Inertia: the weight of standing still
Inertia — 202
"Silence is the language of inertia."
Magaret Heffernan
I’ve seen the word 'inertia' more often lately, which had me thinking about the motivation for these essays. It feels like a good time to remember why inertia matters and why I’ve been writing to some of you for nearly five years—for which I’m grateful.
I find stillness strangely comforting, like the way the morning sun finds your bed at the same angle, day after day. The familiar weight of routine pressing against your shoulders. The quiet hum of a life lived in known measures. It’s pleasurable and calming, but also discouraging.
You may remember learning about inertia in school: the science of objects that keep moving until something stops them, that stay frozen until something stirs them awake. It feels terrifyingly human, doesn’t it?
We experience it too. Like water trickling down the path of least resistance, we prefer to remain as we are—letting nothing change unless deeply compelled. Our beliefs settle into comfortable grooves because relying on predetermined mental models seems like an efficient way to navigate life’s endless decisions. But there’s danger in these defaults, in what scientists call belief perseverance (or conceptual conservatism)—this stubborn habit of maintaining belief even when confronted with contradictory information, even if it’s not in your best interest.
In the 1960s, a social psychologist named William J. McGuire noticed something curious about the human mind: even when confronted with new truths that challenged our beliefs, we didn’t shift immediately. Instead, change seeped in slowly, like water through limestone. He called it cognitive inertia—this ghostly resistance to new ways of thinking, this comfort in our mental hammocks.
He spoke of balance theory, an influence on cognitive inertia and the theory by Fritz Heider. The theory claims there must be a balance between interpersonal relationships, whereby all parties are aligned in their thoughts, emotions, and social relationships; people are generally motivated to steer clear of imbalances, and so they form attitudes that will try to reduce tension.
It’s also linked to the well-known theory of cognitive dissonance, proposed by Leon Festinger. It has been said for a long time that striving for internal psychological consistency and cognitive dissonance often leaves people feeling uncomfortable—leading them to reduce said dissonance. This reduction is usually achieved by rejecting, avoiding, or changing our perceptions of contradictory information to remain in those mental hammocks. Something we see a lot now with social media and influential figures.
In the About part of this journal, I mentioned that my thought process originated twelve years ago in Sorrento. I was fifteen and didn’t have the words for it then. Tasting Italian spring for the first time on a school trip.
Ancient walls and salted air. The first place I developed thoughts about inertia. Neat expectations of life and relationships shattered against reality’s sharp edges because I spent too much time trying to align with the people around me, highlighting my differences even more. That’s where I started to learn how life will refuse to follow the neat lines we draw for it and how kindness doesn’t always echo back. I tried to follow what seemed like well-worn paths of thought but didn’t notice the damage it was doing to my path.
Margaret Heffernan, wiser than most, once said, “Silence is the language of inertia.” Feel how she names the quiet comfort of staying still and not rocking the boat. It’s why we sometimes stay around relationships that stopped serving us, remain in jobs that stopped growing us, or let love calcify into a poor routine.
But here’s the thing I love about inertia: it works both ways. Just as stillness begets stillness—movement creates more movement. Each letter I write and story I share makes me want to share more. And each workout or bike ride I do motivates me to do another. The small actions ripple outward.
So that’s why I write to you. Inertia (and status quo bias) talks about humans’ inability to alter the ways they process information, sticking with the perceived ‘easy route’ until we find a good reason to do something different.
Inertia is the story of being human and how emotions can get stuck like records skipping on the same vinyl groove. It’s in the same tone as those who dismissed the Spanish flu and COVID as something of a seasonal visitor—until it wasn’t.
The magic lives in the tension between staying still and daring to move, in naming the forces that keep you in place and having quiet courage to challenge the models that make you think one way or another.
If you’re reading this, you’re indeed in good stead to let new truths seep in and dance with you. And you realise that inertia is your teacher, not your prison. With this and each essay, may you learn that resistance to change and struggling to overcome it isn’t a weakness; it’s simply, wonderfully, and perfectly human.