Stuck in the Loop
What breaks before the wrong decision gets made
Why Agency Breaks Down
A few years ago I was in the middle of one of the harder stretches of my life -- the kind where multiple things unravel at once and you can feel the floor shifting. I knew, in some clear part of myself, what I needed to do. I had thought it through, talked it through, written about it. The understanding was there.
And I still couldn’t move.
Not because I was afraid, or lazy, or in denial. What I felt was something more specific: a disconnection between the part of me that could see clearly and the part of me that could act. I’d reach for intention and find something blurry. I’d reach for will and find something exhausted. The gap between knowing and doing felt like it was made of something I couldn’t name yet.
It took me a while to understand that what I was experiencing wasn’t a personal failure. It was a structural one. And once I saw it in myself, I started seeing it everywhere else.
The framework I’ve been developing -- I call it the Enactment Arc -- started not from theory but from watching the same disconnection show up in different forms. Someone navigates a genuinely hard personal transition: they’ve done the inner work, they can see clearly what needs to change, and they still can’t move. Someone else is running a team or a company, responding to everything, perpetually in motion -- and somehow the things that actually matter keep not getting done.
The pattern wasn’t random. It was a breakdown in the movement from perception to action, and it tended to fracture in the same places, for recognizable reasons, under recognizable kinds of pressure.
Under pressure, our capacity can break down at any point along the path from salience to action: what becomes important, what we want, what we need to understand, what we commit to, what we do, and what we later integrate.
Each step matters.
The earlier steps carry particular weight because they shape the clarity and coherence of will and action. When we skip them, action may still happen, but it often becomes reactive, fragmented, or hard to sustain.
Here’s what I know from personal experience first, before any of the frameworks: when my resources are low, my choices are different.
When I’m tired, I skip the workout. When I’m anxious, I overthink instead of act. When I’m depleted, I reach for whatever is closest rather than whatever is right. The Don Miguel Ruiz image that stays with me is this: your best crossing a desert, when you’re hungry, dehydrated, exhausted , looks like eating a leftover pizza, which is very different from your best on a well-rested morning. Same person. Same values. Entirely different capacity.
It’s like that acronym, HALT: when you’re hungry, angry, lonely, or tired, notice the need before acting.
Under scarcity, agency narrows. The window of tolerance tightens. That’s not a character judgment. It’s a structural reality. It’s in the nervous system, even.
The Exit 8 is an indie game that has also been adapted into a film. You walk through what appears to be an ordinary subway corridor. The corridor loops. The only way to progress is to notice subtle anomalies: a sign slightly off, a shadow that doesn’t belong, a detail that breaks the pattern. Miss them and you keep looping. Catch them and you move forward.
Nothing in the environment changes dramatically. The corridor is always the same corridor. The exit appears not when you try to force your way through, but when your perception becomes precise enough to register what was always there.
I think about that game beyond just a metaphor for insight. I have enough of those. The game is more precisely a description of something mechanical that happens. Attention has to be available. It has to be pointed in the right direction. The quality of what you notice determines whether the loop continues or the exit appears.
Most breakdowns I’ve witnessed in people, in organizations, in systems, began before the wrong decision was made. It began with a failure of attention upstream of the decision. Something important became invisible, or was never salient in the first place.
That’s the source where change starts.
The Sequence That Breaks
Agency, when it’s working, moves through a recognizable arc.
Something catches your attention. Out of everything happening around you, one thing becomes salient -- it rises above the noise and asks to be taken seriously. You feel a pull toward it, or a resistance, or both at once. You try to understand it: what is actually happening here, how much do I know, what does this situation need? You form an intention. You act. Then you get feedback, integrate what happened, and the cycle begins again. I’ve watched this sequence work, and I’ve watched it break. The fracture points are not random -- they follow the arc, and they tend to show up in the same places under similar kinds of pressure.
When that sequence holds, action feels purposeful. Even when it’s hard, there’s a quality of coherence to it -- a sense that what you’re doing is connected to what you actually perceive and value.
When it fractures, things get strange. You act without having really understood. You understand without having really decided. You decide without being able to follow through. You know you’ve lost integrity, but can’t pinpoint how (and blame others instead). Each stage of the movement can fail in its own way, and the failure at each stage has a different texture and a different remedy.
I’ve started calling this the Enactment Arc, because naming it made it easier to see where exactly the breakdown was happening. In myself, in the people I work with, in organizations trying to navigate genuine complexity.
The fracture points are not random. They follow the arc.1
The Misdiagnosis We Keep Making
What strikes me most, looking at this across individuals and organizations and the broader cultural moment, is how consistently we mislabel what’s happening.
We say someone lacks discipline. We blame weak leadership. We prescribe better information, clearer strategy, more accountability. And sometimes those diagnoses are accurate.
But often the fracture is upstream of where we’re looking -- and that gap between where the problem lives and where we’re applying the solution is where we lose time and effort.
The person who can’t move despite understanding everything isn’t failing at will. Will is just where the absence finally becomes visible. New productivity apps and better to-do lists won’t fix the issue. The actual break happened earlier, somewhere in what they were able to perceive as salient, or in a desire that was more conflicted than it appeared. Nicotine patches alone won’t stop a smoking habit. A no-contact period after a breakup isn’t the solution to feelings of unworthiness, rejection, or abandonment.
The team that looks disengaged and gets put through another alignment workshop isn’t failing at commitment. The desire is genuinely split, and naming the split is the only thing that resolves it. Everything else is pressure applied to the wrong layer.
Misdiagnosis is expensive. It costs time, trust, and the energy that goes into solutions addressing the wrong level.
What This Means for Right Now
We are living through a moment when multiple systems are becoming more stretched, thinned out, and honest simultaneously. Economic pressure is revealing structural imbalances that growth once absorbed. Households used credit to bridge the gap between wages and the cost of living. Companies used cheap capital to mask weak operating models. Cities relied on office districts and commuter flows that no longer function as they once did. Governments carried debt comfortably while rates were low. In each case, the imbalance was already there. Growth did not repair it. Growth made it easier to live with. Growth masked the fractures.
AI accelerates all of this in ways worth naming separately. It generates fluent answers faster than we can evaluate them, which creates the impression of understanding at exactly the stage where real understanding is hardest to build. That is not an argument against AI -- I use it, build with it, teach around it. It is an argument for paying closer attention to where in the sequence the tool is helping and where it is quietly substituting for the slower but more important work of genuine judgment.
That deserves its own essay, which is where I’m going next. But briefly: AI introduces a particular distortion at the understanding layer. It generates fluent, confident answers instantly, which creates the impression of comprehension. The knowledge stage of the arc gets thinner even as the expected speed of action increases. There is less room for the slow formation of genuine understanding that grounds coherent choice. The pause to reflect is gone.
When the arc can’t repair itself under that kind of pressure, people don’t adapt. They contract. Attention narrows to what is urgent. Desire becomes reactive. Understanding goes shallow. Action turns either impulsive or paralyzed. From the outside it looks like a failure of intelligence or will. From the inside it feels like being stuck in a loop you can see but can’t exit.
This is not a reason for despair. It is a reason for precision.
If the breakdown lives in the movement, then repair has to happen there too -- not by forcing better outcomes or piling more information on top of confusion, but by strengthening each stage of the arc so that perception can stabilize, meaning can clarify, and action can follow with some degree of integrity.
That is the work. Not as an abstraction. As a daily practice, in individuals, in teams, in the quiet interior of anyone trying to act coherently in a world that is moving very fast and asking, underneath all the noise, for something more honest.
Where I Want to Go Next
The question that stays with me is not why people fail to act. It is where, exactly, in the movement from perception to action the thread gets cut -- and what it would take to repair it without forcing it.
That is what I want to explore next.
Where It Actually Breaks
The first fracture happens at attention. Not everything that matters becomes salient. We are wired to notice threat, movement, and novelty -- which means we systematically miss what is stable, slow-moving, or quietly important. Organizations build cultures that make certain kinds of information visible and others invisible. People develop habits of attention that confirm what they already believe. The environment itself -- accelerated, noisy, demanding -- rewards fast reaction over careful noticing.
When what becomes salient is distorted, everything downstream is already compromised. You can have excellent judgment and impeccable values, and still act incoherently, because you are responding to an incomplete or distorted version of what is actually happening.
The second fracture happens at desire. Even when perception is accurate, desire can be conflicted. You see clearly what is needed and feel pulled in two directions at once -- toward safety and toward truth, toward what you want and toward what you know is right, toward the familiar and toward what is actually called for. That conflict doesn’t resolve itself through more information or more willpower. It resolves, when it does, through something closer to inner honesty: a willingness to feel the conflict clearly rather than paper over it with a premature decision.
The third fracture happens at understanding. This one is particularly visible right now. We live in an environment that generates fluent, confident-sounding answers faster than we can evaluate them. AI makes this more acute, not less. You can receive a well-structured response to a complex question and feel, briefly, that you understand something -- when what you have actually received is a plausible account of it. Understanding that is deep enough to ground action is slower to develop and harder to fake. It requires sitting with a question long enough for your own thinking to form, not just accepting the first coherent version that arrives.
The fourth fracture happens at will. This is the one that surprises people most. Will is not the same as wanting. You can want something quite intensely and still find, at the moment of commitment, that something contracts. That contraction is real. It is not weakness in any simple sense -- it is often the signal that you are being asked to act from a self that has not yet fully formed, or to cross a threshold that carries genuine cost. Will that holds under pressure is not willpower in the grinding sense. It is something more like inner authority -- a settled enough relationship with your own values and perception that you can act from them even when it is uncomfortable.
The fifth fracture happens at integration. After action, there is feedback. Something happened. The question is whether you can take that feedback in -- let it modify your understanding, adjust your attention, update your sense of what is salient. Or whether the feedback gets defended against, rationalized, or simply not seen. When integration fails, the next cycle begins already fractured. People repeat the same pattern not because they are not trying, but because the loop never completed.