Running From or Toward? A Better Test for Decisions

Robert Taibbi’s September 2026 article asks whether a major decision means running from something or running toward something. It is the sort of question that fits neatly in a journal, on a coaching worksheet or over a mug bearing the words DO THE SCARY THING.

It also starts wobbling as soon as an actual life gets involved.

Leaving a punishing job can move you away from chronic stress and toward work with saner expectations. Ending a relationship can provide escape while opening the possibility of safety or independence. Taking an exciting new job can look future-facing while conveniently postponing a difficult conversation with your current manager.

One action can contain approach, avoidance, hope, fear and a pressing need to pay rent. Human motivation has never respected a two-column worksheet.

The Strongest Case for Asking the Question

Taibbi, a licensed clinical social worker, offers a more nuanced version of the prompt than its motivational-poster form. In his account of major life decisions, running away can represent growth and assertiveness when someone leaves a toxic workplace or an emotionally or physically abusive relationship. It can also become a recurring response that leaves underlying problems untouched.

Running toward something carries its own split personality. A new role or relationship may reflect a considered goal. It may also be the first shiny exit available, chosen before the old situation has been understood.

Taibbi eventually advises readers to resist treating the choice as either-or. Unless a situation is untenable, he suggests identifying one or two problems that would need to improve, describing an ideal outcome and examining what the experience can teach you.

That makes “from or toward?” useful as an opening question. It prompts you to name the pressure behind a decision and the destination you hope to reach. Trouble arrives when the answer becomes a character judgment: toward means brave and ambitious; away means cowardly and avoidant. Taibbi’s own examples do not support that moral sorting. Leaving danger is movement away. Chasing novelty can be avoidance wearing a nice blazer.

Psychology Offers a Dimension, Not a Personality Quiz

A useful checkpoint in the scholarly history came in June 2001, when Andrew Elliot and Martin Covington published an article introducing a special issue of Educational Psychology Review. Its abstract describes approach and avoidance as a fundamental distinction in the study of behavior. It also says researchers had used other designations for the same or similar conceptual ground.

The accessible abstract does not establish where the idea first originated, and it gives no basis for dating the framework to 2001. It does show that approach and avoidance belonged to an established research conversation by then, with scholars comparing concepts and applications rather than offering a one-question test for quitting your job.

That history puts the popular prompt in its proper-sized box. The psychological distinction can help describe what pulls or pushes behavior. A major decision may involve several motives at once, some competing and some reinforcing one another. The label alone cannot tell you whether the decision is wise, safe or workable.

Context supplies what the slogan removes. Someone who depends on a job for income or benefits faces a different choice set from someone with savings and another offer. A person who fears retaliation from a partner has different options from someone deciding whether an ordinary conflict can be repaired. Mindset does not pay a deposit or produce a safety plan. Any decision test that ignores power and resources risks grading people on choices they do not have.

Procrastination Gives Us a Useful Comparison

The closest practical comparison may be procrastination, although the scale differs. Delaying an email and leaving a marriage are not interchangeable events. They can, however, share a sequence: distress appears, an available action reduces it, and the relief makes that action more appealing next time.

Quartz’s summary of work by psychologists Fuschia Sirois and Tim Pychyl describes procrastination as short-term mood repair. A person avoids a task that produces unpleasant feelings, gains immediate relief and sacrifices progress toward a longer-term goal. The account also notes that anxiety-driven avoidance can concentrate on high-stakes tasks precisely because the person cares about the outcome.

That mechanism sharpens the original decision question. Consider two resignations. In one, a worker has identified harmful conditions, assessed alternatives and chosen a role that meets defined needs. In the other, a worker quits after a dreadful meeting because resignation instantly stops the anxiety of addressing a recurring problem. Both people are running away. Both may also be approaching something. The revealing clue is what the choice does to discomfort today and whether any unresolved problem travels with them tomorrow.

The comparison has firm limits. The Quartz article is a secondary account of the researchers’ work, and procrastination research cannot establish whether a job change or breakup will succeed. Immediate relief also accompanies sound decisions. Leaving an abusive situation may reduce fear because the source of danger has changed, not because someone has dodged healthy discomfort.

Relief therefore works as a clue, not a guilty verdict. Its value comes from prompting another round of questions before a reversible choice becomes an expensive one.

A Decision Test that Leaves Room for Reality

No five-question checklist can certify a life decision, despite the self-help industry’s heroic confidence in stationery. This one can at least expose information hidden by the running metaphor.

1. Is the situation untenable or unsafe?
Taibbi explicitly places abusive relationships and toxic work environments among situations where escape can be the purpose. A demand to “face the problem” can become another instruction to endure harm. Safety changes the order of operations.

2. What does each option do to your discomfort in the next hour?
Write down the immediate emotional payoff of staying, leaving, accepting, declining or delaying. Perhaps leaving brings relief. Perhaps staying postpones the fear of uncertainty. Avoidance can sit inside either option.

3. What problem remains after the relief wears off?
A different employer may remove a destructive manager while leaving a pattern of avoiding difficult conversations untouched. Alternatively, the manager may be the central problem, and departure may solve it. Look for repeated behavior across situations without assuming repetition proves personal failure.

4. Can you name the destination in observable terms?
“Something better” is fog with a LinkedIn account. Defined conditions such as predictable hours, freedom from intimidation or clearer responsibilities make it easier to compare an opportunity with the goal it is supposed to serve.

5. Is there a safe, reversible step available?
Taibbi suggests identifying one or two changes that would improve a situation when it is not untenable. That might mean gathering information, asking a focused question or testing whether a boundary produces change. A small experiment will not fix abuse, coercion or entrenched power imbalances. In ordinary uncertainty, it can reveal more than another evening spent prosecuting yourself in your own head.

The answers may still conflict. A choice can bring immediate relief, serve a long-term goal and carry serious financial risk. Another can preserve stability while shrinking the person’s life around an avoided conversation. Psychology supplies vocabulary for those forces; it does not perform the decision on your behalf.

Ask what you are escaping, what you are approaching and what your discomfort does in the next hour. Three answers beat one slogan.