Swimming in It Until You Escape

By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News

Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — August 21, 2026, 9:30 p.m. PHT

You Don’t Smell the Water You’re Drowning In

One of the most dangerous things about a stagnant system is that it feels normal while you’re inside it. Not good. Not hopeful. Just normal.

That was Iowa.

When nothing is actively collapsing, you assume progress must be possible. You keep working. You keep waiting. You tell yourself the next raise, the next opening, the next election cycle will change something. You do not realize you are standing still because everything around you is also standing still.

It is only after you leave that the stench becomes obvious.

Stagnation Masquerading as Stability

In Iowa, life appeared stable on the surface. People went to work. Bills were paid—barely. Communities functioned. Nothing looked broken enough to demand urgent attention.

That appearance is what traps people.

Economic stagnation rarely announces itself as crisis. More often, it presents as a plateau that never ends. Wages rise just enough to be called raises. Costs rise faster. Housing deteriorates slowly. Jobs persist without evolving.

Economists describe this as low-mobility equilibrium—a condition where employment exists but advancement does not (Autor & Dorn, 2013). You are not unemployed. You are immobilized.

The Slow Drain of Energy

Living inside a stagnant system drains energy in ways that are hard to name. You are not fighting an emergency. You are enduring a grind.

Every year that looks like the last one chips away at motivation. Ambition becomes dangerous because it has nowhere to land. You learn not to hope too loudly. You lower expectations not out of pessimism, but out of self-preservation.

That psychological adjustment is rational. It is also devastating.

Studies on long-term economic insecurity show that prolonged stagnation reduces risk-taking, future planning, and cognitive bandwidth (Mullainathan & Shafir, 2013). People adapt to scarcity by narrowing their world.

Iowa rewarded that adaptation.

When Work Stops Meaning Anything

I worked. Consistently. Reliably. For years.

It did not matter.

The raises were symbolic. The promotions theoretical. The idea that effort would eventually convert into stability became harder to defend with each passing year. You start to realize that time itself has become the cost.

You are trading years of your life for maintenance, not movement.

That is when people begin to disengage—not dramatically, but quietly. They stop pushing. They stop asking. They stop imagining themselves somewhere else because imagining without means hurts too much.

The Fog You Can’t See Through

The most insidious part of stagnation is that it clouds perception. When everyone around you is stuck, stuck feels universal. You assume the problem is personal, or generational, or just “how things are now.”

This is why leaving is so disruptive.

Distance restores perspective. You suddenly see how constrained your choices were. How narrow the margins had become. How much energy was spent simply staying afloat.

Looking back, Iowa felt like being underwater without realizing you were holding your breath.

Addiction as a Pressure Valve

Stagnant systems need release valves. In Iowa, those valves were alcohol and meth.

This is not a moral judgment. It is an observation. When there is no path forward, numbing becomes one of the few available forms of relief. Substance use offers temporary escape from a reality that offers no exit.

Public health research links economic stagnation directly to increased rates of substance abuse and “deaths of despair,” particularly in rural and semi-rural regions (Case & Deaton, 2020). Iowa fits that pattern precisely.

The system does not cause addiction directly. It creates the conditions where escape—any escape—becomes attractive.

Why You Don’t Realize It Until You’re Gone

People often ask why it took so long for me to leave Iowa. The answer is simple: nothing dramatic forced the issue.

There was no eviction. No firing. No single catastrophe.

Just a slow, cumulative realization—after leaving—that I had been treading water for nearly a decade. That my life had not been moving forward. That I had mistaken endurance for progress.

You cannot diagnose stagnation accurately from inside it. The metrics you would need—comparison, mobility, opportunity—are invisible when you have nowhere to compare yourself to.

The Moment Clarity Arrives

Clarity came after I left. That is always how it happens.

Suddenly, the exhaustion made sense. The depression had context. The sense of being trapped was no longer mysterious. It had a name.

I had not failed.

I had been submerged.

Sociologists call this relative deprivation—the realization of disadvantage that emerges only through comparison (Runciman, 1966). Leaving Iowa provided that comparison.

Why Staying Is So Costly

Stagnant systems exact their toll quietly. They do not break you quickly. They wear you down slowly, stealing years without leaving obvious scars.

That is why people who escape often feel grief alongside relief. You mourn the time you cannot recover. You wonder who you might have been in a system that allowed movement.

That mourning is rational. It is the cost of clarity.

Iowa as a Category, Not an Exception

Iowa is not alone. It represents a category of American places where life is livable but not expandable. Where work exists but futures do not. Where people are told to stay patient while nothing changes.

Understanding that category matters—because people are still being encouraged to wait in places that have already stopped moving.

Waiting does not create exits.

Naming the Truth Without Softening It

Iowa taught me that you can be fully employed, socially polite, and functionally trapped at the same time.

It taught me that stagnation is hardest to detect when it is universal.

And it taught me that escape is not betrayal. It is recognition.

You cannot climb while swimming.

Eventually, you either drown—or you get out of the water.

References

Autor, D. H., & Dorn, D. (2013). The growth of low-skill service jobs and the polarization of the U.S. labor market. American Economic Review, 103(5), 1553–1597.
Case, A., & Deaton, A. (2020). Deaths of despair and the future of capitalism. Princeton University Press.
Mullainathan, S., & Shafir, E. (2013). Scarcity: Why having too little means so much. Times Books.
Runciman, W. G. (1966). Relative deprivation and social justice. University of California Press.