Are You Stuck In A Random Loop?

By notoriouslysinglegirl, September 11, 2026

This morning I was text chatting with a friend and she started talking about a dubious character in her story. She named him “Prison Mike.” Recently “Prison Mike” had done some work for my friend’s mother and confessed to her that he was “madly in love” her daughter.

“Why did you name him Prison Mike?” I asked.

“He kept breaking a court order regarding his custody battle with his ex wife. Only he kept trying to prove his ex wife was breaking the custody order. He did this every Friday and kept landing himself in prison.”

Sounds like he’s in a loop

It’s kind of random because if “Prison Mike” knows he’s going to “prison” then why keep doing the same thing over and over again?

Palm Springs

In the movie “Palm Springs” the characters keep looping through the same scenario over and over again landing them back to November 9. Until the female protagonist gets fed up with the bullshit and starts studying quantum physics trying to figure out how to stop the loop so that she can exit.

She realizes “the loop” is tied to the cave. She researches physics and realizes she can exploit the loop’s mechanics and bust out of it.

In the movie, the female protagonist is stuck in an emotional loop because she doesn’t know how to live fully outside of the loop.

• She’s stuck in shame. She believes she’s done something unforgivable and can’t live outside of herself. And can’t imagine becoming a different version of herself.
• She avoids vulnerability. It’s easier to keep recreating the same patterns than avoid what she did and to whom she wants to become.
• Initially she wants escape without transformation. She wants out of the loop but can she really move forward ?
• The male protagonist Nyles has been in the loop so long that he’s emotionally numb. Nothing has consequences anymore so he doesn’t have to make real choices.
• Their relationship disrupts the numbness. They begin caring about each other which makes the possibility of loosing each other unbearable.
• Sarah ultimately chooses uncertainty against repetition.

Both characters decide to break the loop because they don’t know what the unknown future will bring but they chose it anyway.

Maybe that’s why “Prison Mike” kept getting stuck in his crazy loop that landed him in prison. He was use to the drama. The loop probably brought him some type of comfort on what to expect even it meant chaos.

Chaos brings comfort

To some, chaos brings comfort. It’s normal. It feels good even though it’s not necessarily healthy or safe.

I recently stepped out of a loop with a certain someone who kept doing the same thing. I always expected him to change. Expected him to make more room for me in his world. However, the story always ended the same way.

Texting me he’s always busy. Calling me on the phone only when he’s driving. Taking days to even weeks to return a text message. And when he would return the text it was always at 6:45 am for some strange reason. Sometimes it included a random Chevy Chase meme.

So before I decided to exit this last and final loop with this guy, I asked him why he didn’t answer my text messages with in a day or two.

His response: “ I don’t have the emotional capacity to deal with your text messages at the moment so I shelve them to be read at a later time.”

Well, I’m not a box of cereal, so I told this guy I would no longer be responding to any text messages because this relationship was no longer serving me. It was boring and too predictable. So, I decided to exit the loop.

Although he once told me he traveled to the future and saw what I was to become. At that time, I didn’t want to know what he saw.

I wanted the future to be a surprise and unfold naturally.

Before I exited the loop, I asked him “If you’ve been to the future and you know what’s going to happen, then why are you still running on the hamster wheel creating the same loop?”

There was no response.

And then I bid him Adieu.