Are you in a rut? Do you wake up in the morning and discover that this is as good as it gets and if this is as good as it gets there isn’t half as much as good as you’d imagined you’d get. You want more, you don’t know what that more constitutes but you want it, because you believe it has to be better than this.

After all, there is one life to live so grab it with both hands and go for broke.

It is fashionable these days to have sociological pundits whine about walking away from lousy jobs, lousy deals, lousy marriages, lousy whatever and doing our own thing. Get out, they exhort, get up, they say, be somebody, make it count, tumble out of the trenches and fight the good fight.

There is a heady thrill to the advocacy of such destructiveness and many of us are willing converts.

What the philosophers don’t tell you is that not only is the grass on the other side not half as green as they’d like you to believe, it is full of weeds and, often enough, a one way path to disaster.

What they also conveniently fail to tell those on whose low self esteem they feed is how to get back to the status quo once you have set alight all your bridges and discovered that what you thought you wanted isn’t!!

Would you believe that book shops now have special sections dedicated to getting out of the rut and all they seem to be doing is making their authors rich enough to swim in their own blue water channels.

Most of these books tell you these days to be true to yourself and, by being so, become someone.

Now, this is all very well and sounds terrific but imagine if you will, the 84 percent of humanity that lives a life of quiet despair suddenly lemming off to seek some sort of lyrical satisfaction after throwing up their present positions.

What absolute nonsense. What these writers don’t tell you is that life owes you nothing and that the rut they want you to escape from has a certain security and comfort about it. Never underestimate that aspect.

The world is full of people who chucked up what they had and took a walk only to find, that weeks down the road, they would have given anything to turn the clock back and return to that humdrum, dreary, predictable life they were leading. At  work, in the office, on the home front, in the greyness of their existence. You know why. Because we are creatures of habit, because we seek the elusive and because we have no idea of what constitutes happiness or contentment or that lovely label, job satisfaction.

We do not deal in absolutes and haven’t yet reached that level of development where emotions and feelings can be measured.

How long are we going to be happier in the next job, the next relationship, how much of this so called satisfaction is going to cascade upon us and does there really exist a yellow brick road to Oz?

Sure, life can be a grind. There are days you hate what you do and what you are.

You feel let down, you are genuinely disappointed with your lot in life and there is that persistent little voice telling you not to miss the bus, there may not be one for a good long time to come, to get out before it is too late.

But, at least you have something. Don’t knock it. And before you put it to risk and  lose even that little bit  think long and hard.

The job, the relationships, worn a little by time and familiarity of routine but still intrinsically solid. Hold onto them because what you could be doing is mistaking the myth for substance.

The way I see it there is less patience in our world and even less tolerance. We are easily disappointed and, therefore, easily swayed by lures, like fish...

... no wonder we often end up with a hook in our throats.