Cheers to 2025
January 5, 2025
Every New Year holds promise, as though it is any different from the turn of
5 tips to help you reach for that hatch and see beyond the winless situation
I am sharing 5 tips to help overcome the Catch-22 situation
The expression Catch-22 comes from the name of a satirical novel written in the 1960s by Joseph Heller- arguably the most iconic novel of the 20th century. The book was written from his war experiences in World War 2. Heller was flying over France when shrapnel hit his plane, a B-25 bomber. Up to that time, he had been pretty well fearless, but no longer. He wanted out.
His emotions formed the backdrop of his most famous book titled Catch-22.
Catch-22 is the story of Captain John Yossarian, an imaginary Air Force flier in Europe in the closing months of World War II.
Yossarian is angry because so many people he never met are trying to kill him. He has to fly day after day to drop bombs on the Nazis who are trying to shoot down his plane. His commander keeps raising the number of times his men must fly before they can go home.
Yossarian searches for a way to stop flying. He finds an Air Force rule that says a soldier can be removed from flight duty if he is insane. Yossarian decides any soldier is insane if he is willing to put his life in danger by continuing to make dangerous flights.
He thinks he has found a way to save his life. But he learns there is a “catch” – a tricky condition — to that rule. Anyone who requests to be removed from flight duty because he no longer is willing to put his life in danger cannot claim to be insane. Anyone who is smart enough to show ‘rational fear in the face of clear and present danger’ obviously is not insane and must continue to fly. He therefore must continue to fly.
You’ll find Heller’s expression “catch-22” in the dictionary. It’s defined as “a problematical situation for which the only solution is denied by a circumstance inherent in the problem…” or “an illogical, unreasonable, or senseless situation.”
Life is full of catch-22s and they present a somewhat logical problem that you can’t solve and this becomes worse knowing that you can get caught in a catch-22 situation through no fault of yours.
Sometimes people feel that they are in a catch-22 situation when a marriage goes bad. The choice is stay there and suffer or feel that you are wrong in walking away from it. In business you face it when you know that a fellow employee is cheating on the company. Do you report the situation and face the consequences of being a whistle-blower, or do you violate your conscience by keeping quiet?
Another common conundrum often noticed when you apply for a job but you are told that you can’t get a job without experience, but you know you can’t get experience without a job. So how can you get that experience if you never get hired in the first place?
How about this one where you are locked outside your house and you left the key on the dresser in your bedroom. But you will have to open the front door in order to get the key, but you need the key to do that.
To put these thoughts in one piece see a concise meaning of Catch 22;
A catch-22 is a paradoxical situation with no apparent way out because of how conflicting or contradictory factors or rules keep you trapped in it. In some ways, a catch-22 is like a “chicken-and-egg” situation. You can’t have chicken without eggs. And you can’t have eggs without chickens who grow up to be hens. So which came first? It’s a logical conundrum where the circumstances feed into each other, and you always end up back at square one.
When I think about it; it’s like a situation where a combination of rules is creating a dead loop making it feels like a game where the rules are set up so that if you obey the rules, you lose. No matter what. In the end, you might have to lose in a catch-22 system to win. And so you’re boxed in. It’s a very bad feeling to have. Very demoralizing.
How does this even concern you?
Since these sort of situation occurs pretty often in Life it leaves one unable to make the best of choices, feeling helpless and utterly hopeless. And there is a chance that you probably didn’t even know you are caught up in Catch-22.
The good news is that most Catch-22s have an escape hatch that can be reached with enough persistence and creativity by diving into those unwinnable situations and reaching that hatch.
Let me share these invaluable tips with you;
#Tip 1- Always align your decision making with an overall objective or goal. This would allow you rationalize the situation as being a win if it helps you reach your objective irrespective of the problems you have to face. I would also like to add that you weigh the options against your personal values to determine if it conflicts in any form with the principles you hold dear.
#Tip 2 – Don’t get sucked into the situation. It is easy to see no way out and to let the feeling of hopelessness dominate your thoughts and then translate into feelings or behavior of despair and dejection. Approaching the problem with a positive attitude is one step to solving problems of this nature. Think outside the situation and imagine other creative solution to the problem.
#Tip 3 – Don’t sweat the things you can’t change. Where the situation appears to be almost impossible, don’t kill yourself trying to solve any problem. Many times, the situation either gets taken over by a more pressing situation or unlocks itself somehow without any effort from you.
#Tip 4 – Think differently. Sometimes we mentally want the conundrum to exist so we can concede to defeat when we are faced with a really tough situation. But thinking things through using another perspective can create another approach to solving the problem. A change of perspective may just be all you need.
#Tip 5 – Just do you. Do not make the problem you are faced with change the person that you are.
I hope you enjoyed this piece.
Related Posts
The Constructive Generalist: How Akin Akingbogun is Engineering Africa’s Future and Writing Its Stories
May 8, 2026
In an era that increasingly demands hyper-specialization, Akin Akingbogun stands out as a refreshing anomaly. He is a man who refuses to be confined to a single box.
I Parked My Car Five Minutes Away: So the Kids Wouldn’t See It.
May 5, 2026
There is a particular kind of silence that falls on a man when the phone stops ringing, the proposals go unanswered, and the diary that once groaned under the weight of appointments sits quietly — almost mockingly — open. If you have ever been there, you know it.
Wired for Me
May 5, 2026
Let me tell you something uncomfortable: the most generous person you know — the one who volunteers every weekend, donates quietly, never asks for anything in return — is probably getting something out of it. Not money. Maybe not even recognition. But something.
When the Burnt Toast Saves Your Life
May 1, 2026
Adaeze had been awake since 4 a.m.
Not because she was anxious — though she was — but because this trip felt different. After eighteen months of follow-ups, phone calls, and PowerPoint presentations polished to a mirror shine, the deal was finally ready to close. An investor meeting in Abuja. A partnership that would change the trajectory of her small but gutsy consulting firm. She had triple-checked her flight, her documents, her outfit. She had prayed. She was ready.
The Loudest Person in Every Room Is Often the Most Afraid
April 28, 2026
When he told his father, Dare’s first response was a sigh. Then: “I told you to practice more. I told you months ago. You don’t listen. You never listen.”
There was no “I’m sorry, son.” No pause to let the boy simply feel the loss of the thing he wanted. Just a swift, seamless pivot to what Temi had done wrong — and, by extension, how Temi’s failure was evidence of Temi’s failure to take his father’s wisdom seriously.
You Only Heard One Side. That’s the Problem
April 28, 2026
I want to tell you something that took me embarrassingly long to learn. Not because the idea is complicated — it is not. But because it cuts against something deeply wired in us, something we are rarely honest enough to admit.
Everything You Were Too Embarrassed to Google About Mid-Life Crisis
April 28, 2026
You are somewhere between forty and fifty-five. You looked in the mirror recently and had a thought you immediately dismissed. Maybe you googled something at 2am that you would never say out loud. Maybe you bought something expensive and impractical and told everyone it was an investment. Or maybe you just feel — quietly, persistently — like the life you built was supposed to feel better than this by now.
Chekhov’s Gun
April 28, 2026
Anton Chekhov was a Russian physician and playwright — a man trained in the discipline of diagnosis before he became one of the most precise storytellers in the history of world literature. That combination of sensibilities matters, because the principle he articulated in the late nineteenth century was not merely a rule of dramatic craft. It was an observation about the nature of significance itself. About what it means for something to be present. About the relationship between introduction and consequence.
Fear Is a Prison with Invisible Walls
April 28, 2026
There is a prison that has no concrete walls, no iron bars, no guards posted at the gate. Nobody built it for you. Nobody sentenced you to it. And yet, for many people, it is the place they spend the better part of their lives — circling its perimeter, brushing their fingers against its invisible boundaries, and quietly retreating each time they feel the edge of something that might require more of them than they believe they can give.
The Closed Fist
April 25, 2026
Picture a hand holding sand. The tighter the grip, the faster the grains escape between the fingers. Ease the grip — open the palm, allow the hand to become a vessel rather than a vice — and the sand stays. This is one of the oldest paradoxes of leadership, and one of the least learned: that control, pursued too aggressively, produces the very loss of control it was designed to prevent.
The Growth Trap
April 25, 2026
There is a version of ambition that builds. And there is a version of ambition that consumes. From a distance — and especially from inside it — they look almost identical. Both are energetic. Both are forward-moving. Both speak the language of vision and possibility. The difference only becomes visible later, usually at the point of fracture, when what was built begins to come apart under the weight of what was promised.
The Frontline Disconnect
April 25, 2026
There is a particular kind of organisational absurdity that most people who have ever worked in a company will recognise immediately. It is the policy that was clearly designed by someone who has never had to implement it. The restructuring that looked elegant on a slide deck and chaotic on the ground. The customer-facing process that was overhauled by a committee that has not spoken to a customer in years. The directive that arrives from above, fully formed and non-negotiable, that causes the people closest to the work to exchange a look — the kind of look that says, without words: they have no idea what we actually do here.
Burnout Is a Leadership Failure
April 23, 2026
We have built an entire mythology around exhaustion. In boardrooms and business culture — perhaps nowhere more so than in the high-pressure, always-on professional culture many of us inhabit — busyness has become a currency. To be tired is to be serious. To be overwhelmed is to be important. To be burning out, quietly, is somehow proof that you are fully committed.
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Discover more from Akin Akingbogun
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
3 thoughts on “Let’s talk Catch 22”
This is educative and sent a clearer signal about the realities of life.
Thanks omo Akin, I thoroughly enjoyed this. Always something to learn from your posts
Great Tips!!! My favourite is APPROACH PROBLEM WITH A POSITIVE ATTITUDE!!! Glad I came here today!!!! Thank you Duke!!!!!