The Day I Realized We Were Adapting to Something Broken

(2 Minute Read Time)

The Day I Realized We Were Adapting to Something Broken

I remember the moment because nothing special was happening.

No crisis.  No argument.  Just a familiar heaviness I had learned to carry without thinking about it.

I was tired - but not in a way that sleep could fix.  The kind of tired that comes from constantly adjusting yourself.  Your expectations.  Your reactions.  Your needs.  I told myself it was normal.  Everyone else seemed to manage.  So I did too.

That was the story I kept repeating.

Until one small thought slipped in, almost uninvited:

Why does this require so much endurance?

I had been calling it growth.  Maturity.  Resilience.  I was proud of how adaptable I’d become - how little I needed, how much I could tolerate, how efficiently I could move through days that didn’t quite fit.

But sitting there, feeling that quiet exhaustion settle into my body, I realized something uncomfortable.

I wasn’t adapting because things were healthy.  I was adapting because questioning felt risky.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped asking whether this pace, this pressure, this constant self-correction made sense.  Instead, I focused on becoming better at surviving it.  I learned how to stay productive while tired.  How to stay agreeable while overwhelmed.  How to silence the part of me that noticed something was off.

And the scary part?  It worked.

I became functional.  Reliable.  “Doing well.”

But also became smaller.

I lowered my expectations so I wouldn’t feel disappointed.  I reframed discomfort so it sounded like gratitude.  I told myself this was just how things are - how adulthood works, how ambition works, how life works.

It wasn’t until I paused long enough to actually feel my own resistance that I saw it clearly:  I wasn’t broken.  The system I was adapting to was.

And adaptation had become a way of protecting it.

That realization didn’t come with clarity or confidence.  It came with grief.  Grief for how quickly I had learned to doubt my own discomfort.  Grief for how often I had mistaken endurance for strength.

I think about how many of us are doing this quietly.  Adjusting ourselves instead of challenging what’s asking too much.  Normalizing strain.  Wearing exhaustion like proof that we’re trying hard enough.

We don’t question it because we’re afraid of what happens if we do.  Afraid of being difficult.  Ungrateful.  Behind.  Left out.

So we adapt.

But here’s what I’m still sitting with:  adaptation without reflection slowly teaches us to abandon ourselves.

I don’t have a neat resolution.  I’m still living inside the same world, the same expectations.  But something changed that day.

I started paying attention to what costs me energy instead of what earns me approval.  I started noticing when resilience is being demanded instead of supported.  I started asking - quietly, imperfectly - Does this actually make sense?

That question alone hasn’t fixed anything.  But it has stopped me from assuming the problem is always me.  And for now, that feels like a step in the right direction.

I’m not suggesting adaptation is always wrong.  Humans adapt - that’s how we survive.  But survival isn’t the same as flourishing.  And coping isn’t the same as consent.

The danger is when adaptation becomes automatic.  When we stop checking whether what we’re adjusting to deserves our flexibility at all.

So maybe the question isn’t:  “How do we keep up?”

Maybe it’s:  “What have we accepted that we shouldn’t have had to?”