience. It lives in the future, abstract and uncertain. The body does not respond to it with urgency. It responds with vague interest, easily overwhelmed by the screaming alarm of potential loss.

This is why I could work sixteen hours to protect a job I hated but could not work two hours to find a job I might love. The protection felt urgent. The pursuit felt optional.

I see this everywhere now. People clinging to friendships that drain them because ending a friendship feels like loss, while avoiding the effort to find friendships that might nourish them. People staying in cities they have outgrown because moving feels like losing home, while the city that might become home remains unvisited. People keeping beliefs that no longer serve them because changing beliefs feels like losing identity, while new understanding waits unexplored.

We are prisoners of what we already have. The bars are made of fear, and we built them ourselves.

My uncle worked the same job for thirty-five years. He did not love it. He did not hate it. It was simply there, familiar, safe. When he retired, he told me something that has stayed with me. He said, “I spent my whole life protecting my position. I never once asked if it was worth protecting.”

He had optimized for preservation. He had succeeded at keeping what he had. But what he had was never what he wanted. He had defended the wrong territory his entire life.

I do not want to be my uncle. But I feel the same forces pulling at me. The same fear of loss. The same paralysis around gain. The same ancient programming that whispers: keep what you have, do not risk it, the unknown is dangerous.

But here is what I am learning: not pursuing gain is also a kind of loss. When I do not apply for the better job, I lose the chance to have it. When I do not risk the conversation that might deepen a relationship, I lose the intimacy that conversation might create. When I do not try the new thing, I lose the person I might become.

The fear of loss is so focused on what I have that it ignores what I am losing by standing still.

My daughter is seven. She has no loss aversion yet. She tries everything without calculating risk. She asks questions without fear of looking foolish. She approaches strangers without worrying about rejection. She pursues what interests her with full energy, unburdened by the weight of what she might lose.

Watching her, I remember when I was like that. Before the fear accumulated. Before I learned to protect instead of pursue. Before my comfort zone became my prison.

I cannot go back to seven. The fear is installed now. It will always be part of my operating system. But perhaps I can override it sometimes. Perhaps I can notice when I am defending territory that is not worth defending. Perhaps I can reframe gains as losses—see the dream not pursued as a chance lost forever, the conversation not had as connection that will never exist, the risk not taken as a self that will never be born.

Last month I quit the job I had protected for too long. The fear was enormous. My body screamed that I was making a mistake. Every instinct told me to stay, to keep what I had, to not risk the unknown.

I quit anyway.

The relief was immediate. Not because the new path is certain—it is not. But because I am no longer spending my life defending a prison. I am walking out of it, into uncertainty, into possibility, into the version of myself that the fear had been preventing.

It is terrifying. It is also the only way forward.

We are built to fear loss more than we hope for gain. This kept our ancestors alive. But it keeps us small. It keeps us defending what we have instead of reaching for what we could have. It makes prisoners of us in cells of our own construction.

The doors are not locked. They never were.

We just have to want freedom more than we fear losing the familiar walls.

I am practicing this. Every day, I am practicing.

It is the hardest thing I have ever done.

It is also the only thing worth doing.