The Path of Least Resistance Isn't What You Think
AI assistance disclosure: This post was originally recorded as a 36 minute voice note, included above, and I used Claude (Anthropic) to edit the transcript into written form for ease of reading. All ideas, words, and examples drawn directly from the original recording. I have also reviewed and revised this article before publishing.
I'm driving to Ojai right now, listening to Are You There, Spirit? It's Me, Travis, and it's reminding me of this oracle card I will continuously pull for people. This message I keep coming back to, over and over, in readings and in my own life:
Follow the path of least resistance.
And every single time I say it, I clarify it’s message because it’s really easy to misinterpret it as: take the easy road. And I need you to understand that is not what I mean. Not even close.
The “Easy” Path Requires You to Suppress Yourself
The easiest thing to do— is to follow the rules. To follow the beaten path. To follow what's already been determined as "good" or "right" in your context.
It’s following along when your parents tell you the right thing to do is go to grad school. Become a doctor. Be a lawyer. Focus on the money. It’s following along when society tells you to be afraid of AI, that the humanities are dead, that there's no money in art. The easy path is the one that doesn't make anyone uncomfortable. Including yourself.
But here's the thing. That path requires you to suppress what you feel. And suppressing what you feel creates resistance. Enormous, chronic, soul-level resistance. Which is exactly why choosing the path of least resistance is actually so hard, because the path of least resistance is the one you internally know is right, but that you don't yet think is right.
And there's a fundamental difference between thinking and knowing. Learning to discern between the two is a skill. It takes time. It takes trial and error. It takes genuine effort. And the only way to develop it is to do the counterintuitive thing. To actually do what you know you want to do, what you know is right for you, even when every thought, every rule, every paradigm you've been handed is telling you not to.
I Know This Friction Because I Experience It
I’ve been thinking about what it actually takes to follow the path of least resistance, namely a lot of courage and trust, because I’m going through it right now.
I'm going through my Saturn Return— for those who don't know, that's an astrological cycle that hits around age 27–30 and it is all about responsibility, structure, discipline. It's the squeeze. And I feel it. I feel the pressure to make more of myself, to go higher on my path, to figure out where I put my energy in my career, in relationships, in where I'm even living.
In the last seven years, I dedicated myself to building a business. And honestly? It hasn't really felt like building a business. It has felt like a journey of finding confidence in myself. Finding safety in myself. Trusting what I know and what I see. Having both the confidence and the humility to show up fully without the perfect credentials, without a perfect strategy (or honestly, any strategy) and doing it anyway.
And now I'm in this leg of the journey where I have to actually decide: where does all of that go? Because this whole thing has been a self-expose— where are my deepest fears, where am I still performing, where am I still proving myself, where am I still not enough, where am I still waiting for permission to be who I actually am?
The Permission Game — And All the Forms It Takes
At every point of resistance, I’ve discovered a new face that I ask for permission. And I want to walk through the way this shows up across a life, because I think most of us are playing this game without realizing it.
When we're kids, it's our parents. They have a specific idea for you, they know how big and bad and scary the world is, and it wasn't really a conversation or a debate. For me, it was literally being told, “no” when I asked if I could go to a friend’s sleepover party, or if I could take a video editing class, or quit golf. Oh yeah— I was a competitive golfer for over ten years of my life, taught it for six years, but I hated golf. I suppressed a lot to get through that. And that was just... how it was.
In middle school and high school, a lot of us— especially women— start asking our weight and our appearance for permission. We outsource whether we're even allowed to like ourselves or allowed to eat more food, to how much we weigh, how many calories are in something, and how we look. Our worthiness of love, our confidence, our right to be accepted? All handed over to a number on a scale or a reflection in a mirror. That is just another version of the same game. Asking something outside of you for permission to be good enough.
As adults, it becomes money. How much do you need in the bank to feel safe enough to travel? To start that business? To have kids? To be worthy of a relationship? To leave the job that's slowly killing you? And notice how the goalpost never actually arrives. There's always another number, another threshold, another thing you need before you're allowed to go after what you actually want.
And then there's the permission of credentials. This one is still tricky for me, and honestly, I think it's what I've been navigating for years. Actually, probably my entire life. The fear of not knowing enough, not being smart enough, of not being seen as legitimate enough. So much of my work is in psychology, in understanding the soul, in understanding human behavior. And I find myself bumping up against the gatekeepers of credibility— the ivory towers, the governing bodies— that get to decide whether what I know counts as legitimate or evidence-based enough to share.
Here's what I actually believe, having lived through nearly a decade of passive and active suicidal ideation: the root of it was not a chemical imbalance. And by the way, the chemical imbalance theory is not actually proven. You cannot measure your neurochemical levels without cutting into the brain. It is a theory. A working hypothesis that works for some people and creates a whole different set of problems for others like suppression of self, emotional numbness, not being able to feel anything. People get off medication because they're like, that's not what I wanted either. And when you go deeper, when the root cause is tied to the way the world is structured, to basic needs not being met, to a system that is genuinely not built for you— medication is not a fix. It's a band-aid, at best.
What I know from my own experience is that suicidality, at its root, is a spiritual issue. It is a disconnect from yourself. A disconnect from your soul and from love. Because I truly believe that at our foundation, we have the capacity for good, we have the capacity for evil, and we are fundamentally oriented toward what we think is right. The self-destruction happens when your paradigm tells you that hurting yourself is the right thing. That's where suicidal ideation lives. That's where self-harming behavior lives. That's where self-destructive patterns live.
We All Have a Propensity to Self-Harm
I want to be clear that self-harm doesn't only look like cutting. It doesn't only look like wanting to die.
Heavy drinking. Drinking to the point of unconsciousness and doing it frequently? That is self-harm. But it's also celebrated. Expected. Think about bachelor parties, bachelorette parties, college frat parties. There is a cultural expectation of self-harm baked right into our biggest celebrations.
Procrastination is self-harm. You are not doing the things you know will be fulfilling and helpful for you. Chronic laziness is self-harm. Choosing to microwave something or order out every night when you know cooking would serve your health and your budget better— and I am not saying those things are inherently lazy, but when you're honest with yourself about why you're doing it, sometimes the answer is: because I don't care enough about my future self right now.
This propensity lives in all of us. It is baked into our cultural DNA. Which actually shows you something really important about human nature.
Why We Harm Others (And the Planet) Without Seeing It
This is where it gets big. Stay with me.
For us to harm others, or to harm the world, we have to convince ourselves that the harm is moral. That it's the right thing. When you look at Hitler, at Al Qaeda, at the worst atrocities in human history— you have to be willing to look at it from those people's perspectives. In their framework, they were doing what was right. They had convinced themselves that the other group was so evil, so dangerous, such a threat to humanity, that eliminating them was actually the moral choice. The service to God. The service to their people.
We call them monsters, and they were. But what created the monsters wasn't the absence of a moral framework. It was a broken moral framework. A schema so distorted that it could justify the unjustifiable and move against basic human virtues.
And before you think this is only about history and the worst examples of humanity, just look at climate change. We are destroying the planet through our collective greed and consumption, and most of us are not connecting that to harm. Because we've made nature and modern human life into two separate categories. Two different things. Incompatible, unrelated. So when we heat the planet, when we melt the Arctic, when we poison the water, when we wipe out hundreds of species— we don't experience it as hurting ourselves. But when the bees die, we die. We won't have food. When the Arctic melts, we die. We are hurting ourselves when we hurt the Earth. We just don't see it because we've made it other.
Same thing with the way we eat.
I believe plants, food grown from the earth, is food. Animals are not food. Animals are alive. They're sentient beings. They feel. They suffer. And yet we have built an entire food system, an entire cultural story, that requires us to not see that. You don't think pig, you think pork. You don't think cow, you think steak. Some menus don't even say chicken or duck, they say poultry. The language itself is doing the work of the disconnect, keeping your morality intact while you participate in something your morality, if followed to its actual conclusion, would reject.
And then we turn around and call cultures that eat dog monsters. But from where they're standing, it's just another animal— the same logic we use for cows and pigs, applied to a different animal. We can't see that the only difference is which animals we've made emotional, relatable, like our babies, and which ones we've made into food.
That is cognitive dissonance. And it is extraordinarily strong. Strong enough to let us go completely against our own values without realizing we're doing it. Strong enough to build entire civilizations on systems of harm we call normal.
This is what a broken schema looks like at scale. And if it can happen at that scale— globally, culturally, historically— you better believe it's happening in your personal life too.
The Schema That's Running Your Life Without Your Permission
Your schema is how you think. The framework of beliefs that tells you what's possible, what's allowed, what's true about the world. And it is operating constantly, mostly below your awareness.
Here's a clear example in one of the most common problems: wanting to be rich but staying broke.
You'll hear something like this and immediately think, that's not me, I genuinely want financial abundance. But your actions are the mirror. What you do is what you actually believe. And if there's a subconscious story running that says rich people are greedy, money corrupts, if I make real money my friends will leave me, people will use me, I won't know who I can trust, I'll become one of those people— then some part of you doesn't actually want the thing. And that part is winning.
We do this with all of it. We see someone with a $10,000 bag and instead of letting it just be their life, we make it an attack on our own. Must be nice. I bet it's daddy's money. Nepo baby. They have no idea what it's like to be me. And look, I'm not saying you need to celebrate billionaires or think they're good people. That is not the point. The point is that when you make someone else's success into your personal wound, you have just given them power over you and created a perpetrator in your own mind. And now you are the victim of their success. And in order for you to move toward wealth yourself, the thing you say you want, you have to get past the story that wealth = corruption, wealth = them, wealth = something bad that happens to good people.
Otherwise you stay poor. Not because life is rigged against you (though sometimes it is), but because part of you has decided that staying poor is safer and you have no power to do anything about it, because you’ve given it away.
The Shirt Analogy
Imagine shopping didn’t come with price tags, ever. Now, imagine walking into a store with shirts.
No sticker. No label. Just you and the clothes. Now your only question is: do I like this? Does it fit? Does it feel right? Does it suit who I am and where I'm going?
That is a completely different decision-making experience than most of us have ever had. Because most of us learned to look at the price first. Before we decided if we even liked it, before we tried it on, before we let ourselves want it. We let the price decide our desire. And in doing that again and again, we train ourselves to shrink. To want smaller. To fit our desires inside the container of our current limitations.
Here’s the thing— your current limitations are going to be far, far smaller than your actual potential. So when you train your desires to fit your limitations, you are training yourself to aim at a fraction of what you're actually capable of.
This is not just about shopping. This is your career. Your relationships. Your creative work. Your life.
"I can't quit my job because then I won't have savings and then I won't be able to pay rent and then—" Spiral. "I can't be with that person because my parents won't approve and they don't make enough and—" Spiral. "I can't go all in on my dream because what if it doesn't work and—" Spiral.
Notice how each thought spawns the next, and before long you can't even remember what it was you originally wanted. You've just talked yourself out of your own life.
Now, if you’re thinking, “well if I just buy everything I want, I’d be broke!” or, “that would be so irresponsible to make decisions based on desire!” I hear you. What you have to understand is that by leaning into your desires, you actually learn to trust yourself and become the most responsible steward of your time, money, and energy. When you lean into your desires, and you later feel like you genuinely wasted your resources, that doesn’t mean you can’t trust yourself again or that you made the wrong decision. That actually means you learned something new about yourself— you learned what you truly value. When it comes to the shirt analogy, let’s say you buy a shirt you can't quite afford, but you really really loved in store. Well, you might realize you're so precious about it because it’s the only luxury item you have and it cost so much, that you're afraid to wear it. In fact, having the shirt doesn’t make you feel abundant, it actually is a reminder of how poor you feel. That's a lesson too. Now you know: you want something you can spill wine on. You want something you can show up in without anxiety. That's useful information. It costs something. That's okay. That's the school of life. And investing in your mistakes, investing in the lessons— that is investing in yourself.
The 4 of Cups Moment
Okay, time to bring it all home. How does shopping for shirts, Hitler and veganism, and knowing we have a willingness to self-harm all fit in the picture when it comes to following the path of least resistance? It shows you that in order to move forward, you’re going to have to look at things differently— and be willing to be wrong about what you think is the right thing to do.
In tarot, the 4 of Cups shows a figure sitting with three cups in front of them. Contemplating, comparing, slightly dissatisfied. None of them quite right. And they are completely missing the fourth cup: the one being offered by a hand reaching out of a cloud, right beside them.
The fourth cup is always there. It's the option you're not seeing because you're so deep in your own head, your own rules, your own three options, that you can't look up long enough to notice it. Sometimes the path forward isn't one of the choices you've been weighing. Sometimes it's something else entirely, something that feels so obvious once you see it that you almost laugh — because it was right there.
But you have to be willing to look up.
On Knowing vs. Thinking
This is the piece I want to close on, because it's the foundation of all of it.
Following the path of least resistance requires you to be able to access what you know, not just what you think. And for a lot of us, we've been so conditioned to distrust our feelings— you're making an emotional decision, you’re not being logical, you'll regret it, don't be reactive— that we've actually cut ourselves off from the most important information we have.
Fun fact: a little over half the world are emotional authorities in Human Design. If you're not familiar, Human Design is a system similar to astrology that is based on your birth date, time, and place that maps how you're individually designed to operate. One of the themes is authority, which describes how your intuition actually speaks to you.
The classic advice if you’re in a dilemma is, “trust your gut.” If you're a Sacral authority: yes, trust your gut. You have a literal gut response— a defined Sacral center— that gives you reliable yes/no signals. When people say "trust your gut," they mean you, specifically.
But I'm a Projector with Emotional Authority. I don't have a gut to listen to the same way. My truth comes through emotional waves, and I am designed to wait for emotional clarity before I decide. Not certainty. Clarity. Because certainty isn't coming for me. Even on my best days. Even on the things I'm most sure about. If I wait for 100%, I will wait forever.
If you're an Emotional Authority, which about 50-58% of the world is, and you relate to this: give yourself permission to decide on 60%, on 80%. Give yourself room for doubt to coexist with yes. Give yourself grace that on your wedding day, you might still have a moment of "wait, is this right?" — and that doesn't mean it's wrong. You make the decision. You build the trust. That is the practice.
And if you’re neither an emotional or sacral authority? Don’t worry, there are 5 more. Advice like, “sleep on it,” “trust your instincts,” “follow what you really want,” “talk to someone” or, “feel it out” are all examples of different ways your intuition may speak to you.
What Success Actually Is
At the end of the day, the reason why we stress so much over which path to take is because we care. We care about our futures, we care about our success, we care about what our lives look like. But I think we've been measuring success with completely the wrong ruler and it’s what’s keeping us stuck.
Success is not how long you stay in a career. It's not a number in a bank account, a follower count, a credential on a wall. It's not even whether a relationship lasts.
Success is becoming the most authentic version of yourself.
It's being able to communicate the unique value you were brought here to offer— as effectively, as generously, as effortlessly as you can. It's sharing your gifts without attachment to the result, without white-knuckling the compensation, trusting in the divine law of reciprocity. It's emotional regulation. It's healthy friendships. It's being someone who can hold space, love with intention, move through life with integrity.
Success is living in alignment with your own values. Allowing the vision to unfold on its own terms. A peaceful life. A satisfying life. A life full of surprises you've learned to actually receive with open hands.
That is the path of least resistance.
And yeah— it's the hardest thing you'll ever choose. But it's the only one worth choosing.