Maybe you’re not trying
usefulfictions.substack.com
usefulfictions.substack.com
I wonder how much psychologically we can be more confident and less anxious when we're doing something for others vs ourselves..
The idea, if I understood correctly, is to build this me-mentor more and let it help us feel more safe. Let it support our insecure parts/personas.
(I hope my English isn't too bad)
Things like that seem to be used in at least some schools of psychology.
It reminds me on something my psychologist told me, when trying to find this me-mentor, it can help to take inspiration from someone I find really safe with and trust a lot. Aka someone I have good memories with / of.
In that case, my theory is that you get to shed your learned helplessness about how things look. I suspect it’s similar with giving advice.
I have solved all my issues with doing house chores with wireless headphones, tablet, and youtube @ 2x speed. Sure, it means that I can't load my dishwasher until I find something half-decent to listen/watch but once I do find it, I have 10-50 minutes of just pure closing. Dishwasher loaded, countertops empty, new load of laundry, dry clothes in the closet, gym bag packed, trash taken out. Frankly, kinda enjoy it now.
I like listening to debates since they are the most stimulating. So long as I can find a good one, I’m about to make dinner and unload the dishwasher.
An audiobook that’s good enough can be so captivating that I run out of things to do while listening to it.
I have pretty extreme adhd which might be related. But I’m just glad I bought those headphones back then.
tl;dr you should ask your badass partner for strategic help when the entire galaxy is under threat, even if she seems busy.
Reverend Will Dexter: "You know before I got married Emily he used to come by sometime to help me clean out my apartment well I asked her how come here so he could help clean up my place when your place is just as bad she said because cleaning up your place helps me to forget what a mess I made a mind and when I sweep my floor all I've done is sweep my floor but when I help you clean up your place I am helping you."
“Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.” - Mark Twain
My girlfriend and I both have ADHD and are medicated. I will run laps around her tidying up her place, but struggle at my own place.. its so hard to understand
It takes intimate familiarity to know all of those things about someone.
If you were in their shoes, the problem might genuinely be trivial, for you. Because you're not that person, and that problem isn't your own failure mode - you would instead fail at a different "trivial" problem and in an entirely different way.
Or maybe you are flawed in the same way, but don't know it yet. You never quite know. Humans aren't any good at that whole "self-awareness" thing.
This is accurate. The roadblocks to solving their problem are often several small things completely unrelated to the problem itself.
One mundane reason is that you've probably already solved that problem for yourself.
Almost by definition, the big problems we have are in areas where we're less competent than others.
Like coyotes and wolves, we're wired for life in relatively small tribes where we're caring for one another and pursuing a common purpose.
So, what is to be done?
Since you asked me, you are using the same concept and now I need to help you solve your problem (which seem to be the one I also have..)
I think the solution must be we're primarily responsible for ourselves, and that unless we ask others for help all the time we need to figure things out. I also lately have been thinking from the perspective of the person I'm anxious to interact with, and feel that they may actually be happy to interact with me, receive some warm greeting and help out by answering my question or doing my task.
If you could do something for others but feel anxious doing it for yourself, it must be "in our head" and logically we should be able to get over that and choose to be brave. I think in really it's often missed how we can be brave doing the action if it was for someone else, and that the bravery may actually already be inside us.
This at least is how I think of it now.
If you're visiting someone else, you arrive, and you leave. The helping them clean part has at least some sort of boundaries. Even if you don't finish, you have helped them along.
When you're at home, even if you start, if you leave it halfway, it will be your problem after you stop. And tomorrow still and so on. So it feels more daunting.
When someone asks for advice, I often find if I pay deep attention, that advice is aimed at myself as well. Listen to the advice you give, because often times, the advice giver should follow it as well.
Yet, a study from 2014 showed that seeing your own problem from an outsider view removes the gap between how wisely you think about yourself and how wisely you think about others.
I see three dimensions:
- natural pleasure of helping someone
- ignorance about the problem, making it seems easier
- a saturation aspect: my problem has probably something i've been dealing with for days, my brain is full of unanswered questions about it and has no more "space" for it
Thank you for taking the time to type this up. I would be extremely interested in any sort of research around this and may add( maybe others face the same ) that's incredibly difficult to introspect yourself and solve problems for yourself as easily as you can for others.
The problem with your problem is you have a desired outcome. And the other is you are not required to do the heavy lifting.
One method is to find a way to bless "future me". Future me will thank current me sometime in the future and while current me won't enjoy future me's rewards directly, he will think kindly, instead of with contempt.
We have to choose what to 'deal with' and our capacity for that and awareness of it can change over time.
I also think this goes along with the author's concept of you're not trying since you can kind of snap into awareness and then just do those things sometimes.
When it’s maladaptive (ignoring a serious red flag in a relationship, or not fixing that pinhole in the roof before it causes major damage in the house!), it leads to other serious problems and long term costs.
The biggest challenge in life is having the capacity to understand when it is going too far in the bad direction, and doing something about it before it tips over into overwhelm/overload.
I once broke an ankle badly and were on crutches + stabilizer boot for three months. I could mostly only use one hand if standing (other was holding crutches).
It took me weeks to notice all the things I didn’t do any longer because it was painful and/or difficult. Like just making a cup of coffee in the morning (and I LOVE coffee!).
Activities were aborted before making any conscious decision to not do them. I recognized the same pattern in my father some years later when he was temporarily in a wheelchair.
1. put up a whiteboard somewhere
2. observe with some regularity what your routines are right now (non-judgmentally)
3. write them down (descriptively, not prescriptively)
4. update over time
Then you'd get the chance to notice your routines changing.
I once worked with a guy who was a grandmaster at finding rational explainations of why they needed to do the thing that clearly was bad for them. He was overweight, but every time he ate both extremely unhealthy and much next to us he would explain how his body needs that because he would get a bad mood etc. His excuse not to make sports was some sports accident he had 30 years ago as a 18 years old (a medical condition I happened to knew very well because my marathon-running brother had it as well). For every other sport he also had some excuse, be it cost, traffic, weather, other people doing it being douchebags or whatever. This went all the way to making up a medical condition that gave him a excuse why he cannot visit his estranged child.
This guy had an absolutely phenomenal skill level when it came to self deception. And it only became better when his overweight led to a medical condition and his doctor hammered home that he is going to die if he continues on at this path.
Just because you're not emotionally ready to do something doesn't mean you're not trying enough. I feel like we tend to downplay the role of luck in emotions and mind. Like "of course you could be more confident, agentic, assertive, etc. YOU are not doing enough of that". But if you physiologically or materialistically go through a bad patch with respect to health or resources people "get it". If you are not physically gifted to play a certain sport people "get it". But if you're not mentally gifted to be "agentic" it's YOUR responsibility. Don't know why this expectation was set. Same way how mental health has been a stigma and still somewhat is, but if you have a physiological disease it's OK, not your fault.
We all just write advice looking backwards. People who are lucky enough to have the perfect combination of circumstance and mindset to think that agency is all you need write that way.
The author specifically addressed this.
> My approach [...] was the only one that seemed available given my spiritual and psychological resources at the time. But my orientation to the problem became fixed in time at that point of low agency, and it never occurred to me to revisit it as my capacity for action increased.
They acknowledged that one's capacity to Actually Try is sometimes limited. The article is about getting stuck in that mindset and assuming you're still limited, even when you do later have the emotional resources to bear against the problem.
The failure mode is when someone starts seeing almost everything as totally out of their control, even when it’s not.
When I was doing volunteer mentoring it was a common scenario for people to request help for their hopeless situation at work, then to resolve it through the simplest suggestions like “Have you tried talking to them?” Gentle questions like “What did they say when you asked them about it?” would reveal that most of the hopeless situations were only assumed to be hopeless or out of their control.
That’s not to say that every situation is in your control. However I’ve talked to enough people who erroneously underestimate their agency or control over situations to always question it on a situation by situation basis.
Some times it takes external encouragement to realize that a situation is not actually out of control or hopeless.
When you were doing good you were sure it was your fault, but when you were doing bad you were sure that it was not your fault.
Do you see how that sounds?
Millionaire who believed he could go from homeless to $1m again in 12 months as an experiment (with advantages) with something more or less like agency alone.
I find that this happens when I want to do something The Right Way, but don’t have a clear path, nor the energy to figure one out.
For example I want a nice winter wardrobe, but first I have to figure out what I like, what is trendy, where to buy it, what will suit the weather. I am wholly unprepared for it. Suddenly it’s a whole ordeal, so I just wait.
In another category - art - I had to learn to be okay with suboptimal outcomes. Each attempt teaches you something, so to make good art, you have to make a lot of bad art first. Paper is cheap and making bad art is fun once you move past perfectionism.
Socialising is the same. You get better at it through practice. Practice is fun, it makes you do fun things and meet fun people.
With “shopping problems”, you are stuck with your bad purchases, your suboptimal wardrobe. Each iteration is expensive in time and money. So you try to get it right the first time. Cue weeks of research for something that is ultimately not that important. The worst is shopping problems that have an element of taste.
If someone knows a way to deal with this, I am listening.
Also recognize you're engaging in the sunk cost fallacy by keeping clothes you don't actually want, and you're making the world better by allowing it to go to an owner who would better appreciate it.
Some more concrete ideas:
1. thrift stores
2. clothes rentals
3. clothing swaps
4. Buy the cheap version of what you think you might like (if it exists) first before buying the expensive version
5. Don't make your entire wardrobe trendy clothes. Make most of it relatively classic / basic and limit "trendy" to a subset of items.
Not for all of us, though. For some, socializing is considerable pressure.
I think that the core problem was similar: I was willing to make an effort, but did not have a clear idea of how to do it.
For me, I've taught myself to socialize, but it takes lots of masking to do so, which means lots of energy, and failures are pretty hard on me.
For the same reason, if it weren't for digital cameras, I never would have taken enough pictures to become competent enough to enjoy photography.
I am also all ears about anyone chiming in with an effective way to deal with shopping problems. Sometimes, I've found that what it takes is Gemini to restate what I already knew to be the conclusion but without my mental processing of trying to falsify it (Gemini, unlike real humans, doesn’t get overloaded and shut down when I ask rapid-fire advice questions).
My friend also taught me to slowly gather an inspiration folder with things I like. I have one for clothing, home decor and art. It made my job much easier.
I have filled a shopping cart with clothes I have seen on others in the last few months. It wasn’t that hard. I was just set in my ways.
I recently had a similar issue with the wardrobe. I've been bedridden for an extended period of time and lost a lot of weight in the process. As a result, I had to replace every basic piece of clothing, both indoors and outdoors - things either didn't fit or were too worn. I still didn't feel too good to go shopping around town so I had to order online. On top of that, I was short on money. With little room for error, the task felt daunting, to say the least. Couldn't get around it for a while.
Long story short, I solved the shopping problem by figuring out how to sell the old things first. That helped me with both getting the old pile of crap off my mind as well as moving forward with the new purchases without the fear of unrecoverable losses. Now purchasing clothes feels less like gambling and more like something I can be in control of. The stars don’t have to align the first time, but eventually, they will.
Don't do the research yourself, pay a specialist instead. Missing a winter wardrobe? Find a personal stylist (okay, requires some research to find, but much less than finding fitting wardrobe yourself). They will guide the shopping process, the outcome is most likely better than what you can come up with even with weeks of research. Costs a pretty penny, might feel funny, but it's effective.
Not happy with your art? Get a personal tutor for drawing. Learning a language, but struggling with it? Tutor it is. Learning is so much faster with personalized feedback and accountability, a good tutor provides both.
I would frame it more like: just because you have tried and failed doesn't mean you can't succeed, even if you have failed again and again and again. Circumstances change. New solutions become available. New resources or new insights present themselves. Sometimes just doing nothing and letting time pass actually produces progress. But the only thing that guarantees failure is to give up altogether.
She did ask for help (more accurately, she accepted help from a trusted source). That was what made the difference. Someone came in with a new approach vector.
She sounds like a fairly remarkable person, so failure isn’t necessarily an indication of incompetence. Rather, it can be an issue of approach. We can get fixated on a particular workflow.
Humans are a social animal. We’re not built to “go it alone,” and that’s really our “secret sauce.” The whole can be greater than the sum of the parts.
“It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not weakness, that is life.” Jean-Luc Picard
Competition is many times about challening yourself, failing, learning from that failure, and eventually succeeding.
Getting better comes from collaborating:
- Being attentive to your practice (i.e. recording, going over your work, etc.)
- Asking, and taking the advice of other people in your field (i.e. find places where there are people older than you who have done the same tasks, and consult with them)
- Being exposed to diversity of thought (i.e. teams more diverse in culture, race, and gender, consistently come up with a better array of solutions — this directly benefits you, helps you think along alternative dimensions and perspectives, exposes errors you may have encoded)
- With art, taking on voluntary restrictions to inspire you — art prompts, game jams, etc.
Sure, some of these can be framed as competition — maybe you might frame being attentive to your practice as competing with your past self, and taking voluntary restrictions as competing with the others in the game jam or whatever — but I very, very much prefer to frame them as collaborating — in a solo practice session, you're collaborating with yourself to find the flaws and fix them, in a game jam session, you're collaborating with those around you to produce lots of interesting and good art.
In many cases, you literally cannot improve without depending on the advice of those around you — another perspective, a second pair of eyes, the well-worn advice of the 40yro burned out techies. Framing those as competition will actively just burn you out, in the end (or otherwise people will pick up on it and be less likely to help you, lol).
If you practice the same thing over and over, you won't get better. If you fail, figure out what you did wrong, and improve, that's competition.
"Asking, and taking the advice of other people in your field"
I will agree with you here.
"teams more diverse in culture, race, and gender,
'diversity of thought' has nothing to do with race, gender, or culture. I've found that many companies will use inferior ideas just to say that they are 'diverse'.
You also have to be careful, because when you take too many ideas from people that lack experience/expertise, you have to tune out the noise.
I do agree you need to get a wide array of ideas, though, regardless of race, culture, or gender.
"in a game jam session, you're collaborating with those around you to produce lots of interesting and good art."
This isn't competition, and there is a place for it..but this isn't really what we are discussing.
"another perspective, a second pair of eyes, the well-worn advice of the 40yro burned out techies"
Most learning like this happens if you get stuck on something and don't want to spend lots of time on it (although failing until you succeed will allow you to learn 5X more).
However, to take what you learned and actually improve, takes competition.
I very much disagree, it's a collaboration between yourself now, yourself in the past, and yourself in the future. You aren't competing with your older self, you can only improve by setting up recording and measurements, and doing analysis — all of that requires cooperation and is fundamentally collaborative.
> 'diversity of thought' has nothing to do with race, gender, or culture.
It absolutely does. Each of those represent social and psychological constraints on what solutions you are able to find and broach based on your identification of each. Each of those represent how you are treated differently within society, which limits or defines your experiences, which is a part of shaping how you think, which in turn limits the solutions visible to you. There's nothing wrong with this, and it's perfectly normal, but it is important to get a broader sampling across these points in order to arrive at the best decision. If your circle consists of entirely cis, white men, then you're making the same sampling bias that has led to thousands of small university studies being rejected.
A very real example of this is the way we look at deer. For decades, it was assumed by the men that studied in the field, that deer groups have a leader that decides where they go, because when the "leader" sets off to a new location, they all look towards the leader and follow them. It took a woman entering the field as a scientist and doing more observations to realise that actually that leader was more or less just a deer chosen to tally the vote — they all look in the direction they want to go, but one deer is nominated by the group to tally the votes and acts on the consensus of the group. The hundred-odd men, probably more, that had done studies of deer before that point had been so hierarchically minded that they hadn't considered an alternative explanation, which made them blind to the actual behaviour of the deer.
It's a quaint example, but there are millions of examples just like this one, where taking a statistical sampling of people within one race, gender, or culture ultimately skews the possible result space. And that's important for keeping an open mind and being able to explore the total result space.
> This isn't competition, and there is a place for it..
Many people treat game jams as competitions! Ludum Dare (the OG game jam) was explicitly called a "competition" and had winners, and runner ups, and such; however, by approaching a game jam in that way you lose a lot of what makes them fun and worthwhile experiences — namely, collaboration!
> Most learning like this happens if you get stuck on something and don't want to spend lots of time on it (although failing until you succeed will allow you to learn 5X more).
I disagree with both of these points. Back when I was employed in tech in my mid-20s, I would regularly run ideas I'd had past a group of 30 - 60yro people who were (racially-diverse, gender-diverse) tech leads, programmers, etc. It was a huge, huge boon to my abilities, and allowed me to hone a sense of what was worthwhile to pursue, what was a dead-end, etc. along with honing my skills for being able to look at things from a new angle. That, along with pouring over the c2wiki as a teenager (and thus reading the OG discussions about technologies that are commonplace today, from the people who were major players in the invention and adoption of those technologies) were amazing for expanding and refining my perspective and "approach to problems" toolbox. I cannot recommend this enough, and at no point did it involve competition :)
It does contribute to the fact that I haven't achieved greatness, but I have no regrets, and haven't done badly, despite that. It's not weakness, as some folks have found out, over the years.
When I "win," then someone else "loses." I have a problem with that.
Why do you say that? What kinds of “greatness” are you thinking about? Does that mean money, or fame? Why does someone have to lose?
I’m also a bit allergic to competition, but I want to respectfully disagree with this idea that greatness is somehow zero-sum. There’s an enormous number of ways you can “win” without someone else losing anything, so much so that non-competitive “wins” are a regular part of speech. WinArmy on YouTube comes to mind as a stupid example. :P “Win” in that case can mean skilled or lucky.
Making a lot of friends is a win, one where everyone wins. Being a great artist or philosopher or anthropologist is a form of greatness that helps everybody and hurts nobody. Discovering the cure for a disease is greatness.
Even making money, if that’s considered greatness, doesn’t necessarily come at the cost of someone else. If you’re the person in a company who helps make a better product, better marketing, more sales, or any decisions that result in more money in the door, you can make more money for yourself and make more money for everyone around you too. It doesn’t need to come at a loss for the customers either, your product can be positive value for them after paying for it, and in some cases can earn them money. Even the economy isn’t zero-sum.
I guess that I term it in the value system represented by a majority of folks, hereabouts.
In my own universe, I drew the golden ticket.
It is sometimes useful to get outside input or take a break and wait for new circumstances.
Not going to lie, it is also very possible a husband going to law enforcement gets taken more seriously than a woman reporting stalking.
It's like the fly who keeps buzzing at the window pane instead of giving up to fall six inches to the open windowsill.
What has worked for me is getting ahead of my brain and setting myself up for success before it gets there.
I’ve also completely given up on the idea of thinking before speaking. My solution for this is anticipating mistakes before I get into a conversation and not making the same mistake twice.
How is that not thinking before speaking?
It’s mental training done days or weeks before an event, not hours.
During conversations my short-term memory is frequently overloaded to the point I miss words people are saying. There is no room to actively remember what not to say.
Its an easy trap to fall into to say that people are in hard situations because They Arent Trying Hard Enough.
Your manager might think so.
Your company probably thinks youre not trying hard enough.
…but, there is a also reality, which is overloading people with impossible expectations and then watching them fail isnt helpful.
Its not a learning experience.
Its just mean, and selfish… even when those expectations are, perhaps, self imposed.
If youre in one of these situations, you should ask for help.
If you see someone in them, you should offer to help.
Its well documented that gifted children struggle as adults because they struggle under the weigh of expectations.
The soltuion to this is extremely rarey self reflection about not trying hard enough.
Geez. Talk about setting people up for failure.
The OP literally succeeded by asking for help, yet somehow, walked away with no appreciation of it.
I have a kid going thru this right now. It’s very disheartening and frustrating to see, because even with coaching and help, they don’t see the help and suggestions as solutions because they simply can’t see it. And as a parent you don’t want to have to intervene, you want them to learn how to dig their way out of it. But it’s tough to get them to dig when they don’t believe in shovels.
You might think this contrived, but when people tell you over and over that you’re not trying hard enough because of things you can’t control, you internalize it.
To me — someone who has to ask for help — it seems like that she didn’t really notice that help was the thing that helped.
Brilliant.
> We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them
[1] https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/7751/did-einstein-sa...
I also think it's unkind not to recognize that we have limited time and energy and it's simply not possible to address everything all at once.
IMO the better takeaway is to learn to admit when we're doing that (deprioritizing a problem we don't have the resources to address,) rather than pretending there is no choice, so it occurs to us to revisit the problem if and when there are the resources to do so. My personal approach to this would be to add it a todo list with no assigned due date.
Also, I don't know who the author is talking about, but when I read:
"These are people who could successfully launch a product in a foreign country with little instruction, but who complain that there aren’t any fun people to meet on the dating apps."
I hear someone who maybe isn't valuing romantic relationships but also views admitting that as socially taboo, so they come up with an excuse for why they're not in a relationship. I don't necessarily perceive someone who isn't applying agency to all areas of their life.
What a cruel time for experimenting on animals the 1960s were...
A lot of productivity writing has the frame "trust me, I was incorrigible and this system worked for me. If it worked for me it will work for you."
None of those systems ever worked for me. I worried about learned helplessness. I worried that imposter syndrome was actually just me being an imposter. I worried I wasn't trying hard enough, and spent enormous effort trying every idea I could: meditation, delegation, therapy, coaching, exercise, diet, sleep, prayer, etc., etc., on and on.
After DECADES of stress and pain it turned out to be a dopamine deficiency. Contemporary medication addressed this for me, quickly and effectively.
I am currently on the lowest commercially available dose of a time release methylphenidate, with a dosage pattern that mitigates this long term falloff in most people.
What has been most meaningful to me is the sense of hope both the diagnosis itself and the medication bring.
Sometimes one is trying, and is working hard enough, but is climbing higher mountains than other people while wondering why none of the online mountaineering advice makes sense.
Sometimes one needs an oxygen tank.
And what is such a pattern, if you could be so kind?
The gist of it is that the person who wins is often not the one who wants to win the most, it's the person who wanted to lose the least.
Depending on where you live, small claims can have many routes (this is good), the default is to have your case heard by a judge while you are unrepresented by a lawyer (most likely). However due to the large amount of cases and the fact that your case has very low value, the courts may push you to other routes. One route is mediation, I have been to two-forced mediation sessions and each time the opposing side states at the top they have no intent of make a deal. The second mediation the lawyer was still hostile from the start and threatened to have me pay their legal fees. This rattled me and made me reconsider my actual case. I needed clarification. I found a lawyer referral service provided by the state with a 30 minute consultation, that was affordable ($35) and even though I wasn't looking for representation it offered me a chance to have someone give me advice on the latest updates. A lawyer helped me out but not before immediately rejecting me after seeing the small amount and the small claims case information. I had to reach out again and explain that I didn't really need their representation but to weigh the threat of legal fee retaliation (though honestly what judge would allow that to happen?).
I ultimately think if we had better civics education people wouldn't feel so helpless. This entire small claims process has revealed how difficult it can be to find legal advice and how often that uphill battle can be once you're up against an opponent. It is always easier to walk away than make arguments legally you don't really know or have to get assistance. We need to start teaching civics in schools at a young age or people will feel more and more trapped by the technology they use and less empowered by the rights they have.
In the example the author gives, her husband did not have that inaccurate, yet reasonable perception, and only in hindsight does the author realize her own inaccurate perception.
I cannot recommend that readers take the author's advice to heart as carelessly as she presents it. There is some merit to it, but there are sometimes real consequences when you try when your perception was accurate that you shouldn't have, and you have carelessly misread your increase in capacity, especially if you are desperate for it.
Yet, when she told her friends, they did NOT suggest such actions. They too felt like there was nothing that could be done.
Rather I'd posit that the actions the husband did seemed obvious to the author in hindsight, and that not everyone would easily identify those kinds of actions. We are used to hearing narratives that people in other countries are relatively untouchable (eg scams), so there's already a kind of learned helplessness there.
Given that context especially, I was surprised she didn’t hand over the problem to her husband earlier. Any time some kind of bureaucratic process is required my wife and I usually involve the other person. But neither of us are public like that and she’s not been stalked like this so who can tell.
But after the brother extortion at least you have to tell your husband imho. It means that there’s a bigger blast radius now.
Unsurprisingly, these things are hard to handle solo. I would struggle too. But I think most married people would lean on their partners to solve it for them.
Perhaps as public figures this kind of stuff happens to them often and so the escalation point is never obvious like it is to private people like me.
On another note, this is a bit hard to believe:
"extorted money from my brother by spoofing my phone number and pretending to have kidnapped me."
Having studied jung some time and having extensive meditative practice from this essay I'd conclude with 95% certainty that she permitted this to happen for personal reasons. Stalking is horrible but you know what's worse than being stalked? Loneliness. Individuated attention is incredibly rare to come by in today's world so when someone receives it, the feeling of being special is hard to push away.
Big kudos btw to both her and her husband. I read their writing from time to time and I've never read anything from either that wasn't brutally honest and packed with deep insights.
It's basically a physical approach to applying agency rather than a rational one. Agency becomes a paint sprayer and you spray it everywhere. Your agency expands in all directions. It's pretty great.
I appreciate your insight.
Here’s an interview where he describes a bit about his meditation practice. The entire video is worth a watch, but for the sake of brevity, I have linked directly to the timestamp referenced.
I really enjoyed this article and it really resonated with me, which made me wonder if it is actually an evolutionarily selected solution in a way - like that ignoring something turns out to be a surprisingly effective form of triage for many situations? Obviously the cases where this doesn’t hold are what the article is addressing but I found it fascinating to think about why that approach might be so common.
Imagine trying to be conscious about every life situation and to "actually try" to do what's best every single time. How much effort this would take? So, we develop habits instead. Maybe the question is how to place the cursor between relying on habits and consciously trying. How to develop the internal mechanism to detect the condition when "actually trying" is better in long term than falling back to a habit? How to even define this condition?
It is reductive, but also a new perspective from which to see ourselves.
The peak level of this is when you deliberately don't put in the effort to change aspects of how you approach a problem, because making the problem easier to solve would make it feel like you're cheating at solving the problem. And that somehow the effort of solving something in the fundamentally wrong/high effort way makes you more valuable as a person than the people who find an approach that isn't beating your head against a wall
Even though, weirdly, simultaneously you hold the cognitive dissonance of the fact that you don't actually judge people who do attempt to solve their problems more healthily, and actively give the advice of doing that to friends
There are irreducible dimensions of life where one shouldn’t accumulate debt, otherwise they come bite you when you’re vulnerable or they could make you vulnerable, which will end up affecting your productivity at work to say the least.
That's why I go out of my way to dunk on people who treat “try things” and “hard work” as useful advice. What you work hard on matters. If they wanted respect, they ought to have had the honesty to admit they do not have specific advice for you (or lack the time to help).
People willing to both try things and work hard are much more likely to discover a good solution.
For me, this is the standout line right there. It just so happens that for some reason we determine these limits for ourselves and operate within them. So you have a feeling of doing all you can, but you are still operating within the self-imposed limits.
"What is the best thing to work on?"
"What is the next thing I should do?"
It seems ridiculous and sort of passive.
It's like "a goal without a plan is just a wish"... Well I have wishes, and I need a plan.
Does anybody else find this strange? There's this person whose name you don't even know, but somehow you know who his old friends are? This is not a situation I'm familiar with.
You left out the adverbial phrase. The whole sentence is
> When he reached out to my company six months later to apply for a job, I learned his real name and used it to track down an old friend of his to ask for help — but the friend told me he was afraid to intervene because he didn’t want to become a target himself.
When the stalker applied for a job, additional details may have become available to the OP, potentially including personal references (i.e. "old friend".)
The sentence is a bit ambiguous but that's what seems to make the most sense to me.
you DESERVE misery. If you are suffering, then you are the cause.
I feel I should hate this line of thinking... But it's too common. I can't hate all of humanity. Instead, I know to fear others. I know to never ask for help. This belief is so common that to do otherwise is self destructive.
If you had gone to the police they would have blamed you.
Your husband resolved it because it wasn't "his" problem. He didn't "cause" it so could not be blamed. Because as far as everyone else is concerned, the reason you had that problem was because "you weren't trying"
it's not true.
The husband was the social proof that this random junkie woman who's complaining about a guy on the opposite side of the planet was worth taking seriously. She might not have wanted to go to the cops because she didn't want to go to them, have them laugh it off and then feel both powerless and humiliated, and the conclusion is that another person who then manages the difficulty isn't even trying? Maybe not, but that's a different think from deciding that they aren't doing it because they're stuck in some old mindset.
The other example she gives is this: "These are people who could successfully launch a product in a foreign country with little instruction, but who complain that there aren’t any fun people to meet on the dating apps." Like, girl, it's not up to you whether or not there are any cool people on dating apps. There's a selection bias of who gets on dating apps going on here. You can do everything within your power and Actually Try all you want to have it be another way, but you can't really force cool people to socialize in the way that you want them to. It could be the case that there really is no one cool on those dating apps, because social climate being the way that it is means that no one feels comfortable showing their whole, unvarnished, "cool" selves and the coolest people are hidden.
At what point is someone "Actually Trying"? Is it once they've succeeded? This feels like the self help, "The Secret", "Girl, Wash Your Face" of previous eras but dressed up in the language of people who use terms like "non-zero probability", "priors", and "local optimum". The takeaway should not be that someone shouldn't try, but that the serenity prayer's most difficult part is the "wisdom to know the difference". She had the power to change this, but the wisdom to know the difference here was not guaranteed. It would be a kinder message to everyone who is in a tough spot to at least acknowledge that having a husband to vouch for her, with connections, free time, and a motivated reason to help out kind of changes to what extent she personally could be responsible for Actually Trying.
"Are you sure you aren't just having trouble?"
Similar concept imo.