As the saying goes, better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.

This is absolute horse shit, yet it conceptualizes the misery that so many people live with every day. The devil you know is familiarity, the predictable suffering, the unpleasant life circumstances you’re currently in. Therein lurks the temptation to, as John O’Donohue aptly says in his book Anam Cara, become addicted to the very things that bring us pain:

“It is startling that we desperately hold on to what makes us miserable. Our own woundedness becomes a source of perverse pleasure and fixes our identity. We do not want to be cured, for that would mean moving into the unknown. Often it seems we are destructively addicted to the negative.”

We stay at jobs we hate. We maintain routines and habits that drain our minds and souls. We stay rooted in the same place even though it no longer serves us. We remain in a soft, velvet misery because we have been in it so long it has not only become familiar, but insularly. We close off our minds to what could be different. We fear what could be different. Because in the unknown are all the sufferings we haven’t developed a perverse camaraderie with. Yet that presupposes that only suffering awaits us.

It takes courage to choose the unknown. And our present, familiar misery is an invitation to change:

“The negative threatens us so powerfully precisely because it is an invitation to an art of compassion and self-enlargement that our small thinking utterly resists.” – John O’Donohue

Some of the best decisions of my life were ones that took me into the unknown.

Some of the worst were ones that kept me strung up in the familiar.

I have experienced the allure of familiar misery. It becomes daunting to even think of trying to escape it, to try again, to risk failure again. The small, entrapped ego drunk on fear and shame would have kept me there forever, because from its perspective the unknown bore only knives. In truth, stepping back into the unpredictable, the unsafe, was what the deepest part of me truly needed. Of course, there was pain in the unknown, but not just pain. Every new horizon brings a multitude of potential blessings.

Yes, it takes courage to let go of misery in the name of what might be. Sure, it could go the other way, too. But how long should we put up with elective suffering? Our whole lives? Life is short. Dizzyingly short. Why not find out what waits beyond the thorny shore of your discontent? You only have this one shot to discover the answer. The alternative is, well, predictable.

The devil you know is a certainty of misery.

The devil you don’t know might not even exist in the first place.