12 Of The Best Books About Feeling Stuck In Life

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“The only way to learn is to live.”

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There are times in life when it feels like you’re standing still while everyone else is moving forward. Perhaps you’re stuck in a job you don’t enjoy, unsure about a relationship, struggling to find direction, or simply wondering what you’re meant to do next. Sometimes, you don’t even know precisely what’s wrong – you just know that something needs to change. That’s where books can help. The best books about feeling stuck in life don’t necessarily present easy answers about what to do. Rather, they can help you recognise those feelings, see your situation from a different lens, and remind you that feeling lost doesn’t mean you’ll be lost forever. From novels about characters searching for meaning to thoughtful nonfiction about change, purpose, and personal growth, these books explore what it means to feel trapped – and what it takes to finally move forward. 

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The Midnight Library – Matt Haig

First up on our list of books about feeling stuck in life is Matt Haig’s globally acclaimed bestseller, The Midnight Library. When Nora Seed finds herself in the Midnight Library, she has a chance to make things right. Up until now, her life has been full of misery and regret. She feels like she’s let everyone down, including herself. But things are about to change. 

The books in the Midnight Library enable Nora to live as if she had done things differently. With the help of an old friend, she can now undo every one of her regrets as she looks to work out her perfect life. But things aren’t always what she imagined they’d be, and soon her choices place the library and herself in extreme danger. Before time runs out, she must answer the ultimate question: what is the best way to live?

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Designing Your Life – Bill Burnett And Dave Evans

Whether we’re 20, 40, 60 or older, many of us are still looking for an answer to that perennial question, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ In Designing Your Life, Silicon Valley design innovators Bill Burnett and Dave Evans use their expertise to help you work out what you want – and how to get it. 

Using real-life stories and proven techniques like reframing, prototyping, and mind-mapping, you will learn how to build your way forward, step-by-step, to a life that’s better by a design of your own making. 

Stoner – John Williams

William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life. And yet, as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude. 

John Williams’ luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world. 

Siddhartha – Hermann Hesse

Hermann Hesse’s classic novel has delighted, inspired, and influenced generations of readers, writers, and thinkers. In this story, a wealthy Indian Brahmin casts off a life of privilege to seek spiritual fulfilment. Hesse synthesises disparate philosophies – Eastern religions, Jungian archetypes, Western individualism – into a unique vision of life as expressed through one man’s true search for meaning. 

The Defining Decade – Meg Jay

In this enlightening book, Dr Meg Jay reveals how many twentysomethings have been caught in a swirl of hype and misinformation that has trivialised what are actually the most defining years of adulthood. Drawing on more than a decade’s worth of work with hundreds of twentysomething clients and students, Dr Jay weaves the science of the twentysomething years with compelling, behind-closed-doors stories from twentysomethings themselves.

She shares what psychologists, sociologists, neurologists, reproductive specialists, human resource executives, and economists know about the unique power of our twenties, and how they change our lives. The result is a provocative and poignant read that shows us why our twenties do matter, perfect if you’re feeling a little lost in that stage of life. 

Four Thousand Weeks – Oliver Burkeman

Nobody needs reminding there isn’t enough time. The sense of anxiety and hurry has grown more and more intense in recent times, but still the most meaningful parts of life seem to lie just beyond the horizon. Still, we rarely make the connection between our daily struggles with time and the ultimate time management problem: the challenge of how best to use our four thousand weeks, the equivalent of living for eighty years. 

Drawing on insights of both ancient and contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual teachers, Oliver Burkeman delivers an entertaining, humorous, practical, and ultimately profound guide to time and time management. Four Thousand Weeks teaches us how to embrace finitude and how to change the unhelpful ways we’ve come to think about time. 

The Remains Of The Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

In the summer of 1956, Stevens, a long-serving butler at Darlington Hall, decides to take a motoring trip through the West Country. The six-day excursion becomes a journey into the past of Stevens and England, a past that takes in fascism, two world wars, and an unrealised love between the butler and his housekeeper. Through Stevens, we are given one of the best books about feeling stuck in life through this unforgettable narrator and his experience of trading personal happiness for blind obedience and emotional suppression. 

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My Year Of Rest And Relaxation – Ottessa Moshfegh

Our narrator should be happy, shouldn’t she? She’s young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, paid for by her inheritance. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn’t just the loss of her parents or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva. It’s the year 2000 in a city brimming with wealth and opportunity; what could possibly be so terribly wrong? 

My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question. Through the story of a year spent under a truly mad combination of drugs designed to heal our heroine from her alienation from this world, Ottessa Moshfegh shows us how reasonable, even necessary, alienation can be. 

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The Happiness Trap – Russ Harris

Are you caught in a happiness trap? Russ Harris explains that the way most of us go about trying to find happiness ends up making us miserable, driving the epidemic of stress, anxiety, and depression. This empowering book about being stuck in life presents the insights and techniques of ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy), a revolutionary new psychotherapy based on cutting-edge research in behavioural psychology.

By clarifying your values and developing mindfulness, ACT helps you escape the happiness trap and rediscover true satisfaction in life. 

Wild – Cheryl Strayed

At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother’s death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life. With no experience or training, driven only by blind will, she would hike more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State – and she would do it alone. 

Told with suspense and style, sparkling with warmth and humour, Wild is one of the best books about feeling stuck in life and about forging ahead against all odds through one young woman’s journey that maddened, strengthened, and ultimately healed her. 

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Convenience Store Woman – Sayaka Murata

Keiko has never fit in, neither in her family nor in school, but when she is eighteen, she begins working at the Hiiromachi branch of “Smile Mart,” and she finds peace and purpose in her life. In the store, unlike anywhere else, she understands the rules of social interaction. Keiko is very happy, but the people closest to her increasingly pressure her to find a husband and to start a proper career, prompting her to take desperate action…

A brilliant depiction of a world hidden from view, Convenience Store Woman is an ironic and sharp-eyed look at contemporary work culture and the pressures we all feel to conform, as well as a charming and completely fresh portrait of an unforgettable heroine. 

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Man’s Search For Meaning – Viktor E. Frankl

Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl’s memoir has riveted generations of readers with its descriptions of life in Nazi death camps and its lessons for spiritual survival. Based on his own experience and the stories of his patients, Frankl argues that we cannot avoid suffering, but we can choose how to cope with it, find meaning in it, and move forward with renewed purpose. 

At the heart of his theory, known as logotherapy, is a conviction that the primary human drive is not pleasure but the pursuit of what we find meaningful. Man’s Search for Meaning has become one of the most influential books in America; it continues to inspire countless readers to find significance in the very act of living.