I've always noticed that when I'm giving advice to someone or trying to help out, it always feels their problem is easier than whatever problem I have. As someone with some anxiety around things like calling some company to get something done or asking a random stranger for some help in a store, I would gladly do it if it was to help someone else (family member or friend). But when it's for me I find it harder.
I wonder how much psychologically we can be more confident and less anxious when we're doing something for others vs ourselves..
People in the ADHD community are outspoken about a tangential concept: cleaning. Cleaning your friends place is a fun, novel, non-emotional activity. Cleaning your own space is a mental slog, boring and often painful due to having to rid yourself of mementos.
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.
This is ozempic territory: a technical solution to your own shortcomings is most effective.
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.
"other people's same problem easier" i see, but have never seen messiness as example at least in communities w adhd comorbid with depression. personally the concept of other people cleaning my private mess, even/especially if they are close family/friends is terrifying and already overloads my head and i can only project the same sentiment (and some extrapolation of my own experience helping friends/family with cleaning... it is super hard, we are talking about intruding on what the person values as trash or not trash, and that itself can be a source of great shame i.e. my mother who lived to much worse abject poverty than the children she helped raise with a better life. sorry for being dramatic about an otherwise straightforward point but yes in my experience that "cold" reduction of the problem into something actionable would be key, though people arrive there differently i noticed, e.g. me and my "armchair courage" that any unseen sideeffect is not my problem, for my mom (okay sometimes for me as well) it is about being able to forget that she has problems just by the appearance of having the luxury to give advice
A line I always remember (from Babylon 5) is: "When I clean my place, all I've done is clean my place. But when I help you clean your place, I'm _helping you_."
tl;dr you should ask your badass partner for strategic help when the entire galaxy is under threat, even if she seems busy.
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
What's the opposite? Where solving your problems is easy and but solving your friend's problems are very difficult because your advice are never relevant?
This is something I've noticed as well. I've talked about this with my psychiatrist and she calls this brave, reassured version of ourself the "me-mentor" (jag-mentor in Swedish). Similar to our inner child, this is a core part of our who we are.
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.
Somewhat related, a psychologist I talked to in the 2000s said she really liked the Patronus concept in the Harry Potter books. You imagine an entity that's fueled by your positive memories and emotions, and that protects you from certain anxieties and other stressors.
Things like that seem to be used in at least some schools of psychology.
When trying to examine someone else's problems, you can see the problem itself. But what you aren't seeing is a pile of all the little habits, beliefs, behaviors, impulses and assorted mind defects that prevented them from solving it in the first place.
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.
> When trying to examine someone else's problems, you can see the problem itself. But what you aren't seeing is a pile of all the little habits, beliefs, behaviors, impulses and assorted mind defects that prevented them from solving it in the first place.
This is accurate. The roadblocks to solving their problem are often several small things completely unrelated to the problem itself.
The opposite conclusion is that you are more risk-taking when it comes to dictating the actions of others, because neither their gains nor their losses directly accrue to you. But human beings feel loss aversion more keenly than they desire gain, so this biases the advice you would give others (but not yourself) riskier in general.
I think this is exactly it. It's easy to see that there's a chance to improve things while ignoring the ways it could make things worse when they won't affect you.
Should you quit the job you don't like? "Of course" the friend will say. But then you might just end up with a job you hate more that pays less, or even no job.
Whether the outside perspective is helpful probably depends on how much your own perception deviates from reality. Though people do have a tendency to prefer the status quo until things change, so maybe you should always prefer the "change" option when you aren't sure.
This phenomenon is called "Solomon’s Paradox" - People think more clearly about other people’s problems than their own. When facing their own issues, they reason less rationally.
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 imagine it has to do with vulnerability. When you are asking for something or sharing something, being turned down feels personal. When doing it for someone else, it's no big deal if they say no.
> I've always noticed that when I'm giving advice to someone or trying to help out, it always feels their problem is easier than whatever problem I have.
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.
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.
Probably because our desire to help and not let down a person we care about gives us courage. That courage serves as motivation to go outside our comfort zone.
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.
It's something I've been wondering about for a long long time. Thanks for bringing up the question. Sometimes my problem-of-the-day is not even that hard but I have near zero drive to finish it, but if anybody comes with an issue, I then feel motivated (up until I realize his/her issue was hard I guess).
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
>I wonder how much psychologically we can be more confident and less anxious when we're doing something for others vs ourselves
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.
This is a fascinating phenomenon, isn't it? I've heard it invoked as "it's always easier to clean someone else's room." And anxiety does seem to be the key. Very often the actual blocker isn't the difficulty of a task, but how we relate to it.
I find the same thing between doing something entrepreneurial vs. doing it for work. If my boss tells me to call a customer, I will have no problem doing it. Calling for my side hustle......way more anxiety.
I'm sure there's a proper name for what you described, but I call it Rip van Winkle syndrome. He helps everyone in the town with their needs, while allowing his own property to fall to ruin.
That's why it's good to have close friends so that we don't have to be perfect ourselves in all respects in our private lives... humans are a political animal after all
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 is an idea that philosophers have played with in countless varieties, perhaps the one closest to the author's wording is Jean-Paul Sartre's concept of bad faith. Faced with anxiety, guilt or overwhelming weight of responsibility, it's often easier to subconsciously sidestep the problem and pretend you don't have a choice, even if you do. This is not even a conscious decision, it's hard to be aware of our own quirks and biases.
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.
When it’s adaptive (stepping around or over a pothole that you have neither the power nor incentive to fix), it’s what we do with 95%+ of all our input.
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 think it makes sense in the same way we blot out our awareness of 90% of the external stimuli -- There is just too much of it.
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.
Sounds to me like this "bad faith" mechanism has been weaponized, and is literally how the public is controlled in the United States, maintained in a state of apathy towards the violation of everything the nation claims as a core value.
Paradoxically some things with human bodies work like that: Back pain? One of the best ways of usually getting rid of it is using your back more and building muscle.
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.
I have some qualm with "agency is important" type thinking because when I was in a good situation in life with "moderate" difficulty which I overcame I called it me being agentic. However, when I was in situations in life which were bad and totally out of my control and to the best of my ability I couldn't come out of them, I realized it's pretty much all just luck and circumstance.
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.
> However, when I was in situations in life which were bad and totally out of my control and to the best of my ability I couldn't come out of them, I realized it's pretty much all just luck and circumstance.
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.
> Just because you're not emotionally ready to do something doesn't mean you're not trying enough
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.
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.
There are agentic ways to submit to the journey even if it’s going to suck for a while and there’s no apparent end in sight. Gratitude. God. Whatever. Lots of people submit by withering away and letting their emotions take them down a path of steady erosion. That is not high agency.
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.
With clothes, make it cheap so if you make the wrong decision it's not a big deal.
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.
I've found that thinking about complex problems as finding a way to enable iteration helps a lot. First off, anxiety-wise, it's much easier to think about the iteration rather than the bigger problem. And while working your way towards iteration, you also begin to tackle the bigger problem from different angles. That itself is valuable, but you also get a bit of much needed desensitization as well as some small victories which yield the mental resources to ultimately help you get yourself together.
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.
It is for me too, but in the end, practice made it so much easier. It took years and some guidance from a therapist, but it worked. “I want to meet more people” was one of those problems that took me year to properly work on.
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.
I had unexpected amounts of fun at long multi-day raves. You get into altered mental states (even without substances) and don't have to talk to people but also you can.
Assuming you earn enough, throw money at your problems. Many problems can be solved, or made significantly easier by money.
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.
> 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.
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).
Writing that comment got me to try Zalando, instead of slowly mapping out and visiting every store in my city. Maybe I wasn’t trying correctly.
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.
Isn't there a website that picks your clothes out for you and you send back what you don't like? If you're not actively paying attention to fashion maybe outsource this one.
I think the "maybe you're not actually trying" framing is not very constructive. The author did try, making decisions and taking actions that seemed appropriate for her situation at the time. The problem was that because her attempts to solve the problem failed -- again and again and again -- she stopped trying. Which is a not-entirely-unreasonable thing to do.
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.
That’s a great point, and was how I felt about it, after reading the article.
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.
My therapist calls this "touching the hot stove". When you put a lot of effort into a problem and fail over and over, your mind "gives up" as a protective measure. You can drive yourself crazy trying to push forward and find a solution in a straight line.
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.
The other side of that is that sometimes you just can't win, no matter what. You may end up wasting your life trying and trying anyway. Recognizing when to stop trying is just as important, I think.
That is an excellent point. Recognizing and accepting things you can't control is a critical life skill. But either way, "Maybe you're not trying" is not a helpful framing.
My life got infinitely easier when I realized the normal way of doing things will never work for me. Even with medication, my brain is too broken to have discipline. I can’t form new habits by repeatedly doing something. Flat out doesn’t work.
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.
It seems that the author balked at a rather specific level of action: getting government agencies involved. I feel there might be more the author could say about this aspect of the event, though she is not, of course, under any obligation to do so.
I found this helpful in the context of the author’s other work. “Maybe you can try a different way” feels less useful than “if you really, really wanted to do this, what would you do that you’re not doing right now”? Even though they’re effectively the same thing, I can usually think of an answer to the second question quickly. It reminds me of Mr Krabs having to let go of the dime.
This was sort of my takeaway too. The OP got help from someone else and thought to herself “if only I’d tried harder I could’ve done this on my own”. That doesn’t seem like a healthy takeaway.
I didn’t take it that way at all. I took it as “I was blinded from the actual solution because my vision was artificially narrow due to my past experiences with this person.” They didn’t ask for help, their partner intervened for them with a completely different and more direct approach.
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.
> It seems like, by default, you are stuck with whatever level of resourcefulness you brought to a problem the first time you encountered it and failed to fix it.
Since I assume you would be interested to know, this quote seems almost certainly misattributed to Einstein and seems to have been made up by Ram Dass [1]. Though I would be happy to be proved wrong if you have a source
I think this is partially restating "try smarter, not harder" with a lot more words.
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.
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I wonder how much psychologically we can be more confident and less anxious when we're doing something for others vs ourselves..
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.
“Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.” - Mark Twain
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.
tl;dr you should ask your badass partner for strategic help when the entire galaxy is under threat, even if she seems busy.
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
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 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.
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.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24916084/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=weaponized
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.
Dead Comment
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 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.
Dead Comment
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.