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It's worse than you think

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Any life philosophy that helps one get through the day in a positive way is good. I do have a nit to pick with part of this one. It leans on the idea that "everyone is winging it all the time" and links to a Guardian opinion(?) piece where they pull quote from people who can't read a clock or tie their shoes. I think that's both not the right level of assumed incompetence that the author wanted to convey, but also reinforcement of a comforting excuse for failing to flourish. There is such a thing as expertise, and it (almost) always takes a lot of work to achieve it. So it both denigrates those who have worked hard to be competent in their field and gives aspirationals an out that potentially stunts their growth.

I agree that the mantra applies in some circumstances, like casual social interaction (although I'm sure there are subject matter experts in that realm too who could out-chat any of us), but applying it to your career and goals seems self-defeating to me.

But again, we are all different and different motivations work on each of us. Just my unsolicited opinion.

Your final sentence really resonates. I think for some people, a note of pessimism is such a relief and freeing (e.g., "Oh thank goodness, I'd never have been able to meet that deadline anyway. Now let me get started on it"), but for others, that same note of pessimism causes inaction ("Why would I bother trying if it's impossible?! Not even worth getting started")

I agree that expertise is a thing, but its my belief that often this expertise is acquired by "winging it" or doing something without really having a clear path of how to do said thing. This is what I got from that line, at least

Of course there is something like expertise. But the really accomplished experts are winging it most of us all, because they are at the frontiers of human knowledge, trying things that no one has tried before, stepping where no one has stepped before. So what else can they do than wing it.

And regarding the possibility that someone becomes an accomplished expert in a field and then never tries anything new? It must be exceedingly rare. If you don't have the temperament to always try new things, you rarely become a true expert. And a true expert that can't try new things rapidly becomes bored to death.

And there's no innovation without that ability to push boundaries, feel on the edge, and occasionally screw things up. Who dares, wins. All pioneers are 'imposters', out of time and place, or alone behind enemy lines, until they look back one day and see others following and realise they're a leader.

To quote Greg LeMond: it never gets easier, you just get faster. As someone who arguably has accumulated expertise, I still feel like I'm winging it a lot. The difference is I'm now winging it at the boundaries of the state of the art. It certainly doesn't feel easier to be here than where I was 20 years ago (though I do feel to be in a better place). There's always much more expertise I need!

You prompted me to think of fitness - as someone who has accumulated fitness I still feel like I am suffering a lot when I run, and I can take that suffering as a bit like winging it. The difference is I am suffering/winging it at a decent pace, I'm accustomed to what suffering/winging it feels like and know that I don't need to give up, I believe I can push on.

And indeed there is always more fitness that I need.

I'll add another relevant point that I think is attributable to Bradley Wiggins, but I can't find it now: [on time trials] You should always be asking yourself if you can keep going at this pace, and if the answer is anything other than "I don't know" you've already lost.

Yes! and how much you come to resent chasing the idiot you who kept going at that pace and set your last pb.

Running is not training. Running is a stimulus; training is the response of the body to the stimulus. You want to come up with an ideal set of stimuli to create an efficient training response.

Outside of a goal race, you shouldn't suffer when you run, especially 'a lot'. You are tearing down muscles and training energy systems that are inefficient.

Slow down. Walk. Fragment runs into multiple runs. Run doubles. You'll get faster, faster. Add volume at your new, sane pace and new, sane volume up to 40-60 miles/week.

Once you've achieved the slow end of 'adult fast', say sub-20m/40m/90m for 5k/10k/half, you can revisit suffering during training. You still probably shouldn't.

Of course if you want/like to suffer or can only run 4 times a week at peak heat during a Georgia summer then all of this is out the window.

Interesting.

I'm not much into sport, but I had the impression that training was above the goal.

Like, you try to get into a situation that is harder than reality, so when you finally do the actual thing, it will be easier.

It's complicated. What you suggest is true, but how you get to that point is different. The parent is also emphasizing high volume low intensity training which is part of many routines; high intensity interval training is another.

Often the strategy is to adopt both, until you gradually converge on some target (pace over distance). Where that target is is a different issue.

Everything fell into place for me as a runner after I joined an adult running club whose coach used Jack Daniels "Running Formula" as the basis for setting each member's training intensities and durations. It largely removed the ability/willingness to suffer as a factor in reaching one's fitness potential.

Jack Daniels Running Formula sounds interesting maybe I could do that! (unless it's a different Jack Daniels).

Only if you keep pushing speed. At a given speed, the fitter you get the better you feel at that speed.

Plus, fresh of the couch everything hurts. Some fit person's lungs might be burning, their legs might feel heavy, but the not-fit person has three different cramps, blisters, achy feet, shoulder pain, toe pain, neck pain, lung pain... that gets better fairly quickly with training.

I feel the whole "it never hurts less you just get faster" viewpoint is demoralizing & misleading, which doesn't help when people are struggling to stay fit.

This is a great point well explained. The more you know the more you feel able to wing. And the more chance your winging has of coming off.

Einstein probably felt like he was winging it with General Relativity, until he wasn’t.

Good point.

High-tech feeling like magic is something that comes to mind.

When I try new ideas, I sometimes get the feeling they have merit in a way I can't explain. So, when people ask my why I'm working on X or Y, I can't really give them satisfying answers.

> it never gets easier, you just get faster. As someone who arguably has accumulated expertise, I still feel like I'm winging it a lot.

Yes, I believe the gp has missed the point of the article.

The lesson from "your to-do list isn't difficult, it's impossible" is not nihilism. The point is not that no one is good at anything so why bother; the point is that the feeling of overwhelm, dread, and depression from an impossible- seeming to-do list is rooted in false assumptions. Your to-do list doesn't seem impossibly long, it IS impossibly long! You are born with a to-do list and you will die with a to-do list - but that's OK. We're all in the same boat.

Another helpful way to think about this is a math analogy. Your knowledge is a circle or sphere that has your literal area of expertise. The more your learn, the larger it gets - but you also gain more contact with the unknown.

That is the lesson. Imposter syndrome demystified. Only a fool feels in complete control. One simply does what one can.

>> One simply does what one can.

Exactly.

Long ago, I built a task management app for myself and my company. After using it for a while, I looked at the overview and found that I had something like 768 hours of Urgent and High priority tasks due in the next two weeks. There are only 336 hours total in two weeks (nevermind sleeping, eating, traveling, etc...). Moreover, this was not atypical of the list of things on my plate, it was just that now it had been collected as actual data.

No amount of working faster, trimming, delegating, etc. was going to get this done. The realization is that things WILL slip, even so much that some never get done. The goal is just to keep the critical things from slipping so much that you are taken out of the game. Also recognize that this is OK, and don't beatup myself or others about it (and that beating on myself or others only distracts and prevents the tasks from getting done). Just get on with what you can get on with.

Over the years I've learned to be suspicious of simple solutions to difficult problems and those who assert such solutions. When trying to convey that healthy skepticism to others I tend to use the phrase "beware those who express the certainty that can only be born out of ignorance or a swindle."

The analogy I use to explain how the acquisition of knowledge leads to humility is akin to climbing. You start in a ditch and can only see a single mountain that you must ascend to be knowledgeable. Once you reach the peak of that mountain you are greeted with an entire new range of mountains that would remain hidden from you without the benefit of your newfound perspective. You may also safely assume that beyond each of those mountains lies yet another set of partially or completely obscured mountain ranges.

As Socrates said, "if I am wise it is only in that I know what I do not know."

I see it as a case of the Availability Heuristic[1] striking hard.

Say you make 100 decisions in a day, and your expertise yields an obvious, high-quality answer in 98 of them. When you think back to that day, the remaining 2 (which didn’t so yield) will dominate your memory of what happened.

In that case, it will feel like all you did was make non-rigorous, poorly-grounded guesses … but that impression is wrong.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic

Yeah getting "good" at a lot of things is just having been in the situation once or twice so you are less stressed. It doesnt mean you made the right decision the first time or even that you will make the right decision this time. Just that you can react faster than the first time.

I agree with you. However "seems self-defeating to me" I think is kind of the point of his essay: instead of letting your deficiencies defeat you, accept them then throw yourself at improving yourself with that acceptance behind you.

The insight provided is summed up at the end, here:

> In short: we can't ever get free from the limited and vulnerable and uncertain situation in which we find ourselves. But when you grasp that you'll never get free from it, that's when you're finally free in it – free to focus on the hard things, instead of the impossible ones, and to give this somewhat preposterous business of being a human everything you've got.

You say:

> but applying it to your career and goals seems self-defeating to me

What about applying the insight to the concept of 'a career' itself? Ie not as something to make your career better, as if that is the obvious only answer.

Many take it for granted that career/money/etc is what life is about... but is it?

If time is over as quickly as that (as the author says) is the 'best' use of one's time spent in a career? Is 'a career and all that' a distraction from getting a better understanding of existence and one's place in it? Or from following one's heart and allowing oneself to be guided by what one uncovers within as 'right', as opposed to whatever external metrics are provided and might not (ultimately) be in your favour?

I think the author was just trying to be nice to the reader. The worst case scenario when suffering from impostor syndrome is not that everyone is winging it all the time, but rather that you are in fact not very good at what you're doing, you may never become good at it and the people around you know that already. But I think the main point of the article still stands: Accept that you're not good at something, stop worrying about it and try the best you can anyway. Usually, after doing that for a while, you end up actually becoming good at it.

haha yes i read something similar between the lines : ) the author presented a very charitable version of this.

After the last decade, I now believe the "everyone is winging it all the time" theory more than ever.

I used to think people in power really had their shit together (CEOs, judges, doctors, politicians, etc.) but it turns out that it's just regular dumbasses everywhere.

Hell, just look at the testimony from the January 6th hearings. These people were running the most powerful organization in human history and they were absolutely batshit stupid. Crazy yes, but also just plain stupid. Totally incapable of assembling a coherent worldview.

Sure there are experts, but they became experts by focusing their energies on their discipline. They don't have time for political machinations. The people _running_ everything are by and large just bullshitting their way to the top.

I'm not sure what you're referring to with the Jan 6th hearings (I don't really follow US news), but in my opinion it's certainly the case that politics, media and administration are the privileged domains for which the phrase "everyone is winging it all the time" makes the most sense. It's infuriating but I gather it's unlikely to be true for most other things in life which require, as the parent comment pointed out, actual expertise.

When I think of all my models, whether directors, writers, painters or engineers, they've always struck me as especially smart, and this feeling seems to always correlate with how humble they are and how old the interview I am watching is. I guess they mostly talk about the thing they do for a living. Also, I've noticed a decrease in global intelligence, and that probably makes people look much more stupid in comparison.

In fact, I don't believe expertise makes you brilliant on all fronts -- arguably, it may signify the exact opposite. Take an artist, e.g. an actor or a painter, that is someone who spends most of their time learning their own specific craft, why should we listen to their takes on things unrelated to their activities more than the average person? It makes no sense, but sometimes we hear musicians, actors, etc. give their undue opinions on various matters. And so we stumble upon the fact that they have, like most of us, no clue on most things in life, just like us. And that's okay I guess.

Reminds me of the brilliant Ricky Gervais quote:

"So if you do win an award tonight, don’t use it as a platform to make a political speech. You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg."

> why should we listen to their takes on things unrelated to their activities more than the average person?

Also applies to HN :-)

"Also, I've noticed a decrease in global intelligence, and that probably makes people look much more stupid in comparison."

Serious citation needed here??

True. As long as a person has a few very specific tendencies, or perhaps a lack of certain resistances/indoctrinations/beliefs he can push forward much more than the average person and thus he can become a CEO etc... and still be fallible, but he will also succeed merely due to the state of his mind.

> The people _running_ everything are by and large just bullshitting their way to the top.

There were never on the stand. All you've seen are footsoldiers, and one way of organizing an army is to design it for dumb soldiers. Read Dark Money by Jane Mayer to get an idea of the kind of people who're running that show.

As Bertrand Russell said:

"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt."

The worse is that other stupid people see confidence as a signal of competence (and give confident people power), when it's actually a negative signal. Truly smart people are usually pretty humble.

I think both are true: there _is_ such a thing as expertise and it's worth making huge sacrifices to develop it.

But you cannot be an expert in every aspect of an endeavour that you are involved in. You have to be winging it in some regard.

A very common example is being an expert programmer who must turn their hand to project planning or politics or UX design in order to translate their engineering excellence into actual success. You can become an expert in each of those things too, but there's always another field of challenge around the corner.

It's worthwhile to become great at each of those things as they arise but you have to escape from the longing to never be bad at anything again.

Edit: after more pondering, I don't actually think there are any project planning experts. I've never seen it done successfully, _even_ when you take this article's advice and admit that various aspects of planning (like time estimation) are hopeless. So I guess the hopelessness is fractal in some places.

Reminds me of Pema Chodron on hopelessness:

> The first noble truth of the Buddha is that when we feel suffering, it doesn’t mean that something is wrong. What a relief. Finally somebody told the truth. Suffering is part of life, and we don’t have to feel it’s happening because we personally made the wrong move. In reality, however, when we feel suffering, we think that something is wrong. As long as we’re addicted to hope, we feel that we can tone our experience down or liven it up or change it somehow, and we continue to suffer a lot.

> The word in Tibetan for hope is rewa; the word for fear is dokpa. More commonly, the word re-dok is used, which combines the two. Hope and fear is a feeling with two sides. As long as there’s one, there’s always the other. This re-dok is the root of our pain. In the world of hope and fear, we always have to change the channel, change the temperature, change the music, because something is getting uneasy, something is getting restless, something is beginning to hurt, and we keep looking for alternatives.

> In a nontheistic state of mind, abandoning hope is an affirmation, the beginning of the beginning. You could even put “Abandon hope” on your refrigerator door instead of more conventional aspirations like “Every day in every way I’m getting better and better.”

It is interesting how nihilism and existentialism rose as Christian faith diminished, and how they have so many parallels to Buddhism. Not sure if they were heavily influenced by it or if those ideas rose inevitably to fill the void that lost faith left behind.

I would like to think it may be a fundamental truth of the human condition, formalized/written in different times and places. The Stoics had it too, and that's pre-Christian. I suspect some Christians during the first two millenia of Christianity had it too, I don't think it's incompatible with Christianity (or "faith"!) of all historical sorts, but don't know enough about the history to say.

(Update: Googling, some suggest Jesuit spirituality as being a Christian philosophy focused on non-attachment... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignatian_spirituality)

Yeah. It also seems to me that philosophers never got over nihilism. Nietzsche saw nihilism as the problem of the human condition after "God was dead", as something to be overcomed in order for humanity to reach to the next level. But this never materialized AFAICT, right?

In spite of the headline that might suggest otherwise, I don't think the author was suggesting inaction through futility and nihilism. Rather, as he mentions in the conclusion, it's about accepting that we don't have as much control over circumstances as we'd like, and to let go of external standards and situations:

...that's precisely when you can throw yourself at life's real hard challenges: the impressive accomplishments, bold life choices, and deeply fulfilling relationships. You get to live more intensely, because you're no longer making your full participation in life dependent on reaching some standard – of productivity, of certainty about the future, of competence, etcetera – that you were never going to reach in the first place.

This reminds me of Candide. I can't find a quote that perfectly lines up with TFA. But this comes close. Read the book if you're piqued.

  "You are right," said Pangloss, "for when man was first placed in the Garden of Eden, he was put there "ut operaretur eum", that he might cultivate it; which shows that man was not born to be idle."

  "Let us work," said Martin, "without disputing; it is the only way to render life tolerable."

The author of the post here is coming at this idea from one specific angle: it's worse than you think. But this is a specific instance of a larger insight. None of it makes any sense, nor has any meaning. He could go one step further with all of this. yes, it's true that your to do list is a complete f-up. No doubt. But it's not just your to do list, or your imposter syndrome, or etc. It's all of everything. The whole of existence. It's all just one complete cosmic joke of a guy slipping on a banana peel joke.

I think the Hitchhiker Guide Galaxy books by Douglas Adams captured this. When I was a kid I didn't realize the existential dilemmas that kept cropping up. I just thought it was funny. Now in my mid-40s it's still funny, but it feels a lot more true, too.

I'm also getting vibes of this from Jesus.

  John 18:36 Jesus said, "My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But now my kingdom is from another place."

My angle being, this world is not what's important. Sure it's important because you're here now. There is that. But don't get too caught up in it. It's all going away soon. It doesn't really ultimately matter if you're late to your daughter's orthodontist appointment.

Oh and the Bhagavad Gita hits this too. "Thou hast power only to act, not over the result thereof. Act thou therefore without prospect of the result, and without succumbing to inaction." Really this is a universal that every philosophy has to speak to. It's really interesting.

From what I'm beginning to realize more and more is that the central problem in humans is the mind: the constant intrusions of random thoughts, generating self-conflicts based on past remembrances which are also projected in the future.

Your mind is obviously out of control: if you had your mind under full control you would be able to sit for 1 hour in a dark room and had zero intrusive/distracting thoughts. And yet if you try this you might last a few minutes but then you'll start to fantasize and get lost in future/past images and you won't even notice when you got sucked into them, it happens so automatic, without one noticing it.

So thus the question becomes: how can one deal with this? What needs to be done/seen for one to overcome these random thoughts?

I'm exploring this now through Krishnamurti. There are many Buddhist monks, but how many of them reach enlightment? Practicaly zero, so obviously they are doing something very, very wrong.

It seems like what should follow from this is rejecting the idea that the brain should be under conscious control. Brains just don't work that way. Why not find a way to make use of that?

>Brains just don't work that way. Why not find a way to make use of that?

If that were true this means that anything you try and do is futile because you will always revert to a hardcoded state, basicaly meaning that you are a full robot.

I have experienced permanent changes through understanding/seeing my own mental patterns.

So yes, the brain can be brought under consious control, but one needs to see it's patterns: once you see a pattern it dissolves, freeing you from the thought.

But to truly see a pattern "in your bones" aka have an "euroka moment" can be quite difficult at times. Intellectualizing/philosophising is a dead end. It must be an instinctive realization, not an intellectual one.

So it's not that you bring the brain under consious control through action: it's via negativa:

You regain control by removing the random/conflincting thoughts.

Why so binary? There are states between full control and no control. You can learn about yourself and make changes without silencing unconscious thought.

In fact, intrusive thoughts can be a valuable tool. Last week I found myself wondering "what if I have stage IV cancer?" in response to a tiny medical issue. So I thought about it. Developed a plan. Decided I was satisfied with it.

Then I thought about the changes I wanted to make, and started thinking about whether some of them would be a good idea anyway. I'm still thinking about it, as the weights on various choices are a lot different if I'm not actively dying. But there's stuff to think about. Choices to make.

And this is because I actually make use of the random things my brain produces, instead of attempting to remove them.

As a Christian I've been attempting to focus on the concept of letting go of the worldly and focusing on "Kingdom". The unique challenge that I'm finding is that I'm not particularly tied to my possessions, positions, or wealth but it's important for me to provide those things to my wife and kids.

I can deny myself those things but I find it nearly impossible to deny my family those things. We live way above average and I would prefer at minimum to bring it down to average but it's so hard to say no when I have the ability to say yes.

“Destiny is a gift. Some go their entire lives, living existences of quiet desperation, never learning the truth that what feels as though a burden pushing down upon their shoulders is really a sense of purpose that lifts us to greater heights. Never forget that fear is but the precursor to valor, that to strive and triumph in the face of fear is what it means to be a hero. Don’t think. Become.”

~ Blinky Galadriel - Trollhunters

That was a surprisingly good show for something aimed at children.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillermo_del_Toro

Remember Hellboy having insecurities?

Isn't there also a live action troll hunter movie by him that has nothing to do with the Arcadia series?

I feel like this stoic approach to dealing with problems is a fear of fear so overwhelming you abandon hope for the sake of comfortable stability. Hell, Seneca explicitly tells you to abandon hope (as does the author of this piece, although he stops short of telling you to commit suicide if life gets too difficult).

Instead of just being terrified as the eastern counterparts recommend, you deny it. Constructing a limit-case for every obstacle you face downplays your emotions, making them shrivel away so you can maintain a straight face through extended torture. I've spent the past two years undoing the damage that therapy did to me. Trying to get my ability to suffer back isn't something I ever thought I'd do but here I am. I'll have a brutal, soul-crushing failure turn me into a miserable sobbing pile of person long before I accept only being intellectually aware of all my setbacks without a shred of crippling emotion. If that means I don't have any "impressive accomplishments" because I was sitting in a corner in the fetal position wailing about my dead hamster, so be it.

> I've spent the past two years undoing the damage that therapy did to me.

I feel like our entire society will be spending decades undoing the damage that the “therapeutic” approach to mental health has wrought.

These are very sweeping statements about therapy without evidence or exposition.

As someone who fully believes I'm alive and typing today because of an excellent therapist, I'm curious to understand what you're referring to, and how it differs from my experience.

What do you mean by "therapeutic" here?

"cease to hope and you will cease to fear"

I think it also depends on the type of therapy involved. There is a thing called intellectualization [1], which sounds similar do the thing you described. This is actually a coping mechanism and therapy should work to mellow or remove it and allow you to live your emotions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectualization

All of my therapists have told me I have to feel the painful feelings, not try to escape them.

Doing that is another story.

But they have been very much focused on feeling emotions and not downplaying them, not being scared of unpleasant feelings. The therapist with a buddhist psychology background especially... it's like literally the opposite of where therapy has led you, they teach me that the fear of fear is worse than the fear itself, that the things we do to escape fear, or out of fear of failure, are worse than the fear itself or the failure itself, and can stunt our lives... quite what you are saying.

I'm sorry you had a bad experience with therapists.

I found this comment very striking, and descriptive of my own experience, always trying to keep a straight face.

It's an interesting article and I think the last paragraph is incredibly important.

My personal takeaway is to deal with situations as they are, not as you would like them to be.

If you are a very optimistic and positive person that could mean to realize the difficulties ahead and if you are inclined to see doom in everything it's realizing that things are not as bleak as you imagination makes them out to be.

I am a real doomer on a society/political level and I am in the end suprised things didn't get as bad as I thought. E.g. I have thought the economy should collapse every year for 20 years. Not even Venezuela collapsed as bad as I thought it would.

On a work basis I am a optimist instead for some reason. It is too daunting to realistically asses the amount of work needed for a project so I just start walking towards the top of the hill.

Beautiful piece. Increases hope and reduces mental suffering.

Reminds me of the third noble truth in Buddhism: "dukkha (suffering, incapable of satisfying, painful) can be ended or contained by the renouncement or letting go of taṇhā ("craving, desire or attachment, lit. "thirst")"

I will have a go:

I can’t get my side project to the point it can replace my job.

Its worse than that: all efforts to make money take time, and so have an hourly rate, and so no one escapes working a job.

Also when defined in happiness units per hour, there are non raises.

I'd say it is mostly about expectations. There are various kinds of challenges in life. If you approach them with an unrealistic mindset you get disappointed.

Some things are easy and you just do it. Then there are the more challenging topics. These can't be overseen from the start, so you just start working on it and hope you reach what you desire in the future. Finally some things are just impossible.

Both at work and in personal life it can help a lot to see this distinction.

> Getting on top of it all seems like it would be really hard. But it isn't. It's impossible.

Or maybe, for any given abstract task, it isn't impossible. Maybe you're just giving up and justifying your withdrawal by saying it's impossible because you're essentially weak and lacking in self-discipline.

I don't know, of course. Depends on the task and who's tasked with it.

Reminds me of a limerick my father used to say.

They said that it couldn't be done / With a smile he got right to it / He tackled the thing that couldn't be done / And he couldn't do it.

Tried to make it a little more conventional and went abstract:

they told him it couldn't be done

he thought it a challenge but fun

and got straight to work

just one little quirk

no light bulb can outshine the sun

You can accomplish many tasks X. The point of the piece is that were you to do X, now Y and Z would be on your plate, and you’d feel behind on those. So you can do difficult tasks, but you can’t resolve the feeling of being behind by doing difficult tasks. You resolve the feeling by being okay with not getting it all done as long as you operate near your steady state optimum.

Only when you truly see how utterly an truly terrible things are, that's when you can step up and do something about it - sounds like a motivational bit but it saves you from despairing more than you need to, ironically.

Over and over again I'm drawn back to this centuries old Stoic principle: stop worrying about things that you can't control. Because, like this article mentions, most things are outside of your control.

I really liked this read. I don't think you have to be a pessimist in order to adopt this mindset, just knowing the pessimist's perspective can be a healthy way of focusing on what matters

I think the general conveyed idea is to give up on what you can't realistically change or achieve, focusing on the smaller everyday actions that make your local environment more bearable despite the sorry state of the world.

For example, in a bad relationship, assume that you have met not the best person in the world and acknowledge that it is very hard (even impossible) to change them, but take small everyday actions that make the relationship durable despite of that.

> Relationship troubles? You might think the problem is that you married the wrong person, or that you need to work on yourself, and these might of course be true. But also, it's worse than you think – because two humans living and growing together is just inevitably a matter of having one's buttons pushed and one's old psychological issues triggered.

There was a point in my marriage, about four years (and one child) into it, when I convinced myself that I had married the wrong person and needed out. My feeble attempt to tell this to my wife was the most gut-wrenchingly painful experience of my life. Next year we will be celebrating ten years of marriage.

It was worse than I thought: not only was I married to the wrong person, but attempting to leave would saddle me with a lifetime of guilt and regret for choosing to break up a not-unhappy home. My wife may be a poor match for me, but I’m the one who offered her the ring.

Of course, the realization that a problem is unsolvable never ceases to be traumatic. But as the author quotes Bruce Tift, it’s reassuring to know that with time one can redefine the problem out of existence and move on with living.

    "Your love is one in a million
    You couldn't buy it at any price
    But of the nine-point-nine-nine-nine-hundred-thousand other possible loves
    Statistically, some of them would be equally nice"

-- Tim Minchin, If I Didn't Have You (Someone else would do)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zn6gV2sdl38&t=80s

I've come to terms with the notion that my 10yr marriage is ok. Not perfect, but also not bad. I see it as a partnership - and so does she.

But if I ever got to the point where I was unhappy in her company, persistently, I think it would benefit everyone to separate. Maybe temporarily at first to see how it is for us.

I don't think anyone, including your wife, would expect you to stay unhappy just because you made that offer to her 10 years ago.

The "brace position" for a lot of Brits is the Kantian duty ethic and a very visible Standard by which you can compare yourself. That's all gone.. When the thing-in-itself died and we became hyper-conscious instead, the philosophies of the past no longer tread water. It's true the plane has crashed, and that might be the ground-floor reality, but there has to be more.

This has been my experience since I started my career. Some things seem feasible, easy even, but behind the scenes, there are social dynamics which make your skills/talent completely redundant. You can do amazing things, 10x better, 100x better than anyone else. It doesn't matter. Nobody will acknowledge it.

The same thing may be possible (or trivial) for some people because they are lucky enough to be born in the right place and right time and with the right friends (sometimes it may not seem like it, but one connection can make all the difference), but it's not possible for you. Overcoming adversity and defying all odds achieves nothing. You just don't have the right parents at the end of the day.

It's like politicians. When you watch them give a speech in the news, it sounds like they're talking to you (or at least, people like you), but they're not. They're talking to other people who are better connected than you. You're not part of this system. It's an illusion, a big lie.

> You can do amazing things, 10x better, 100x better than anyone else. It doesn't matter. Nobody will acknowledge it.

Likely someone around will notice and appreciate - but it'd be just a bitter consolation prize.

> but one connection can make all the difference... You just don't have the right parents at the end of the day.

I think it goes much deeper. It's the mindset that matters, not a single connection.

> lucky enough to be born in the right place and right time and with the right friends

Pure randomness does play a big role both at macro and micro levels. At micro level (e.g. team, boss, mentors) I have seen how two ex-classmates in very comparable circumstances ended up with unbelievably different careers (a huge success vs layoff and a career shift to an adjacent field). In their case it's impossible that these differences were due to skills or work ethic.

The effects of macro shifts (e.g. machine learning / data science boom) are also blatantly obvious to me. Catching a huge wave can be effectively be a massive boost to one's skills (the one that people in a stable or stagnating market/industry don't get). One can of course change fields to get in a wave (and many people do) - but some are just literally taken by it.

I learned about relaxing when it's hopeless from this passage long ago:

Zaphod tried to run in several equally decisive directions simultaneously. "Right!" he said. "Er ... we've got to get manual control of this ship."

"Can you fly her?" asked Ford pleasantly.

"No, can you?"

"No."

"Trillian, can you?"

"No."

"Fine," said Zaphod, relaxing. "We'll do it together."

Without JS switched on, I can fully appreciate how bad things are - it's unreadable. I think the CSS needs some work.

It's worse than you think: the entire contents of the post is stored in a srcdoc attribute on an iframe with no height specified. The javascript resizes the iframe to match the content. Bloody stupid way to code a webpage.

It’s a nice suggestion for a way to rationale pessimistic thoughts. But I don’t agree that it’s well captured by the maxim “it’s worse than you think”.

Further examples of things that are worse than we think: the world ability to handle climate change or any other problem involving worldwide cooperation (including peace keeping), people's discrimination against each other, humans' ability to maintain objective views...

> In a piercing recent essay that's well worth your time, Simon Evans writes about watching his daughter become an adult, and also about the death of a close friend...

Yes, definitely worth reading. Better than the original article IMO.

This is really just existentialism, but it comes at it from an interesting angle. Could also be related to Nietzche's "heroic nihilism" (as compared to Schopenhauer's pessimistic nihilism).

The Zen of learned helplessness?

Meh.

We do ourselves a disservice by teaching an idealized picture of history.

The world has been a terrible, awful place for nearly all of its existence.

This right now is probably the golden age relative to the rest of it, but we're so caught up in our doom scrolling that it FEELS overwhelmingly bad.

Yes, bad things happen to people around the world. But bad things have always been happening to people around the world. The average person just generally wasn't aware unless it was happening to them.

We're spoiled with a modernity privilege we can't see and thus can't appreciate.

If learned helplessness is the trick that makes life tolerable, by all means go for it. To each their own.

But no, it's not worse than we think.

It's better than we realize.

The article is more of a thought experiment technique than a water cooler rant.

"In April of 1815, Mount Tambora exploded in a powerful eruption that killed tens of thousands of people on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa. The following year became known as the “year without a summer” when unusually cold, wet conditions swept across Europe and North America."

Yep. People do not realize how uncertain the world was back then. You may get a year of lack of food without even knowing why. Today we know much more, and that may overwhelm us. But not knowing and not be able to do anything is worse.

> The Zen of learned helplessness?

You are very much missing the point.

> This right now is probably the golden age relative to the rest of it, but we're so caught up in our doom scrolling that it FEELS overwhelmingly bad.

How it feels is what really matters. There's little benefit in having a much better material life than any king from the past if people are unhappy.

The developed world is facing an unprecedented mental health crisis especially around depression and anxiety and you cannot handwave it away by calling people "spoiled".

The typical HN starry-eyed techno-optimism is not helpful.

Isn't this what stoicism is about?

It's almost exactly the same thing. It doesn't hurt to rephrase the same ideas, though.

I recommend his book "Four thousand weeks", it's on somewhat similar topics.

I open a page with a single link. I click.

> 404! The page you were looking for doesn't exist.

Indeed it is.

Eh, this was a pretty contrived read, and a bad way to think IMO. A healthy dose of pessimism makes sense but I've never believed in futility.

The author explicitly states that this way of thinking isn't an open path to nihilism. It is the opposite; knowing that you can't change certain aspects of life allow you to focus on a response that is more useful than fighting the inevitable and leads to a life with fewer frustrations.

"Birth is pain, life is pain, death is pain" - Chinese proverb.

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” - Thoreau

This isn't a new observation.

That it's not new does not mean it's not interesting. I enjoyed the post.

That doesn’t have the structure of a Chinese proverb. Those are usually 4 character expressions, which work out to something like 4 nouns/verbs in English plus some supporting prepositions and whatnot. The other common thing is highly parallel constructions, but that just repeats the same word three times. I would be very surprised if that were an authentic Chinese saying.

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