Charlie Munger – Feeling Like a Victim Is Perfectly Disastrous
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Charlie Munger has died - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38451278
Just because something isn't your fault doesn't mean it's not your responsibility.
Hardship is a guarantee; victimhood is a choice.
If you see a piece of trash, you can think that people are terrible for littering, or you can pick it up. It only takes a small percentage of people littering to destroy an environment but it also only takes a small percentage of people to clean it up.
You either way in control, you just wish to not exercise it if you don't take extreme ownership of things.
Reminded of two things while we are at it. Sam Altman, once told this in a class - Its easier to start a hard company, than to start an easy company. Then something I heard on Joe Rogan- The more you indulge yourself in doing hard uncomfortable things, the more easier and content it gets as it goes. Its the people who do the easy things that end up bad.
“Tom, don't let anybody kid you. It's all personal, every bit of business. Every piece of shit every man has to eat every day of his life is personal. They call it business. OK. But it's personal as hell. You know where I learned that from? The Don. My old man. The Godfather. If a bolt of lightning hit a friend of his the old man would take it personal. He took my going into the Marines personal. That's what makes him great. The Great Don. He takes everything personal Like God. He knows every feather that falls from the tail of a sparrow or however the hell it goes? Right? And you know something? Accidents don't happen to people who take accidents as a personal insult.” ― Mario Puzo, The Godfather
One of the greatest pieces I’ve read on extreme ownership.
She also told my sister and I before she passed to never use her death as an excuse to go through life miserable and sad—there were too many things to be happy about and we should give life purpose.
So I agree with the gist of Charlie’s idea of acting like you aren’t a victim even if you do happen to be one.
That said... I also think that due to either genetic predisposition or extreme environmental factors, there are rare cases where trying to take a positive attitude does not help and can in fact make things worse. Trying to use sheer force of will to “power through” certain situations may lead one to ignore other options (medication for example) and the build-up of a series of continuous failures to “think positively” may result in even worse outcomes where erratic or irreversible decisions are made during an irrational state of mind. I’m not suggesting self-pity, but rather the recognition that there are just some situations you can’t put a positive spin on and it is probably better not to try.
I would just add (your 11 y/o experience notwithstanding) that psychotherapy is a viable, and often preferable option for many. The fitness between therapist and client if definitely a key variable; but my experience with therapy vs meds has dramatically favoured the former.
Agree that there are situations with no positive spin in the moment and maybe there will never be a positive spin; but maybe there’s a _growth-oriented_ spin. Eventually.
It is also true that dispensing this particular advice is self-serving for people in power.
In a revolution, things get worse before they get better if they get better. Revolutions come at huge negative expected value. However, appeasing powerful forces can also have hugely negative expected value. Sometimes the calculus makes sense, and when it does, you should hope that people are appropriately discounting the self-serving advice from the powerful.
This is a standard political gambit: create or identify a group of victims, and declare that you will get "payback" for them and make their situation better. Of course you don't, but that's OK, you got their votes and you just recycle and amplify that play next time.
This framing isn't self-serving at all; if more people took it, there'd be a lot fewer folks that the rich and powerful could take advantage of, and a lot more power centers.
But curiously, I've noticed that many people who are powerful and ruthless also have a certain respect for people who will put up clear boundaries and take action to not be taken advantage of by them. It's like they're reluctant sociopaths. "As long as stupid and helpless people exist, they will be taken advantage of by someone, so that someone might as well but me." But it's almost like many of them wish there weren't so many stupid and helpless people, and respect folks who go after what they want even if what they want isn't aligned with their own vision.
Though I'm pretty certain the he didn't have that kind of change in mind when giving this advice.
That mentality seems pretty self-destructive. It’s dumb to not at least try to impress the people who pay you. That doesn’t mean you can’t also take it easy and strike a healthy balance, but just outright saying society and work are bullshit seems insane when we have such a wealth of resources readily available to us.
Most people in power will go out of power via something other than violent revolution. In fact, the whole notion of "elite overproduction" is basically about pointing out the fact that a lot more people aspire to be in power than are actually in power at any given moment. It's an endless game of musical chairs, and if you can avoid playing that particular game you'll be a lot better off on average.
The 'Outrage Factor' is like a measure of how strongly people feel about something and whether they will move into action because of it.
Imagine if you heard news about a big problem – how mad or upset it makes you and others is the 'Outrage Factor.' It's like when you find out someone did something really unfair, and it makes you really angry, especially if it feels unfair, arbitrary or imposed by an unpopular central power, etc.
While it’s certainly true that people in charge generally only say things that keep them in charge, a la the status quo always moves to reinforce its own existence, individuals in power vary a lot in their strategies for staying in power. Some may prioritize transparency and addressing concerns directly, while others may navigate communication or be blatantly manipulating to maintain ‘stability.’
The relationship between power, communication, and outrage factors is complex and influenced by various factors such as societal expectations, political climates, and individual leadership styles. A ‘revolution’ isn’t one thing — it’s all of those things combined and more.
I mean to raise the point that things are frequently much more complicated and simply discounting the advice doesn’t take into account the person saying it, their history of speaking the truth, and what room it was said in.
Obviously the modern world is filled with examples of what you are talking about, so please don’t think I’m trying to counterpoint you — that’s not my intention.
I’m trying to add to the discussion the idea of the ‘outrage factor’ as well as the various styles and politics of who is speaking, because its so very difficult to discern anyone speaking in your best interest (assuming they exist) from the sea of those who most certainly are not and that’s worth considering.
It is also interesting that psychology, sociology and other sciences all have this measurement concept for when people will get pissed off enough to actually take action — with the presumption being that the vast majority of the time, until the tipping point that is an ‘outrage factor,’ they will not. I wonder how well studied and engineered that factor is in modern societies, because I assume it’s very studied, and I also wonder what the impact of broadly deployed AI will be for leadership groups will look like give the obvious benefit of learning to manage this measurement.
Throw a rock in any hall of power and you won’t be able to help but hit several victims before it hits the floor. Powerful people who accept responsibility for the bad things that happen in the world and blame themselves? Just about the rarest sight one will ever see.
For this reason, I see victimhood as the friend of power, not the foe, as victimhood is basically a universal all purpose justification to do whatever you wanted to do with your power anyways. Actual victims who are powerless usually get fuck all benefit from portraying themselves as victims because they’re actually victims so they’re socially disadvantaged.
Misfortune isn't always our fault. How we respond to it is.
It may or may not be your fault, but it is now your problem to fix.
Whether it's a problem you made so can fix by adjusting your attitude/behavior/skills/etc., or a problem that someone else made, or the universe made, and requires some other fix, focusing not on how things got worse, and actually focusing on how to make things better, is the only way to make things better.
I will say, though, that often things I don't like in my life _are_ my fault, and being willing to honestly assess those things is an important razor to cut through the bullshit of self pity.
It's a quote best taken with a slight grain of salt, a lens for looking at a problem which you might not always want to wear. But I like it.
You can't always try to make everything better that you become aware of. You can't fix everything. Not everything is your problem to solve. In fact, some (important) people may not like it if you try to solve said problem.
I very much have to make myself stay out of solving everything and just let others take care of it. Especially since I very much don't like other people I see that encounter the slightest problem and they just throw up their hands screaming "I don't know what to do so I'll just stand here and do nothing while someone else solves it". So it's quite the balancing act. Those people need to do more "my fault, I'll solve it" and I need to do more "not my business, let them solve it but secretly keep an eye on it to ensure that it does get done in the end coz it's actually important".
In the motorcycling world we like to say "The cemetery is full of people who had right of way"
My entire childhood I watched both my parents, who both had 2 jobs, work themselves non-stop to try to provide for us. They didn't drink or do drugs or consider themselves victims, and it didn't help one bit.
Asking the man who wins the lottery how to live a good life and be successful often ends up with them telling you to do whatever it is that they did. It might even be good advice, but it's a ridiculous appeal to authority. Charlie Munger got all this success and he did X, ok, did other people do X and not achieve this level of success? How many people did not-X and were perfectly successful?
It's subjective finger wagging dressed up in more appealing clothing for those that already agree with the opinions to point at and be happy about. Because at the end of the day, it allows us to blame people's misfortune on them, they've adopted a victim mentality and that's why their lives aren't working out. It allows the class that has the vast majority of wealth to deflect any critical examination of the power structure that perpetuates this state. You aren't underpaid, you just have adopted a victim mindset. You aren't exploited, you just haven't found a way to turn the challenge of paying your rent into riches yet.
Are you saying that your family would have been the same had your parents done drugs or considered themselves victims?
If so, why do you think that? Seems like a very bold claim. If not, what are you actually saying?
It doesn't seem like a bold claim to me. I've known plenty of poor, struggling working class people. The only impact drinking or claiming they're a victim have is influencing how much fun they have at parties.
I've happen to know plenty of wildly successful people who also drink and/or think they're victims. Again, primary effect I've noticed seems to be how much fun they are at parties.
Not tons. Millions. If not hundreds of millions.
But let’s debate the merits of yet another billionaire lecturing everyone about the merits of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and not being a victim.
Hard work doesn’t make billionaires. Systems that accelerate privileged positions and concentrate wealth to the top do. And that’s not necessarily bad. But it’s generally bad when it’s this extreme.
That said I wish his family well and am sorry for his passing. He was always a gentleman and kind to the core.
> Hard work doesn’t make billionaires. Systems that accelerate privileged positions and concentrate wealth to the top do.
¿Por qué no los dos? Jeff Bezos worked pretty hard to end up where he is now.
You’re severely underestimating how much a billion dollars is if you really think this is true.
The wealth of an average HNer is much more comparable to the average American than to the wealth of billionaires.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35567986
But of course the truth is it’s a 42 year old (avg) man (91%) that makes $88,716 per year so you’re NOT wrong.
But the idea that Jeff Bezos got where he is because of hard work is inverted. Many work hard, few become billionaires. So what is wrong with the argument of los dos?
This: it may be true that hard work is generally a prerequisite for becoming a billionaire, it is a correlation and not causative effect. The cause of billionaires is wealth concentration itself and a system of overly generous tax advantage for equity owners. That is why the majority of billionaires have sprung from finance and investments — highly leveraged paper wealth from paper products — and not from the likes of Amazon.
I subscribe to the idea that billionaires are a product of the tax system and not the result of some kind of superhuman top-of-heap exceptional personal merit.
Not doing those things didn't enable them to get ahead far enough to not have to both work two jobs. But drinking or doing drugs would have hurt compared to not doing them. So would feeling like a victim.
What it actually preaches is don't look and emulate the successful people in your environment and society as this is all based on luck. Can't disagree more
Skill and hard work are what buy you the lottery ticket. Luck is what determines if the ticket pays or not. That's why almost all successful people have a string of failures behind them, and why the truism "you've only really failed when you stop trying" exists.
However, you can have skill and put in hard work and still never have the success you're seeking. It happens all the time.
Although much of this depends on how you define "success". I'm assuming here that it means monetary gain, but most people don't have "get rich" as their measure of success. In reality, success is being able to live a life that provides satisfaction and happiness. That's an easier thing to achieve.
The reason most successful people have a string of failures behind them is because they learn from past experience and build networks and profile over the course of their career.
Luck applies most at the starting line - your location, your family and their wealth/status/connections [1], the traits and health you inherit, your education and the people you know who can mentor you, invest in you and work with you.
Over time the role of luck recedes and the role of experience becomes more significant (which is why, a few 20-something tech billionaires notwithstanding, most high-growth companies are founded when the founder is in their mid 40s [2]).
Also, “skill and hard work” are not the most important factors; in my experience the most important factor is the ability to self-improve, which takes humility and patience.
[1] It’s certainly not a given that being born into vast wealth equals luck in this context: plenty of heirs to vast fortunes turn out to be deadbeats. They may still be able to become successful in their own career but in a fairly pathetic, unearned kind of way. The right kind of luck for entrepreneurial success is a moderate degree of privilege (just enough not to spoil you) with a moderate degree of hardship (just enough not to break you). This certainly applied to Steve Jobs. Bill Gates too if you include the bullying at school.
[2] https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-succes...
I’m very much on board with the idea of eschewing victimhood thinking, and I generally see the invocation of survivorship bias as a pretty sad indicator of someone’s attachment to victimhood.
However I also recognize that the world isn’t great at empowering people to get out of difficult situations in life. Once you’re down, the world has all kinds of ways of keeping you down. “Just work hard and save money” seems like simple stuff that anyone can do but it doesn’t get you very far if you’re at the bottom of the heap, especially if you’re dealing with illness, family problems, or other burdens.
I do believe there are things that almost anyone (without irrevocable health problems) can do to go from a bad situation to a very good one over the long term (I’ve done them), but these things are not widely known or accepted by mainstream society.
So I sympathize with the sense of futility that many people hold.
Yes, but so what. We're on HN, we're supposed to be well aware that 90% if not 99% of all ventures will fail miserably. (In fact, the main benefits of 'working hard' in startup culture are arguably ancillary ones, such as the chance of networking socially with successful folks. To some extent, success is beside the point.)
This reads like "pick yourself up by your bootstraps": an impossible task. Could you parrot this line in front of a Walmart checkout clerk?
You could work as hard as possible flipping burgers, it won't make you a billionaire, and even a very dumb person could see that.
You have to merely understand the paths people take in life that lead to where you want to be, evaluate the stochastic horizons, and act in accordance to your best bet on what would work. Whether or not, in this process, you consider yourself the ultimate master of your circumstances or a helpless victim flailing at the machinery of a cruel system makes no difference. All that matters is what affects how you think and what you do, and all the feedback loops therein.
"At 31 years old, Charlie Munger was divorced, broke, and burying his 9 year old son, who had died from cancer"
But he persevered to become one of the most successful people on the planet.
No doubt he was a brilliant human and that helped tremendously, but he didn't think of himself as a victim.
You're here, are you not? Ironically it's Charlie Munger who is not. The game of life is played to stay in the game. If you're writing this comment, it seems like they succeeded, at least in the main storyline. They may have failed or chose not to start a bunch of the side quests, but it looks like they won the primary game.
I think this highlights the culturally ingrained measures of success that most of us default to reflexively.
In a world where most of the circumstances around us are out of our control, finding a way to live without falling into victimhood is success by some measures.
Here’s how I think about this: falling into a victim mindset is a good way to stay stuck. Finding a way to avoid this mindset doesn’t guarantee someone will get unstuck, but it increases the odds. And if they stay stuck, they’re only dealing with the circumstance they’re in instead of also dealing with the added layer of psychological distress of victimhood.
I think it’s also critical to still call out fallacious ideas, e.g. being underpaid is a real issue that needs to be solved.
The thing about victimhood is that it primarily impacts the person who engages in the thought patterns and doesn’t actually change the situation for the better. In terms of pure utility, it’s not worth the brain cycles.
This does not mean that the circumstances that lead to the mindset are not serious issues that need to be solved.
Coming from a rich family doesn't primarily make things easy; it nearly eliminates the consequences of risk-taking and allows for failing until you stop failing.
People who aren't wealthy can't take the gambles and risks the wealthy do.
E.g if we plot the range of outcomes for two groups of people, one group embracing a victim mentality and the other not, we'd likely see two power-law curves. However, the curve representing those without a victim mentality would generally trend higher, indicating more positive outcomes.
Applying this to your specific case, if your parents had embraced a victim mentality, there's a likelihood that they would have experienced less success, happiness, etc.
Instead this article is just the assertions of Charlie Munger.
> E.g if we plot the range of outcomes for two groups of people, one group embracing a victim mentality and the other not, we'd likely see two power-law curves. However, the curve representing those without a victim mentality would generally trend higher, indicating more positive outcomes.
What exactly is this based on? Because it _feels_ right? Because it aligns with your own personal beliefs of what makes someone successful?
The article's framing is very clearly "Successful Man has this advice to be successful" but there's no reason given for why this advice is correct in any meaningful way. So, like I said, it might even be good advice, but it's just an appeal to authority. Successful Man said it, and it sounds like common sense, so it must be true.
For all we know, people that feel victimized by a system might be _more_ likely to want to take action to reform the system. There's no data presented, there's just an anecdote about a time when he faced a hardship and didn't adopt victimhood.
How long could Mr. Munger have kept up this belief system had he not met with success. How important was this mindset when compared to the other incredible benefits he received, here's a leg up he had taken from the very beginning of his Wikipedia article.
> Through the GI Bill Munger took a number of advanced courses through several universities.[6] When he applied to his father's alma mater, Harvard Law School, the dean of admissions rejected him because Munger had not completed an undergraduate degree. However, the dean relented after a call from Roscoe Pound, the former dean of Harvard Law and a Munger family friend.
It is quite easy not to adopt a victim mentality when your family friends can reverse a rejection to Harvard Law.
I think the problem comes from the conflict between denying/rejecting victimhood, on the one hand, and realizing that one must get the fuck out of a very, very bad situation immediately, by any means on the other. From what I could tell it quickly becomes an inescapable cycle between "it's always my fault and I'll fix it"-- which implies leaving-- and "I've always been a victim and will always be one"-- which implies staying.
There has to be a big enough window when the person admits to themselves and others that they are unable to get out of the conundrum on their own. And, ironically, that's the the moment when they start to accept help and start living without feeling like such a victim. But that window of opportunity is at odds with "it's always your fault and you just fix it," which strongly implies you and only you fix it. That doesn't leave much/any room to realize just how much you must rely on outside help to get out.
Edit: added to the fact that apparently a lot of people also cycle between getting out of and going back to a bad situation. That makes me think it's less like flipping a bit and more like designing a high-pass filter to attenuate the victimhood frequencies.
So, for example, it's up to you to oppose discrimination via the legal system - it's your fault you're letting them get away with it. It's up to you to organize a union to counter exploitative practices - it's your fault you haven't done that yet.
It's up to somebody to do something - it's up to you. If you're neglected what you can do, it's your fault.
Munger isn't saying it's literally true, but that it is an effective way to face life (this "attitude... works" in the quote).
Asking for help is a perfectly encouraged way of fixing a problem. That's just a modality. You're still taking ownership of the situation and making steps to remedy.
I'd go so far as saying that asking for help is often the quickest and fastest way of fixing an issue. People can't help unless they a) know you need help and b) know what kind of help. Just sitting there fuming in your victimhood won't inspire people to rush over and help.
But I will never get over the hypocrisy of owning a quarter of Coca Cola and constantly criticizing Americans for being overweight (he used words like "sloth").
That's not hypocrisy, that's savvy.
Hypocrisy is an American drinking Coke while complaining about their weight.
Predatory would be investing in Coke, diabetes treatment and weight-loss solutions as a package deal.
A second search with a slightly more specific topic of “weight gain in us immigrants” on DDG was mostly studies (or pages collecting multiple studies) on page 1 of the results.
Person A consumes 2L of Coke every day. Dies an early death at 45 year old. 2L coke is ~$2. From the age of 18 to 45 that person spent $19710.
Person B is good at consuming things with moderation. Drinks one 7.5 oz Coke per week, and lives to the ripe old age of 90. A ten pack of 7.5oz coke is ~$6. That person spent from the age of 18 to 90 about $2252.
You can of course tweak the assumptions, but the thing is sugar doesn't kill anyone that fast. People by and large don't drop dead in years from overconsumption of it.
All your product development is done. You already got it right.
Now your only goal is coca cola displacing a greater and greater quantity of the substances humans put in their bodies.
Every quarter you want that percentage to go up. Maybe public water infrastructure should be looked upon as a competitor.
You think about the future and see vague stormclouds- vitamin supplementation can keep our consumers active a bit longer after the product displaces all sources of nutrition, but there is an absolute limit to how much matter a human can ingest over a given 24h period.
Perhaps a campaign to de-stigmatize public urination. Or maybe theres a way to grow the population…
And there's no reason Coca Cola couldn't diversify away from sugary drinks in the pursuit of growth, exactly as they have been doing for decades. Sugary soda drinks have been a dead-end in terms of growth for a while now. The growth has gone to eg Monster and RedBull et al.
I used to be that way. I'm glad I gave it up.
I drink about one soft drink per year, and it's a Coke. (Which reminds me, I don't think I've had my drink for 2023!)
If all world citizens limited themselves to my rate of indulgence, Berkshire Hathaway's KO stake would be worth quite a bit less.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90740511/heres-what-its-like-liv...
Then I found myself in a windowless room for a day (voluntarily) with a PC and no internet. Literally staring at a wall.
The most productive day I've had in a couple of decades.
And I started to have second thoughts about his dorm plan. Maybe he was on to something.
People work in submarines for 6 months at a time. Humans are adaptable.
Reason being:
>“Our design is clever,” Munger assured skeptics. “Our buildings are going to be efficient.” In addition to cutting costs and foiling potential defenestrations, his design would force students out of their sleeping cubbies and into communal spaces—with real sunlight—where, he said, they would engage with one another.
It seems to me encouraging university students to spend more time alone would be more conducive to getting work done. Overall Munger seemed to have had this notion a lot of old people have that the youth need to suffer because of-course they suffered more.
Munger is an awful person for trying to help students get an education without resorting to crippling debt.
Last I looked, about 9.5% of total EBT/SNAP money for food (that is, money from taxpayers that are supposed to help feed those in need properly) is spent on soft drinks. No person in need, needs soft drinks, especially when we have high rates of diabetes and obesity among the poor.
9.5% of that money being spent on soft drinks is not the problem. The problem is the amount of processed garbage and sugar in most American food.
Buying healthy food is unfortunately a privilege. To have the time to stay fit/healthy (whether going to the gym or taking walks) in this world of processed garbage is a privilege, because time is a precious resource that some people seriously cannot afford.
He's got a point, too. To be a victim is to be helpless, and if you can choose to not see yourself that way, you can at least have some power back.
The reason why people 'choose' to be victims is that it allows collective organization against the thing that has victimized them. This is not helplessness, this is taking power back.
And when people in that situation blame themselves, it is great for abusers but bad for them.
Accepting you're being fucked is the first step to get out of it.
"If you just take the attitude that, however bad it is in anyway, it’s always your fault and you just fix it as best you can – the so-called ‘iron prescription’ – I think that really works."
...does not work for e.g. victims of child abuse. Child abuse is never the fault of the child.
Telling people to stop feeling the way they feel is good for motivational posters, but not something to tell people expecting them to think long and deep about it.
This seems overly strong? To me "victimhood" just implies that you are the recipient of the negative consequences of someone else's actions, it has nothing to do with your response to those actions. You can be a helpless victim and you can be a resistant victim. You can recognize that something is not your fault, and still act to fix it. But simply eating the blame for everything that happens to you will just make you miserable. Healthy self-regard comes from understanding both what is and is not your fault, and what is and is not within your control.
Specifically it's a reality building mechanism where systems that enable harm to occur are shielded from critique in the sense that it renders action against them impotent. Generally, the mechanism is one of individuation of harms. This is most understandable in that victimhood itself is a collective state of being for victims ie: a shared common experience. Share common experiences naturally lead towards systemic-thinking - something we wish to avoid.
What anti-victimhood advocates are doing, whether they know or not, is participating in the creating of a reality where systems which create victims[1] are shielded from systems-level thinking. ie: every case which results in a victim is between individuals.
As a side note: it's incredible weird to participate in a community that advocates for and understands the importance of systems-level thinking but then only applies this to machines rather than social systems.
1. remember that a systems purposes is its consequences
Lots of off campus student housing is still knob and tube wiring in shoddy timber construction.
The reasoning was too encourage people to hang out in common areas to create more of a community feeling. Whether you think that's necessary or a good idea (I went to college long ago, but there wasn't any need to have architecture diving our community), it's not the same as a dorm without windows.
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/10/29/business/ucsb-munger-hall...
> I went to college long ago, but there wasn't any need to have architecture diving our community
Ah, that explains it.
I imagine a few cavemen beating up the first person to build a two story house, because anyone who thinks humans should live off of the ground is not anyone they are interested in taking advice from.
Also, consider that Munger already built a mostly windowless dorm for UofM ~10 years ago, and it is one of the highest rated dorms for the university. And that has fewer affordances for simulating natural light than the UCSB design did.
It oddly makes me feel better and move on with a solution instead of stewing over person X's blunders.
I want to say this position is despicable, but that's not a very charitable reading. But I fail to see how 'making everything your own fault' is in any way a healthy mechanism for dealing with others. Other people DO make mistakes. Other people have loads that they ARE expected to carry. Other people ARE expected to comport themselves a certain way. This not only absolves anyone but yourself of any responsibility to do anything, but it also offers yourself up as a scapegoat to anyone who needs one.
^^^ This! It's only your fault if it's actually your fault - If the blame genuinely lies with someone else, there's nothing left to do but take actions to a) fix it, and b) ensure that it never happens again. Can't rely on others to fix things, because the fact is that most people simply won't even try.
That is a much more charitable interpretation of this idea, and when I look at my own life that's pretty much where I am at. The bar for everyone else is zero. There never seem to be any consequences for others' laziness or stupidity, and the expectation is always that I will fix it. It's not fair of me to expect them to know or care what they're doing, or to fix what they've done, and it's unseemly to complain about it.
That obviously has limits; anything taken literally to an extreme does. For instance, Munger lost a nine year old son to cancer; I doubt he thought "This is my fault, I did this, if only I had acted differently".
The central point of the quote is to believe you have agency. That if you are in a situation you do not like, you can act to get out of it. There are times when this isn't true, but if you act as if it is you'll be more likely to get out of such situations.
And then you have to use human common sense to know when something is literally impossible.
So, back to the example of someone abusive, you might think "it is my fault I am dealing with this person/situation" and consider what actions can get you out. I would distinguish this from victim blaming: First, you are doing it, not an outsider. Second, the point is not to feel shame for yourself, but consider positive actions.
I don't absolve people, I just don't let myself stew over how it's their fault.
I admit that I come at this question from a very bitter place. I have been woken up many, many, many times at 3 AM to deal with a problem that someone else caused, out of sheer laziness or incompetence. Those people suffered no consequences. Had I applied the same level of due care to my own duties in fixing the problem, however, the consequences would have been different, and significant. It is difficult, in such circumstances, not to stew over things a bit.
"What can I do about it?" is the focus. No point obsessing over the other person.
I think that's what Munger was trying to say.
The non-technical manager isn't able to do more to prevent it. Nor is the busy technical manager. The poor performer either isn't able or willing. There's no Superman coming to rescue you. You are the person on the planet who cares the most about the poor performer's effect on your life, and you know the quote about "doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results". The utility of "blame" is questionable, but the choice is only do you consider yourself a victim of the poor performer with nothing you can do and have the same situation happen again and again, or do you recognise that you are in a position to act and prevent it? (If you want, you can then blame your choice not to act, when the situation predictably recurs, I guess).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4AUY-v1nsE - "We are going to have to act, if we want to live in a different world"
This is of course, harder to achieve when you have significant emotional investment in the conflict at hand. Detaching and analyzing yourself, and the situation can be a super power here.
I've just spent the best part of a year in an IOP, unlearning this behaviour, and learning to acknowledge my own pain, trust myself and replacing inner criticism with self-advocacy, and I'm stronger and more effective for it.
The crux of the article is that self-pity is never useful, but it then presupposes that accepting personal responsibility is always useful. Personal responsibility is not the only way to ameliorate the great problems of our life. In fact, for the majority of human history, the idea of pivoting away from self pity from sheer force of will without the help of family and tribe would seem impossible.
Instead of naivly rejecting self pity, I would like a analytical approach to question like
How do we improve our ability to reject self pity? What is the role of social capital in self pity rates? What sociocultural issues have the greatest impact on endowing a sense of self pity? How has self pity been useful for building political movements?
Same thing is going on here. Munger is saying essentially that the past doesn't matter. The situation is what it is and the only thing that matters is what you can do to change it.
Self pity and self blame are just euphemisms for the same emotional context of being down on yourself.
Not really sure he says anything here, leverages swapping one term for another.
It may be consistent within the context of human language but human feelings? How does “self pity” feel different from blaming myself for pitiful state of things as motivation to fix them.
I’m not so sure last century’s rent seeker investors who worm tongued politicians into propping them up are dropping novel nuggets of philosophy.
It's easier to view tragedy as something you can pick yourself up from when massive tragedy aren't mere punctuation points of the constant tragedy that is your own total immiseration.
Feeling like a victim is not the same as wallowing in self-pity. Recognizing that you have been victimized in some way could easily be the first step towards taking ownership of your own circumstances and pushing for their improvement. Moreover, if you are being actively victimized it's probably not healthy in the long-term to pretend like it's "your fault", you're just going to make yourself crazy that way. Taking a clear view of the causes of your current circumstances is the only way you can act effectively, even if those causes are outside your locus of control. Playing these weird heuristic games to avoid "victim mentality" is just as deluded as drowning in "poor me".
There's always things in your control and things out of your control, but the notion of "victim" does zilch to clarify which is which. It's a pointless distraction, a snare for the mind.
Heres an example that I think is likely similar to what OP is imagining when they think of “victim mentality”: say I’m a woman in a technical field who is experiencing misogyny in my workplace. I have several levers available to me: I can quit and seek a new job, I can work harder, I can contact HR, I can confront the misogynist directly, I can request a transfer to another team, etc. But if I simply pretend “it’s my fault” I will likely only recognize the first two as viable options, even if they’re not globally optimal (ex. if the misogynist is in charge of promotions simply working harder will likely not result in the rewards I’m seeking). Observe that in this example I am still keeping the control, and I am emphatically not saying “oh well I guess I’ll never get promoted” and accepting mediocrity. But an honest stock-take of the things within my control, and their likely efficacy at addressing the problem I’m facing, 100% requires the realization that I am being victimized by someone.
I guess it’s some combination of feeling like a victim with a fatalist attitude that’s the real issue.
Yes I 100% think this is the case. Simply creating “awareness” of a social problem, for example, is useless IMO because it leads to fatalism. It needs to be matched with a push to create change. I see this as a major failing of the internet activism of the 2010s, although I support its broad aims. IMO it leaned too hard on classifying and describing various structural inequalities, without really advancing a concrete theory of change. This ultimately squandered the energy it created, leading to this weird situation where much of its sharpest criticisms got swallowed the system and converted into HR platitudes.
did she take the mortgages out of the son's bank or put them in or ... ?
> only judge in a town
> enough money to send all nephews to college
> enough money to literary "save the bank" with nothing but his amateur money lending hobby
checks out the background of everyone who tells others to just "pick themselves up by their bootstraps". Rest in peace.
Reference:
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/warren-buffett-americas-f...
We all have a (larger or smaller amount of) power left inside of us. Being a victim means giving up that power. Don’t. Fight!
This is not the billionaire white guy who can empathize with most people's situation.
Generally speaking, my framework is:
1. I’m NOT a victim.
2. I accept that everything that happens in my life is my fault.
3. I control the controllables; I can’t fix what I can’t control.
4. I must be a problem solver rather than a complainer.
5. Whatever happens in life, I give myself a cap of 48 hours to get over it—this includes being sad, grieving, being unproductive, etc.
I have a few more points in my framework, but these are the key ones.
Now, I want to be clear that you can, in fact, be a victim and things can happen in your life that isn’t your fault, which makes #3 seem a bit contradictory. But if you’re thinking like this, you’re missing the point.
The point is to have a framework that allows you to progress in life without allowing room for excuses.
When my wife first started dating me, she was skeptical of my framework—she said it seemed a bit too robotic. As we’ve gone through stuff life has thrown at us and she watches me fight through it all without ever curling up in a ball, she’s fully on board now.
I say all of this to say: Take control of your life. You can do it and it works.
"It's becoming miserable to work at X because so-and-so is very challenging to work with".
You can't control so-and-so and stewing in this environment while complaining isn't going to help the situation so the only choices are to never bring them up again and be internally miserable or leave. If you leave, the outcome of that might mean you can't pay your bills.
>Now, I want to be clear that you can, in fact, be a victim and things can happen in your life that isn’t your fault
Going to be honest here, I have no idea what you're talking about. Are you saying that people should go through life never feeling like a victim, even if they are one? I don't see how that would be helpful.
>5. Whatever happens in life, I give myself a cap of 48 hours to get over it—this includes being sad, grieving, being unproductive, etc.
You must seriously loathe yourself or live an incredibly sheltered life if you actually follow this (e.g. not just bottling up your emotions and pretending that you're okay). If your dad died, are you seriously just going to take a weekend to try and power through the grieving process? Actually, if you think spending more than 48 hours being unproductive is something that you have to "get over", do you even let yourself have weekends off from work? This is the kind of mindset that leads to people committing suicide.
The belief that you are not a victim is (often) a very useful belief because it prompts change in the only place you're reliably able to produce it: your own decisions. This is true irrespective of whether you're actually a victim today or tomorrow. Obviously if your "I am not a victim" mentality is prompting you not to leave a situation you really should be leaving, then that's a bad application. Note what happened here though: it's not the truthfulness of the belief that changed, it's the usefulness of the belief.
> This is the kind of mindset that leads to people committing suicide.
Citation please? That's an extremely bold claim to be throwing out as established fact.
I figured that this is the angle that he was going for, but I still don't believe it. Feeling like a victim can prompt change as well, and like you said, refusing to feel like a victim can prevent change. It's all about the situation, but I think that refusing to have an honest assessment of your situation will usually cause you to make bad decisions.
> Citation please? That's an extremely bold claim to be throwing out as established fact.
Grieving usually takes at least 6 months[0]. Trying to speedrun the process because you refuse to let yourself feel negative emotions is literally the absolute worst way to deal with loss, to the point that I'm actually surprised that somebody actually just suggested that. Same thing with being unproductive for more than 48 hours. That's a recipe for burnout, and trying to just power through burnout for your entire life without accepting that you might need to rest for a bit will make you feel useless and depressed that you can't reach your absurdly strict self-goals. Self-hatred increases the risk of suicide[1], and I can't imagine that anybody would use this framework unless they despise themselves or have never suffered in their life.
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK66052/
[1] https://www.healthyplace.com/blogs/buildingselfesteem/2018/9...
> Citation please? That's an extremely bold claim to be throwing out as established fact.
I know I’ll probably offend some folks by saying this: This is why everyone seems to expect to be coddled nowadays. Concepts like suicide are used so liberally and flippantly, and worse, they’re even weaponized at times. We’ve gone from vets committing suicide due to PTSD after being in literal war to folks considering suicide as an option the moment they feel the slightest bit of discomfort from life. I think this is really bad for society.
If anything, I think learning how to take full control over your emotions—i.e., the point of my “48 hours” system—can likely actually prevent suicide (this is obviously just my hunch, not based on any studies), because it’s usually (not always) a result of someone losing hope in their ability to control their situation/outcomes and letting their emotions take over. It’s easy to see my system as robotic, but the reality is, the end result is putting the power back in my hands and allowing myself to push through. It’s worked extremely well for me.
Nonsense. It’s actually quite the opposite. I’m a black man who’s been told my entire life that I’m a victim. And to an extent, I was a victim; I grew up in some of the worst environments in America, I’ve been through more trauma—including serious physical violence—than most folks, and my skin color was always my victimhood pass. I’ve been blessed to have had both of my parents married and in my life, and they did their best to teach me to be a responsible person, but everyone else always told me that I had excuses for my issues in life. You know what’s actually destructive? Allowing folks to live in a perpetual state of victimhood. It’s debilitating and renders you powerless. Not allowing myself to be a victim is quite literally the most powerful and life-changing thing to ever happen to me.
Also, it’s not about “pretending” that I’m okay … I am. I’m a realist. I accept that life comes the way it does and figure out ways to move forward despite whatever comes at me. In the grand scheme of things, most of the things we tend to stress ourselves about aren’t actually that deep. And when they are, well, you’re still human, so it’s perfectly reasonable to react accordingly. If someone extremely close to me dies, you’re right, it might take slightly longer than a weekend to get through it, but I’m optimizing for the most likely situations; in my experience, most situations that have folks curling up in a ball aren’t “my dad died” situations.
I agree with this, I’ve seen it play out numerous times. This sort of reasoning barely works on a surface level if at all and requires maintaining at least one giant blind spot — in this case it’s likely impossible to “get over” the intense need for constant unwavering control over one’s internal state that lead to the creation of the 48 hour rule.
The sort of terror underlying the thought of who a person might become if they were to slip up and be sad for three days or two weeks etc. can only be ignored, suppressed or (self)medicated — certainly not “overcome” in that window.
This is, to me, insane. Grief, sadness, anger, etc are not truly within our conscious control. I can't say that I have a study in hand which shows this or anything, but in my own personal experience with them it definitely doesn't seem like a "choice" to feel something. Feeling and actions have mutual influence, but neither fully determines the other. Choosing to be "over it", IMO, is simply denial masquerading as self-control.
To be clear: recognizing the persistence of, say, grief is not at all the same as letting yourself be consumed by it. I think it's appropriate and healthy to set boundaries on the amount of time that you will give energy and attention to an emotion like grief, and making the decision to "move on" is absolutely possible. But to me this must take the form of "I am still feeling X, but choosing not to let my actions be dominated by it", or at the very least the simple "I am still feeling X and that's okay". In my experience people who you instead say "I am no longer allowing myself to feel X" eventually [ex|im]plode. A quote I heard a long time ago that really resonated with me is (something like) "you are not a machine, you are a garden"; my mind doesn't take orders and trying to force it to adopt one state or another will either result in frustration (bad) or deluding myself about my internal emotional state (worse). All I can productively do is provide my mind with the circumstances it needs to develop in a healthy way, and then be patient. In the meantime I can put my best effort into taking healthy and self-caring actions (doesn't have to be sleeping all day, could be taking a class or learning a new skill), without punishing myself for failing these.
I like the idea of having an inspirational quote that shares a premise with a suicide note pinned to the wall, it is very motivating
“Mimic severe mental illness by refusing the nature of reality” is a piece of advice that only a genius could conjure up
Feeling like a victim all the way.
A victim suffers. You aren't allowed to question a claim of suffering.
Therefore a claim of suffering is an axiom.
Axioms are the foundation of (a certain kind of) reality.