Why “going with the flow” is not a choice — but something that happens to us when the story takes over
In ordinary conversation, the phrase “go with the flow” appears effortless and almost glamorous. People use it when life already moves in their favour, when work succeeds, relationships align, and opportunities seem to appear at the right moment. It is spoken from a posture of ease, as if the speaker had discovered a secret technique for living without resistance. But this is a linguistic illusion. The ability to “go with the flow” is not a skill mastered through spiritual discipline or a mindset one can adopt at will. It is a state that emerges only when life is already flowing — when the world cooperates with one’s desires. The phrase does not describe a profound existential principle; it is merely the language of people who are being carried by a current they did not create.
For those whose lives are collapsing, the advice becomes absurd. When income disappears, debts accumulate, the home is at risk, sleep is fractured by dread, and the future is a narrowing corridor — what exactly is the “flow” one is supposed to go with? In these moments, the phrase becomes not only useless but cruel. It implies that the experience of being overwhelmed is the result of failing to relax, failing to trust, failing to “let go.” But “letting go” itself is one of the most misleading expressions our language has produced, because it describes an action that no human being can actually perform. Letting go is not something we do — it is something that happens to us.
The problem lies in grammar. Verbs create the illusion of agency. When the sentence says, “I let go,” the structure implies that the subject performs an action. But genuine letting go has nothing to do with action. It occurs only when the capacity for action collapses. A person lets go not through strength, but through exhaustion: when they can no longer hold on, no longer maintain control, no longer sustain the internal tension that previously kept their world together. Letting go is not a deed — it is the cessation of a deed. It is not a choice — it is the moment in which all choices vanish.
The same becomes visible with help of another verb: “I am falling.” Gravity causes the fall, yet grammar makes it my action. The sentence hides the truth. I am not falling — I am being pulled. The force is external, not internal. The verb assigns agency where there is none. And this is exactly how we speak about collapse, breakdown, burnout, and despair. We describe them as failures of character, failures of planning, failures of discipline, failures of will. But collapse is not a failure. It is gravity. It is the moment when the story — the larger architecture of life — exerts more force than an individual can resist.
This distinction is not abstract to me. It defines my present situation so precisely that I sometimes have to laugh at its clarity. My financial life is unravelling. My home is on the brink of being taken. Every avenue that once offered stability has narrowed or disappeared. And none of this is happening because I made one bad choice. It is happening the way a river carves its banks — through accumulated force, through a movement larger than the individual stones it displaces. My life is being stripped of the illusion of control with such relentless precision that the only rational response is surrender. But this surrender is not noble or enlightened. It is simply the point at which no meaningful alternative remains.
The irony is that people who have never experienced this kind of collapse usually interpret it in the simplest possible terms: as a failure of character. From the outside, it appears preventable — the result of bad choices, insufficient discipline, or a lack of responsibility. Collapse is easily moralized when one is not the one collapsing. But collapse is not a moral event, nor is it a deliberate act of surrender. It is something that happens when the conditions of life overpower the individual’s ability to manage them. To say “I let go” in such a moment is misleading, because there is no act of letting go. There is only the fact that holding on is no longer possible. Life pries the fingers open; the structure takes over where agency ends. This is close to what the apostle Paul tried to describe when he distinguished between human righteousness and what he called the righteousness of God — the difference between the life built by effort, control, and strategy, and the movement that begins only after those capacities break down. In that sense, collapse is not a choice but the moment when the story continues without the individual’s permission.
Paul understood this not as a theory but as an experience. Again and again, he describes moments in which his own strength was taken from him — shipwrecks, imprisonments, illness, fear. He interprets these not as punishments but as necessary revelations: the stripping away of human power to reveal the deeper force beneath it. The same pattern appears in every genuine awakening: only those who are brought to the point of helplessness can perceive the architecture that carries them. Only those who can no longer hold on discover what it means to be held.
This is why the Law of Attraction, manifestation culture, and the spiritualised language of “letting go” feel increasingly hollow. They assume the self is the source of movement, that the world arranges itself according to the clarity of one’s intentions. But the deepest movements of life do not respond to intention. They respond to structure — to the same structure that guided Paul across the Mediterranean, that guided ancient civilizations through their cycles of emergence and collapse, and that now guides our world and our individual lives into a new phase we cannot yet name.
My present situation is not a sign that something has gone wrong. It is a sign that something is moving. The ground is not disappearing under my feet because I am failing; it is disappearing because the story is shifting. All the strategies through which I tried to secure my life have exhausted themselves. Every attempt to “fix” or “solve” my circumstances has reached the point of futility. This is not the end of agency — it is the end of the illusion that agency comes first. And strangely, as frightening as this is, it is also clarifying. When my own power fails, I can finally distinguish what is mine from what is not mine. I can feel the difference between what sinks and what carries.
To live in this moment is not to “go with the flow,” as the lifestyle gurus would say. It is to be carried by a current that I did not choose and cannot resist. It is to feel language correct itself — to realise that the verbs I use to describe my life are too small, that they force agency where there is none, that they obscure the very forces they attempt to name. Letting go is not something I can do; it is something being done to me. And in that forced release — in that collapse of my own strength — I can sense the presence of something that has been shaping my path long before I had words for it.
The true meaning of “letting go” is not peace. It is not acceptance. It is not technique.
It is the moment when the story takes over.
The moment when the weight leaves your hands because you no longer have the strength to hold it.
The moment when gravity — or grace — becomes the only remaining force.
The moment when you are finally carried.
And only then, when the movement no longer comes from you, can you see the shape of the river that has been flowing beneath your life all along.
laurentiuspaulus 