When Your Past Tries to Decide Your Future 

Could you walk away from a career you spent 18 years building?

When I moved to Canada, I left behind more than a country. I left behind over 18 years in academia, my professorship, the professional identity I had built, and a life whose rules I already knew. Starting again sounds exciting when we tell the story afterward, but living through it feels very different.

One thought kept returning to me: “I have invested so many years in this. How can I possibly start on a different path?” Years of education, research, publications, teaching, experience, and professional recognition were behind me. Walking toward something new could easily feel as though I were walking away from all of that. But was I?

Behavioral science gives us an interesting way to understand this feeling: the sunk cost fallacy. A sunk cost is something we have already invested and cannot recover, such as money, time, effort, energy, or emotion. The fallacy occurs when those past investments begin influencing decisions that should really be based on what makes sense now and in the future.

We stay in a job because we have already spent ten years building that career. We continue a project because we have already invested too much money in it. We remain committed to a decision because changing direction would make our previous effort feel wasted. The reasoning sounds perfectly logical: “I've come this far.” “I've invested too much to stop now.” “All those years would have been for nothing.”

But the years have already been spent. Continuing does not bring them back. The more useful question is: If I were making this decision today, knowing what I know now, what would I choose?

This was something I gradually came to understand after moving to Canada. I wasn't actually starting from zero. My title might have changed, my environment had changed, and the professional system around me had certainly changed. But I hadn't lost the person those 18 years had created.

I still carried the knowledge, the research experience, the methodological skills, the years of teaching, the mistakes, the lessons, and the confidence gained from solving difficult problems. Most importantly, I carried with me a way of thinking that had taken years to develop. Changing direction did not erase my previous path. It simply changed where that path could take me.

Your past can be an investment in your future without becoming a contract with it.

We often confuse consistency with success. If we have spent years becoming one version of ourselves, changing direction can feel like admitting that the previous version was somehow wrong. But perhaps growth sometimes requires exactly the opposite. It is not about rejecting the person we were. It is about allowing everything that person learned to become part of something new.

This is one reason cognitive biases fascinate me. When we hear the word “bias,” we often imagine an obvious error in judgment. But biases rarely announce themselves that way. They often sound perfectly reasonable: “Don't waste everything you've invested.” “You've already come this far.” “It's too late to change.”

The mind is remarkably good at turning psychological tendencies into convincing stories. And because those stories are produced by our own minds, we rarely experience them as distortions. We experience them as reality.

Perhaps the goal, then, is not to eliminate every cognitive bias. That would be unrealistic. The goal is to recognize the moments when our minds may be quietly making the decision before we even realize there is a decision to make. Sometimes one question is enough to create that distance: Am I choosing this because it is still right for my future, or because I have already invested too much in my past?

That question reaches far beyond careers. It can apply to projects, businesses, relationships, education, financial decisions, and countless everyday choices. Sometimes the answer will be to continue. But sometimes it may give us permission to choose differently.

My own experience of rebuilding a professional life in Canada became one of the reasons I grew increasingly interested in the invisible psychological processes behind our decisions. That curiosity eventually found its way into Core Mind: The Psychology of Mind Illusions, where I explore how cognitive biases, mental shortcuts, and other psychological mechanisms quietly shape what we perceive, believe, and choose.

Because understanding the mind is not simply about learning how we think. Sometimes it helps us understand why we stay, why we leave, and when it might finally be time to choose again.

          📖 Core Mind is available on Amazon. GET YOUR COPY