If You Can Talk Yourself Into It, You Can Talk Yourself Out of It
When neither passion nor logic holds — what actually does?
If you can talk yourself into something, you can eventually talk yourself out of it.
I came across this line recently. I sat with it for a while — because it wasn’t describing someone else. It was describing me.
I talk myself into starting something because “this has value for me.” But that same logic, at a different moment, will tell me: nothing’s coming of it, time to stop.
The entrance and the exit are the same door.
I’d wanted to build something online for a long time.
At first it was photography, travel, video. I analyzed it thoroughly — why now was the right moment, why I had an edge, why it was worth doing. I built a stack of reasons, the logic held together, I convinced myself, I started.
Later I stopped, using the same logic. The timing had shifted, the edge wasn’t as real as I’d thought, the return on investment didn’t add up. Another stack of reasons, equally coherent, equally convincing. I stopped.
This loop didn’t only happen with content creation. A decision at work, a habit I’d kept for a while, choices I thought I’d fully worked through — all of it came and went, driven by the same machinery. The logic that started things was the same logic that ended them.
Years passed. I kept thinking it was an execution problem, a timing problem, that I hadn’t found the right direction yet. I didn’t see that the issue was somewhere more fundamental.
I’ve always thought of myself as a rational person.
For years, I ran nearly every important thing through a rational filter — why do this, what’s it for, is it worth it, what’s the most efficient path. I believed in this completely. It never occurred to me that the framework itself might have a flaw.
But that line made me see it: rationality itself can be overturned. It’s a tool. Tools are neutral — what builds can also dismantle.
This hit me harder than I expected. Not a quiet “oh, I see” — more like genuine disorientation. I’d spent over thirty years treating rationality as the most reliable foundation I had, and then I realized it isn’t a foundation at all. It’s just a set of arguments that can be reversed at any time.
So what about passion?
A lot of people feel that if you’re truly passionate about something, you won’t abandon it. Passion seems different from rationality — deeper, more instinctive, not the kind of thing logic can dismantle.
But passion fades too. It has peaks and valleys. It gets used up. It wears down against reality. Anything that can be touched can be shaken.
Rationality runs on logic. Passion runs on state of mind. Neither is stable.
I got stuck here for a while. If neither holds, what actually does? I didn’t know. I’m still not entirely sure such a thing exists.
I thought about it for a long time and couldn’t find a good name for it. Or rather, I slowly came to feel that it doesn’t need one.
I’d rather describe it in plain, clumsy terms:
The feeling of “I don’t know why, but I have to do this.”
It doesn’t need a reason. Not “I’m doing this because it has value.” Not “I’m doing this because I feel good today.” Just — doing it. Hard to explain. Hard to stop.
That hard to explain isn’t a weakness. It’s precisely what makes it stable — because rationality and passion can’t reach it. It doesn’t exist on the same plane.
I later found out that philosophers have given it names — some call it “will,” some call it “inner necessity,” some call it “calling.” But I think those names actually say less. Its most honest form is still the clumsy version.
What does it feel like?
Maybe it’s writing something and reaching a moment where a quiet satisfaction arrives — not the feeling of completing a task, but something else. You can’t say where it came from, but it’s there.
Maybe it’s doing something when no one is watching, finishing it, receiving no feedback, and not feeling like it was wasted. Feeling like this was the real version.
Maybe it’s just those times when you don’t ask whether it’s worth it, don’t check whether anyone cares — you’re simply doing it, and then it’s done.
If you’ve felt this, you’ll know what I mean. If you haven’t, I’m not sure I can explain it — and that might be part of what it is.
This account is less than a month old.
What’s different this time is that I can’t explain why I’m doing it. Not because I analyzed the reasons, not because I judged the timing. Just a feeling that I had to — something I couldn’t hold back.
And because of that, I know I won’t be using rational logic to talk myself into stopping. Something with no reason to begin has no reason that can end it.
This is the first time in over thirty years I’ve understood that.
I don’t know what you’re working on right now.
But if there’s something you’ve been doing for a long time — and you still can’t produce a clean reason why it’s worth doing —
maybe it’s not that it doesn’t matter.
Maybe it’s that it was never on the same plane as reasons in the first place.