The biggest threat we face in life isn’t running out of money. Our biggest threat is turning gray.
Gray people are those who’ve surrendered to apathy. They’ve stopped pushing themselves, and slowly their mind, body, and spirit begin to wither.
I first came up with the idea of gray people in the 7th grade, after many hours of examining my geography teacher, Ms. C. By all accounts she was attractive — an early-20s former sorority girl whose youthfulness captivated my classmates.
But to me, something was always off.
The truth of the matter is I thought Ms. C was gray.
What Makes a Person Gray?
In spite of her being at most in the mid-20s, the signs I saw of a gray person were there: sheenless, sagging skin, huge black bags under her eyes, lusterless hair with sprouting gray strands, and a body that didn’t seem strong or vital.
More significant than the outward signs was her energy. She lacked the spark and pizzazz you’d expect from someone her age. Rather than being spry and jovial, Ms. C seemed disassociated and despondent. Even her smiles and laughs felt like they were covering hidden pain.
It turned out that Ms. C had good reason to be gray. We later learned she was going through a painful divorce from a husband who’d cheated early in their marriage. She didn’t even finish out the year.
So while I use her as an example, people like Ms. C aren’t really who I’m talking about. Everyone goes through rough patches. What I mean by gray people is something else entirely.
Henry David Thoreau once said:
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
And that’s closer to it. Gray people are the millions of everyday folks stuck on autopilot — spending decades going through the motions, with their dreams deferred, living a life that’s just barely good enough. The pain of sameness is still easier than the pain of change.
How People Turn Gray
In my 37 years of observing and interacting with people, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is only one thing that makes people turn gray: apathy.
…apathy is a complete lack of ambition that results in not pursuing anything at all and that a person’s greatest risk is that they spend their life not really doing anything at all.
He nailed it. It’s something I saw early in my career as a teacher. I was shocked at how many colleagues went through the motions — showing the outward signs of grayness while constantly complaining about hating teaching, yet never changing anything.
At first I thought it was just teaching. But then I jumped to the corporate world. And while the job titles got fancier and the salaries larger, the grayness remained the same. People grinding through the rat race, chasing titles and money while deferring life for the uncertain future of retirement, when they’d finally be free to live.
In other words, by never trying, or by staying stuck doing the wrong things, apathy becomes its own life force. But instead of propelling us forward, it drags us backward. Apathy is an undertow — and it pulls people into grayness.
The Cost of Going Gray
I know a lot of seemingly successful people who are gray. Things look good on the surface, but peel back the layers and the inner workings of their lives are less than stellar.
Big jobs, big money, big houses, fancy cars. But beneath it all? Unfulfilling careers, passionless (and sexless) marriages, declining health.
That’s the trap of apathy: success becomes an illusion. It’s easy to pretend everything’s fine when it looks fine from the outside. Why risk change when you’ve already got what the world calls “success”? Why endure the pain of growth when life is already “not that bad”?
But in physics, there’s no such thing as standing still. Everything drifts toward disorder unless new energy is put in. In other words, without motion, things decay — as do we.
The cost of being gray is exactly that. With enough time, apathy eats away at your life until you’ve run out of resources to set things right.
Relationships flounder until they’re unsalvageable. Stiff backs give out and never recover. Worst of all, you run out of time to do the things you always said you wanted to do like write that book or move to that other city.
These are the real costs of going gray.
Gray vs. Trying — The Cure Isn’t Success, It’s Motion
So if our lives are either expanding or growing gray, what’s the antidote for avoiding the decay? The solution is actually quite simple — it’s to constantly be in motion.
Two days ago (from the time of writing), I was on the phone with a pal back in the States who was lamenting his ideas for my life. His proposal was that I hang up my world travels, go back home to Orlando, get a job, buy a house, get married, and settle into a more standard lifestyle until he and I both can travel the world together at around the age of 55.
I mention the conversation because it left me wondering: why would someone choose to defer travel for 15-plus years if that’s something they really wanted to do?
...it’s not about accomplishment at all. All it takes is the simple act of trying in life to defeat apathy and it’s insidious evolution. You may or may not ever reach the pinnacle of your goals - but you’ll always rest easier at night because you know you went for it instead of not trying at all
So rather than waiting 15–20 years, why not make our lives such that we can do what’s important to us today? Why not shift our mindsets from making the most money we can, to doing something that actually breathes life into us rather than sapping us of our vitality?
Instead of letting our relationships wither, why not go through the painstaking process of disciplined partner selection — then follow that with relentless effort in constantly building those relationships once we’re in them?
And wouldn’t it be better to stay in motion with our health rather than leaving things to chance? By never letting things slip, we can maintain our vitality in each stage of life instead of letting decay creep in.
Motion brings color. Stagnation brings gray.
The Hidden Danger
The biggest threat we face in life isn’t running out of money. It’s turning gray — because once apathy takes hold, the decay starts, and if you’re not careful, it doesn’t just steal your life. It can twist you into something far worse.
I believe this explains a lot of the evil we’ve been seeing in the world lately. And I’ve written more on this in the follow-on piece: When Apathy Turns to Hate.