## Metaveri Başlık: **So You Wanna De-Bog Yourself** Yazar: *Adam Mastroianni* Kategori: #articles Etiketler: #psychology ## Altı Çizilenler - This is *gutterballing*: excelling, but in slightly the wrong direction. For most of its journey, after all, the gutterball is getting closer to the pins. It's only at the end that it barely, but dramatically, misses. - Gutterballing is a guaranteed way to stay stuck in the bog because people will love you for it. “You're doing the right thing!” they'll shout as you sink into the swamp. “We approve of this!” - I'm *waiting for jackpot*, refusing to do anything until an option arises that dominates all other options on all dimensions. Strangely, this never seems to happen. - Everybody thinks this is a bad strategy because it merely prolongs my suffering, but that's not why it's a dumb thing to do. Yes, every moment I dither is a moment I suffer. But when I finally do the brave thing, that's not the climax of my suffering—that moment is the *opposite* of suffering. Being brave feels good. I mean, have you ever stood up to a bully, or conquered stage fright, or finally stopped being embarrassed about what you love? It's the most wonderful feeling in the world. Whenever you chicken out, you don't just feel the pain of cowardice; you miss out on the pleasure of courage. - Medieval knights used to wander around hoping for honorable adventures to pop up so that they could demonstrate their bravery. They were *desperate* for big, scary dragons to appear. When I put off doing the brave thing, I am *declining the dragon*: missing an opportunity to do something that might be scary in the moment but would ultimately make me feel great. **Not**: “Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.” - Rilke - The mediocrity trap is a nasty way to end up in the bog. Terrible situations, once exited, often become funny stories or proud memories. Mediocre situations, long languished in, simply become Lost Years—boring to both live through and talk about, like you're sitting in a waiting room with no cell reception, no wifi, and no good magazines, waiting for someone to come in and tell you it's time to start living. - Sometimes I'll know exactly what I need to do in order to leave the bog, but I'm too afraid to do it. I'm afraid to tell the truth, or make someone mad, or take a risk. And so I dither, hoping that the future will not require me to be brave. - About half of my friends *kind of* hate their jobs, so they're moderately unhappy most of the time, but never unhappy enough to leave. This is the *mediocrity trap*: situations that are bad-but-not-too-bad keep you forever in their orbit because they never inspire the frustration it takes to achieve escape velocity. - This is the *try harder fallacy*. I behold my situation and conclude that, somehow, I will improve it in the future by just sort of wishing it to be different, and then I get indignant that nothing happens. Like, “Um, excuse me! I've been doing all of this very diligent *desiring* for things to be different, and yet they remain the same, could someone please look into this?” - This never works because there is no Strategic Effort Reserve. All of my effort is currently accounted for somewhere. If I want to spend more of it on something, I have to spend less of it on something else. If I’m consistently not getting something done, it’s probably because I don’t want to—at least, not enough to cannibalize that time from something else—and I haven’t admitted that to myself yet. - This isn't solving the problem; this is *stroking* the problem. It looks like a good use of time, but it's just a form of [socially acceptable anxiety](https://www.experimental-history.com/p/socially-acceptable-anxiety-is-still), a way to continue your suffering indefinitely by becoming obsessed with it. - This is *blaming God*: pinning the responsibility for my current predicament on something utterly unchangeable. And while many religions teach that God intervenes in human affairs, none of them, as far as I know, believe that he responds to whining. - I only started making progress when I realized I was facing a toothbrushing problem: feeling normal again would probably require me to do stuff every day for the rest of my life. I might get better at doing that stuff, just like when you first start brushing your teeth as a kid you get toothpaste everywhere and end up swallowing half of it, and eventually you learn not to do that. But even when you're a toothbrushing expert, it still takes you a couple minutes every day. You could be mad about that, but it won’t make your teeth any cleaner. - These are *fantastical metamorphoses*. I have not, so far, woken up one day and found myself different in all the ways that would make my life easier. I do hope this happens, but I’ve stopped betting on it. - A good word for this is *puppeteering*: trying to solve your problems by controlling the actions of other humans. Puppeteering often looks attractive because other people's actions seem silly and therefore easily changeable. Funnily enough, it doesn't feel that way to them. They have lifetimes of backstory that lead them to act the way that they do, and their actions are, on average, only as changeable as yours. So unless you think of yourself as being easily redirected with a few tugs of your strings, puppeteering is probably not going to get you out of the bog. - Often, when I’m stuck, it’s because I've made up a game for myself and decided that I’m losing at it. I haven’t achieved enough. I am not working hard enough and I am also, somehow, not having enough fun. These games have elaborate rules, like “I have to be as successful as my most successful friend, but everything I've done so far doesn't count,” and I’m supposed to feel very bad if I break them. It’s like playing the absolute dumbest version of *the floor is lava*. - This is *hedgehogging*: refusing to be influenced by others, even when you should. - Such is the result of the *personal problems growth ray*, which makes all of your own problems seem larger than life, while other people's stay actual size. This makes reasonable solutions look unreasonable—the actions that solved *your* human-sized problems could never solve *my* giganto-problems; they can only be addressed with either a lifetime of cowering or a tactical nuke. - I now think of this as *super surveillance*, tracking every problem in the world as if they were all somehow, ultimately, my problems. Super surveillance is an express ticket to the bog, because the world is full of problems and you'd be lucky to solve even a single one. - This is *obsessing over tiny predictors*. It's scary to admit that you can't control the future; it's a lot easier to distract yourself by trying to optimize every decision, no matter how insignificant. - But most of the people I know who feel this way haven’t survived any atomic bombings at all. They’re usually people with lots of education and high-paying jobs and supportive relationships and a normal amount of tragedies, people who have all the raw materials for a good life but can’t seem to make one for themselves. Their problem is they believe that *satisfaction is impossible*. - If you believe that, it's no wonder you'd suffer from insufficient activation energy, or bad escape plans, or self-bogging: you have no idea what to do, because you don't think anything you've learned, or anything anyone else has learned, can help you at all. Whenever I feel that way, whenever I think I'm in a bespoke bog, created just for me by a universe that hates me, if I can think to myself, “Oh, I'm gutterballing right now,” I can feel my foot hit solid ground, and I can start hoisting myself onto dry land.