Psychologist: People Freeze Moments to Avoid Confronting Change

Chilean psychologist Pilar Sordo has spent eight years studying how people talk to themselves—and what she's found is unsettling. The words we use, or fail to use, shape not just how we communicate with others but how we see ourselves and the world around us. In a recent conversation, she laid out a thesis about modern life that cuts against everything we're told to pursue: that our hunger for constant happiness is actually preventing us from growing.

Start with language. Sordo observes that people are using fewer words in everyday speech, a shift that sounds minor until you consider what it costs. When we replace nuanced expression with emojis and shorthand, we lose the capacity to articulate what's happening inside us. Spanish psychiatrist José Luis Marín, whom Sordo cited, argues that humans become ill from a lack of words—that the erosion of linguistic depth in our exchanges damages the bonds between people. The problem compounds because impatience now runs in both directions. It's not just that we struggle to say what we feel; it's that the person listening has less patience to hear us out. "We've been reducing our patience," Sordo explained, "because it costs me effort to tell you what's happening to me, and you have less and less patience to listen to me." The result is that genuine conversation—the kind where both people feel truly heard and attended to—becomes nearly impossible. Real dialogue requires vulnerability, a willingness to be changed by what the other person says. Without that, what remains is just people taking turns speaking into the void.

But the deeper issue, Sordo argues, is cultural. We live in a society obsessed with happiness as a constant state, one that treats discomfort as a problem to be solved rather than a signal to be heeded. This is where her analysis becomes sharp. Discomfort, she insists, is the only genuine invitation to growth. It's the friction that tells us something needs to change—our priorities, our relationships, our understanding of ourselves. Yet modern culture is expert at escape. We're trained to flee from anything that doesn't feel good, to optimize our way toward perpetual ease. And so people do something that sounds almost poignant when you think about it: they try to freeze moments. The magical times, the periods when life felt uncomplicated and full—people want to capture those, to hold them still, to prevent them from passing. Sordo understands the impulse. We freeze moments because we know they will end. "When you start to become aware that everything passes," she reflected, "you get more desire to capture certain instants, certain looks." The tragedy is that in trying to preserve what was good, we resist what comes next. We refuse the discomfort that might reshape us.

Underlying all of this is something Sordo calls internal dialogue—the conversation you have with yourself when no one is listening. After eight years of research, her conclusion is stark: how you speak to yourself determines your self-worth and your vision of the world. If you perceive yourself as trustworthy and capable, you project that reliability outward; others sense it and respond to it. If you speak to yourself with contempt or doubt, that becomes your lens for everything. This internal monologue shapes how you process loss, how you understand your life's purpose, how you express emotion. It is, in other words, foundational. Sordo is careful to defend something that sounds simple but is increasingly rare: the human right to change your mind, to make mistakes, to walk away from situations where you don't feel well. These aren't failures. They're part of being alive. But they require moving through discomfort, and that requires words—real ones, spoken aloud, heard by someone patient enough to listen. Without that, we're left trying to freeze time, speaking in emojis, and wondering why we feel so alone.