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.
This is me. Finally buying some bluetooth headphones 15 years ago changed my life. I finally became a person who cooks every meal, cleans everything, does chores, and exercises daily, even pushes around the house.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's a word people use now to attack things that are supposed to be core values, like free speech. The way I use it is the way it ought to be used, the way you use it is "weaponized."
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.
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.
As a disabled person, I have to push back hard on this post. Frankly, you kinda sound like a judgemental asshole. Just because two people have the same diagnosis doesn't mean their symptoms, severity, or consequences are anything alike.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I am not competitive. That's a deliberate stance, and one that I've held for decades.
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.
You do not have to compete with yourself, or anyone, to get better.
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).
"Being attentive to your practice (i.e. recording, going over your work, etc.)"
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.
> If you fail, figure out what you did wrong, and improve, that's 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 :)
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.
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.
> 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
> Most of the Group 3 dogs—which had previously learned that nothing they did had any effect on shocks—simply lay down passively and whined when they were shocked
What a cruel time for experimenting on animals the 1960s were...
she's a little hard on herself. She claimed the ideas her husband came up with were not particularly inventive and the same she'd come up with had she been helping a friend
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.
The author has somewhat of a history in the professional poker world of being a less than reliable narrator. I’d take the details of the story with a grain of salt and focus on the ideas instead.
Kind of agree, as I was reading it I basically thought that sucks idk what you could do. Let alone get in touch with the fbi. In my mind they're an organization that will get in touch with you, but you don't really call in. Til I guess
It seems to me that frequently, to realize that your resources in a domain has improved, you need to heavily risk the very few resources that you know you 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.
I wonder if the inverse rule for this is “how to know when quitting is more effective than trying” - because I think that often times, and especially for folks who can be incredibly persistent when they put their mind to something, it’s helpful to have a cost benefit analysis of your efforts and it might just be that in more cases than not, just not trying actually resolves the core problem your trying to solve.
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.
Trying on every single thing you do is exhausting. I certainly don't have the energy any more to try hard at some personal life things when my work is stressful. I think it's good to do some introspection from time to time to find out what things might be draining you and preventing you from trying on something that you should be trying hard at.
I think, maybe the part of the problem is that it is sometimes easier to accept the situations as they are, even if we suffer from some, than trying to resolve them. Not better, but easier. Or, at least seems easier.
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?
>Instead of doing those things, you just put up with it. Or, worse, you fight through your anxiety using an earlier solution that required willpower, and the exertion of willpower makes you feel like you’re trying. But the feeling of effort doesn’t mean that you’re Actually Trying.
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
> But the feeling of effort doesn’t mean that you’re Actually Trying.
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).
But “try things” and “hard work” are excellent advice. Someone who’s working really hard to solve a problem one way when it’s not working is not in fact “trying things”. Someone who’s trying many things but putting no effort into it is not “working hard”.
People willing to both try things and work hard are much more likely to discover a good solution.
Faulty sensory appreciation is so real and gives a distorted view of the reality. You keep ignoring body signals about small pain or discomfort, have imbalanced priorities and math and estimations go for a toss. Your actions become irrational, you try hard to fix small things and in the process cause big issues.
> But the feeling of effort doesn’t mean that you’re Actually Trying.
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.
> I learned his real name and used it to track down an old friend of his to ask for help
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.
> > I learned his real name and used it to track down an old friend of his to ask for help
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".)
It doesn't sound that far-fetched. The stalker probably told her that he was planning to join her company and meet her, which gave her enough information to find his name. Once she had his name, she could find his profile on social media and see who his friends were.
There's probably more to the story than the author is willing to let us know, but that wouldn't have made for a nice Silicon Valley "you can do it if you really want it for real!"-success story.
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.
I guess I really don’t like this message because I am a disabled person. In the exercise that she describes where an instructor tells people to stand up from a position that they think they can’t stand up from, what if I actually can’t stand up? It might lead me to believe that perhaps I’m simply not trying enough.
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.
This essay has loads of subtance to it and it illumines my primary issue with stoicism things that we don't have control over are basically not that obvious.
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.
If you, the reader, are having "productivity problems" please get assessed for ADHD.
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.
Unfortunately I must decline to answer for legal reasons, but I am aware that some people report a short term “cure” that falls off after a longer period.
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.
Comprehensive agency is best achieved via meditation (specifically, "choiceless awareness"). In my experience.
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’ve been watching a lot of interviews with David Lynch lately (RIP), and apparently he was a longtime practitioner of meditation, and he even wrote a book about it. Your words, especially the “paint sprayer for agency” resonated with me and reminded me of the way he would describe expanding consciousness through meditation.
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.
A good post. OP is a famous poker player. I think I’ve seen her on Twitter. I don’t think it’s doxxing to mention that her husband Sasha Chapin is a self help type famous fellow on Twitter. They’re both public figures and publicly married (or at least I recall seeing a post publicly).
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.
This stood out to me because I have been involved in a small claims court case over a small amount of money (less than $2k). No one will give me advice other than "take them to small claims", because the take is too small for them to take interest and often small claims issues are really stupid disagreements between two parties where one party is not taking responsibility for some finances.
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.
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.
> Cleaning your friends place is a fun, novel, non-emotional activity. Cleaning your own space is a mental slog, boring and often painful
“Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.” - Mark Twain
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.
This is me. Finally buying some bluetooth headphones 15 years ago changed my life. I finally became a person who cooks every meal, cleans everything, does chores, and exercises daily, even pushes around the house.
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.
What are the sources of stimulating debates you've found?
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.
Helper, help thyself...?
Nice, what was the context of that line in B5? I don't remember it.
S03E20 "And the Rock Cried Out, No Hiding Place"
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."
Thank you, great episode!
I have ADHD and I 100% feel like what OP describes. I’m always motivated when helping others, not so much for myself.
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.
(I hope my English isn't too bad)
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.
Your English is perfect. I wouldn't have known you are not a native speaker if you hadn't mentioned it.
Your English is great, by the way.
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.
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.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24916084/
> 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.
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.
This effect is very real and part of what makes people social creatures -- and why the golden rule is essential to a functioning society.
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.
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.
Yeah, definitely, to the point that I think we should get together to fix each other’s problems as long as the problems fit.
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'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.
Golden rule - treat others as you would like to be treated. Applies externally and internally - IMO. ie. "Treat yourself as you would treat others"
That sounds like role-reversal. Securely attached people are more flexible (than avoidant or helpless) in both receiving and giving.
I'm exactly the same, down to the specific examples you chose.
So, what is to be done?
I was hoping someone points it out for us.
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.
> noticed that when I'm giving advice
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.
Apparently, it's a common symptom of ADHD. Probably of other sources of anxiety, too.
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.
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.
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.
This resonates with my experiences.
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.
That's almost concerning. I wonder if it'd be realistic to
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 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.
That word is having a moment, it seems.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=weaponized
It's a word people use now to attack things that are supposed to be core values, like free speech. The way I use it is the way it ought to be used, the way you use it is "weaponized."
https://www.google.com/search?q=weaponized+free+speech
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.
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.
As a disabled person, I have to push back hard on this post. Frankly, you kinda sound like a judgemental asshole. Just because two people have the same diagnosis doesn't mean their symptoms, severity, or consequences are anything alike.
Great post!
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.
> 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.
> Socialising is the same. You get better at it through practice. Practice is fun, it makes you do fun things and meet fun people.
Not for all of us, though. For some, socializing is considerable pressure.
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.
Well, happy it worked for you.
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.
Right, trying and failing at socializing is not fun at all.
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.
Also see
“It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not weakness, that is life.” Jean-Luc Picard
Also, not everything is a competition that needs to be won.
I am not competitive. That's a deliberate stance, and one that I've held for decades.
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.
> When I “win”, the someone else “loses.”
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.
Yeah, I agree.
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.
If you allow yourself to redefine “achieving greatness” you may be surprised by what is on the other side :)
Great point.
You’ve achieved greatness in your view of the world, and in your empathy for others.
If you want to stay the same and not become better at something, you are correct.
Competition is many times about challening yourself, failing, learning from that failure, and eventually succeeding.
You do not have to compete with yourself, or anyone, to get better.
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).
"Being attentive to your practice (i.e. recording, going over your work, etc.)"
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.
> If you fail, figure out what you did wrong, and improve, that's 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 :)
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.
> You may end up wasting your life trying and trying anyway.
It's like the fly who keeps buzzing at the window pane instead of giving up to fall six inches to the open windowsill.
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.
> anticipating mistakes before I get into a conversation
How is that not thinking before speaking?
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.
Agreed. Its a hair from victim blaming even though the victim is herself.
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.
> 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.
Brilliant.
Reminded me of Einstein:
> We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them
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
[1] https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/7751/did-einstein-sa...
This sounds a lot like Learned helplessness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness
> Most of the Group 3 dogs—which had previously learned that nothing they did had any effect on shocks—simply lay down passively and whined when they were shocked
What a cruel time for experimenting on animals the 1960s were...
she's a little hard on herself. She claimed the ideas her husband came up with were not particularly inventive and the same she'd come up with had she been helping a friend
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.
The author has somewhat of a history in the professional poker world of being a less than reliable narrator. I’d take the details of the story with a grain of salt and focus on the ideas instead.
Kind of agree, as I was reading it I basically thought that sucks idk what you could do. Let alone get in touch with the fbi. In my mind they're an organization that will get in touch with you, but you don't really call in. Til I guess
It seems to me that frequently, to realize that your resources in a domain has improved, you need to heavily risk the very few resources that you know you 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.
One of the best players I've met in a certain game gave me an article and it's stuck with me ever since: https://articles.starcitygames.com/articles/stuck-in-the-mid...
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.
I wonder if the inverse rule for this is “how to know when quitting is more effective than trying” - because I think that often times, and especially for folks who can be incredibly persistent when they put their mind to something, it’s helpful to have a cost benefit analysis of your efforts and it might just be that in more cases than not, just not trying actually resolves the core problem your trying to solve.
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.
Trying on every single thing you do is exhausting. I certainly don't have the energy any more to try hard at some personal life things when my work is stressful. I think it's good to do some introspection from time to time to find out what things might be draining you and preventing you from trying on something that you should be trying hard at.
Definitely resonating with some of this right now, continuing on a journey of discovery of my self and my past. Thank you for sharing
Sounds a lot like the Baby Elephant Syndrome. Worth reading into if you're interested in the above.
This is a really well written article. Everyone does ignore some aspects of their lives.
I think, maybe the part of the problem is that it is sometimes easier to accept the situations as they are, even if we suffer from some, than trying to resolve them. Not better, but easier. Or, at least seems easier.
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?
>Instead of doing those things, you just put up with it. Or, worse, you fight through your anxiety using an earlier solution that required willpower, and the exertion of willpower makes you feel like you’re trying. But the feeling of effort doesn’t mean that you’re Actually Trying.
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
> But the feeling of effort doesn’t mean that you’re Actually Trying.
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).
But “try things” and “hard work” are excellent advice. Someone who’s working really hard to solve a problem one way when it’s not working is not in fact “trying things”. Someone who’s trying many things but putting no effort into it is not “working hard”.
People willing to both try things and work hard are much more likely to discover a good solution.
Faulty sensory appreciation is so real and gives a distorted view of the reality. You keep ignoring body signals about small pain or discomfort, have imbalanced priorities and math and estimations go for a toss. Your actions become irrational, you try hard to fix small things and in the process cause big issues.
> But the feeling of effort doesn’t mean that you’re Actually Trying.
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.
> I learned his real name and used it to track down an old friend of his to ask for help
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.
> > I learned his real name and used it to track down an old friend of his to ask for help
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".)
I think the old friend is _her_ old friend, not the stalker's.
The sentence is a bit ambiguous but that's what seems to make the most sense to me.
It clearly says "an old friend of his"
"old friend of HIS" is not ambiguous.
It doesn't sound that far-fetched. The stalker probably told her that he was planning to join her company and meet her, which gave her enough information to find his name. Once she had his name, she could find his profile on social media and see who his friends were.
There's probably more to the story than the author is willing to let us know, but that wouldn't have made for a nice Silicon Valley "you can do it if you really want it for real!"-success story.
Hm.
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.
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.
I guess I really don’t like this message because I am a disabled person. In the exercise that she describes where an instructor tells people to stand up from a position that they think they can’t stand up from, what if I actually can’t stand up? It might lead me to believe that perhaps I’m simply not trying enough.
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.
Great read and definitely something I can resonate with in my own life.
This essay has loads of subtance to it and it illumines my primary issue with stoicism things that we don't have control over are basically not that obvious.
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.
If you, the reader, are having "productivity problems" please get assessed for ADHD.
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.
How long have you been on your medication?
Unfortunately I must decline to answer for legal reasons, but I am aware that some people report a short term “cure” that falls off after a longer period.
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.
Comprehensive agency is best achieved via meditation (specifically, "choiceless awareness"). In my experience.
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’ve been watching a lot of interviews with David Lynch lately (RIP), and apparently he was a longtime practitioner of meditation, and he even wrote a book about it. Your words, especially the “paint sprayer for agency” resonated with me and reminded me of the way he would describe expanding consciousness through meditation.
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.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=FPb-eTI5jZE&t=597s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catching_the_Big_Fish
A good post. OP is a famous poker player. I think I’ve seen her on Twitter. I don’t think it’s doxxing to mention that her husband Sasha Chapin is a self help type famous fellow on Twitter. They’re both public figures and publicly married (or at least I recall seeing a post publicly).
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.
This stood out to me because I have been involved in a small claims court case over a small amount of money (less than $2k). No one will give me advice other than "take them to small claims", because the take is too small for them to take interest and often small claims issues are really stupid disagreements between two parties where one party is not taking responsibility for some finances.
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.
nice!
Jesus - lotta free time