By Zia Uddin
There is a kind of pain that we bring on ourselves. We know something is wrong. We feel sorry after doing it. We promise ourselves we will stop. And then, sometimes, the very next day, we do it again. This pattern of doing wrong, feeling regret, and then doing wrong again is not new. It has been part of human life since the beginning of time. Thinkers, writers, and scientists across hundreds of years have all tried to answer one simple but painful question: why do we keep going back to what hurts us?
The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle was one of the first to study this problem closely. In his famous book Nicomachean Ethics, he gave this weakness a name — “akrasia,” which means acting against your own better judgment. Aristotle described a man who knows that drinking too much is bad for him, yet still picks up the cup. The interesting thing, Aristotle said, is that this man is not doing wrong out of ignorance. He knows exactly what he is doing. He simply cannot stop himself at the right moment. The problem, Aristotle believed, is that our desires are often louder than our reason, and we listen to the louder voice.
Hundreds of years later, St. Augustine wrote one of the most honest books ever written about this struggle. In his Confessions (397 AD), he described his own life of mistakes, bad choices, and constant regret. His most famous line is both funny and heartbreaking: “Lord, make me good, but not yet.” Augustine wanted to change. He truly did. But he also wanted to enjoy his desires a little longer. He understood something very important: that we do not always go back to our bad habits because we enjoy them. Sometimes we go back because we are afraid of who we will be without them. Our sins can become part of our identity, and letting them go feels like losing a piece of ourselves.
The Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky explored this idea deeply in his book Notes from Underground (1864). His main character openly says he is sick and wicked but does nothing to fix himself. In fact, he seems to enjoy his own suffering. Dostoyevsky, who himself struggled with a gambling habit for many years, knew from personal experience that some bad choices are not really about pleasure at all. They are about feeling alive. They are about feeling in control of something, even if what you control is your own destruction. This is a dark truth, but it is a very real one.
The psychologist Sigmund Freud coined a term for this in his book Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). He called it repetition compulsion, the strange inner force that pushes people to repeat painful experiences over and over again. Freud noticed that his patients kept making the same mistakes, entering the same kinds of bad relationships, falling into the same financial problems, returning to the same addictions. He said this was not bad luck or carelessness. It was coming from deep inside the mind, from a part of us that we cannot easily see or control. We repeat not because we forget. We repeat because something inside us has not yet been healed.
Modern science has added more light to this old problem. The economist and psychologist Daniel Kahneman, in his well-known book Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), explains that the human brain works in two ways. The first is fast, emotional, and driven by desire. The second is slow, careful, and driven by reason. When we face a temptation, the fast part of the brain reacts immediately, before the slow, sensible part even gets a chance to speak. This is why we say things we regret in anger, spend money we do not have, and return to habits we promised to leave. The regret comes from the slow brain — but it always arrives after the damage is already done.
But is there a way out of this loop? Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist who survived the Nazi concentration camps, believed there is. In his deeply moving book Man’s Search for Meaning (1946), Frankl wrote that between any situation and our response to it, there is always a small space. In that space, we have a choice. We are never completely without freedom. But he also said that willpower alone is not enough to change. What truly changes a person is meaning — a strong reason to live and act differently. When we have something we truly care about, something bigger than our desires, the pull of bad habits becomes weaker.
So what does all of this tell us? It tells us that the fault in our choices is not a sign that we are beyond saving. Aristotle said it is a failure of habit — and habits can be changed with enough practice. Augustine said it is love pointed in the wrong direction, and love can be turned around. Frankl said the loop can be broken, but only when we find something worth breaking it for. Every moment of genuine regret is also a moment of awareness. And awareness, no matter how brief, is where real change begins. The question is not whether we will fall again. The question is whether, this time, we will be honest enough with ourselves to understand why.
The author is a PhD scholar at the School of Economics, Quaid-i-Azam University (QAU), Islamabad. He is a policy analyst who writes on green economic growth, environmental sustainability and climate change. Email: ziapyare@gmail.com
