Comment by achou | Hacker News Reader

Comment by achou | Hacker News Reader

This is a useful analysis of what "being an adult" means. I've noticed that the moment when I feel like avoiding social discomfort or potential conflict as the precise moment when I have a choice: either be an adult and understand what I want and communicate it, or avoid it and dislike myself and project those feelings onto others.

Invariably when I choose to behave like an adult I feel empowered and ultimately at peace with myself and others in the end. If I choose avoidance, resentment builds, and further avoidance follows.

The idea that avoidance behaviors can be selfish or agreeable cuts through much self-deception. This can be helpful when I tell myself "I'm just being nice" because it adds the proviso: "yeah, but I'm not being an adult." Which I could see being a really helpful inner monologue in those situations.

This is also intimately connected to the concept of "taking responsibility", which begins with not avoiding something which "someone else" might deal with so you don't have to.

Everything you said is true, but just to add a little nuance, I think it's possible that avoidance can still be the correct choice when confrontation is unhelpful. Confrontation for the sake of confrontation is another form of indulging yourself to avoid certain emotions, like feeling weak or disempowered. Managing that in the height of emotion takes some real meta-cognition.

Keep in mind that "avoidance" in this context refers to not confronting one's own feelings and intuition. After grappling with that feeling explicitly, avoiding overt conflict can certainly be an adult decision to make.

Our feelings are vast and bottomless. It is impossible to confront all of them, and for the same reason its undesirable. Avoiding your feelings can be useful too.

Maybe it’s just personal experience, but I vehemently and totally disagree with this.

There has never been a time in my life where I was better off because I ignored my feelings. Literally never.

There are times that we should avoid acting on some of our feelings. But to do that well, and without further self-harm, requires that you know what they are, and what those feelings are influencing you to do.

It is absolutely not impossible to confront all of your feelings. Difficult, yes. Exhausting, yes. Impossible? Absolutely not. And I really think it’s doing yourself a disservice to ever believe that you have depths that you yourself are incapable of facing.

I think maybe the point of disagreement may be due to "ignoring" vs. "succumbing" to one's feelings.

I think it's almost always useful to acknowledge emotions, but it doesn't mean you have to reactively give in to them. It's sometimes better to view them as a car on a railroad track that will soon be out of sight than to hop on that car and see where it takes you.

I can think of a time when I was better off because I ignored my feelings.

I've struggled with anxiety a lot throughout my life, especially in the lead up to something like a public speaking engagement. For a time, I always tried to reason through it. Why was I feeling anxious? Was it feelings of inadequacy? Perfectionism? Not wanting to disappoint my peers? Any attempt to interrogate those feelings and confront them usually had the opposite effect: I'd feel even more anxious.

On one particular occasion I was scheduled to present to a client at a new job, and the feelings of anxiety started bubbling again. But, this time, I’d had enough. None of my past strategies had ever worked, so I decided I wasn't going to do them. I thought, if my brain is going to flood my body with stress hormones, then it can go right ahead. If I was anxious, then I'd deliver the presentation anxious. I sat in the lobby and allowed the feelings to envelope me. To my surprise, the anxiety began to lift.

What I eventually realized is that my anxiety in those situations was caused by a fight or flight response. My body was trying to spur me to action, and by pausing to think about those anxious feelings — where they were coming from, how I might address them, etc. — I wasn’t doing anything to address the response itself. When I instead choose to ignore the feeling and do the action regardless, it sends a signal to my brain: I’ve chosen to fight. The stress response is no longer necessary, and the feeling goes away.

I don't think the parent meant ignore in the same sense you're taking it.

You still engaged with what you felt. You named what you were feeling, and decided to act on it. In the past, you acted in accord with it; in the instance you cite, you acted in defiance of it, and then on further after-the-fact examination identified what was going on inside of you and determined that acting in defiance of it served you better.

I believe the parent was not using 'ignore' in the sense of "don't act in defiance to how your emotions would incline you to behave", but in the sense of, literally, to pay no attention to it. If you were not paying attention to how you felt, you would still have avoided; your emotions ensured that was the 'easy' and 'natural' choice. It was only by recognizing the feeling, and how your past responses to it didn't serve you, that you were able to decide to act differently.

> When I instead choose to ignore the feeling and do the action regardless, it sends a signal to my brain: I’ve chosen to fight.

I think many psychologists would say you did the opposite of ignoring the feeling of anxiety.

> I thought, if my brain is going to flood my body with stress hormones, then it can go right ahead. If I was anxious, then I'd deliver the presentation anxious.

This is exactly what processing and acknowledging a feeling is like.

Avoiding it can take the form of distracting yourself—literally trying not to think about—but it can just as often take the form of arguing with it or "confronting". It's less about avoiding the existence of the feeling and more about avoiding experiencing the feeling. Not avoiding it means acknowledging it, letting it flow through you, and then letting it pass.

To be more precise, the response is actually - freeze, and then fight or flight.

    I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
    And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
    Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

I don't think the person you're responding to is suggesting a deep meditation on the unlimited ramifications of one's feelings at every moment. They are talking about avoidance coping, which is pretty well-documented (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avoidance_coping). The admonition is to avoid that, more often than not. It's not the same as excessive navel gazing.

Confronting does not mean naming and categorizing everything. It is to introspect, and sometimes the only takeaway is "here be dragons", and flagging that particular terra incognita for exploration later.

In the short-term avoiding overwhelming feelings can sometimes be necessary to deal with something else that is more urgent, or to simply not go insane. In the long run you can't avoid them without some bad consequences.

And while our feelings may be vast and bottomless, they are usually finite in type. Almost any unpleasant feeling can be traced back to our fear for survival.

There's a difference between being "assertive" and "aggressive". I've had this discussion in the past on HN and it seems people want to treat both as the same, not saying that you are. Aggression is rarely, if ever, useful, both directed at someone or coming from someone.

Assertive avoidance is often the correct response to aggression (cf. Miyagi-Do).

Very true and well said.

Ask yourself these two questions:

1. What do I hope to gain from this interaction?

2. Given #1, what course of action is most likely to achieve your desired result?

Confrontation is almost never the best answer for #2.

Taken too far, the "what do I hope to gain" thing can be kind of life-shrinking (because it's not always clear what you'll gain from interactions up front, and that lack of clarity tracks with the quality of what you'll gain too, in some situations) BUT it's definitely a higher-order consideration that way too few people employ.

Yeah. IMO reducing everything to cost-benefit analysis feels like one of those "Silicon Valley" endeavours the feature article talks about - sounds attractive, but ultimately we ought to grow out of the good/bad one-dimensional thinking

A good mnemonic I was told once was HTTP:

Helpful? True? right Time? right Place?

If any of those is a No, then confrontation will likely not be helpful.

That's the most HN comment I have read in a while.

This is right inline with the Buddhist suggestion of not speaking unless the five conditions below are met.

"It is spoken at the right time. It is spoken in truth. It is spoken affectionately. It is spoken beneficially. It is spoken with a mind of good-will"

Yeah, this was directly adapted from that.

> This can be helpful when I tell myself "I'm just being nice" because it adds the proviso: "yeah, but I'm not being an adult."

There is a distinction between being 'nice' and kind. e.g., avoiding giving feedback because it's hard to do vs actually giving constructive feedback

> be an adult and understand what I want and communicate it ...

This is as much a test of whether you are surrounded by adults.

In many situations, asserting yourself can lead to disaster socially. In these cases avoidance is in fact the adult thing.

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