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Don’t discount the weight of emotional trauma and the self-sabotaging habits it has the potential to engender. Most people are slaves to their limbic systems.

Don’t discount the weight of emotional trauma and the self-sabotaging habits it has the potential to engender. Most people are slaves to their limbic systems. Most people don’t have self-education or resources to seek the help they need to fix these underlying problems. Society does them no favors. Media and advertising are designed to promote consumption. And not even healthy consumption. The idea that we are black boxes with private worlds and perfect agency is being eroded by the empirical evidence that, at scale, we are ultimately manipulable. I know because I wrestle with this constantly. My higher self knows what’s right and how I should spend my time and money. On a daily and minutely basis, my lower self vyes for control and often succeeds in taking the wheel. And I have to catch myself and recognize when my long term efforts are being subverted automatically and mechanistically. I know that, over the years, my unaddressed early childhood traumas have compounded into deeply-ingrained habits of self-medicating. It’s a constant struggle. I am not surprised that there are huge numbers of people who struggle similarly and are not as successful as I am at managing this internal conflict. edit: why is this article now flagged? :(

spidey1 8y ago
How do you manage this conflict? I think a lot of us suffer from this at different scales. I've always found it difficult to work on things that will pay off in the future, even if I plan something I just don't seem to be able to carry through a long term project to the end unless I'm in an environment where there's accountability such as deadlines on projects at work. I'm very prone to instant gratification, which is why I can easily lose most of my spare time in video games, netflix, youtube etc.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- throwaway914472 8y ago
  You may want to look into how to use hardware to implement a sort of Ulysses pact - depending on the nature of the behavior(s) that you want to control, a time-locking safe can work wonders.
- nunez 8y ago
  The way I "managed" it long-term was by creating a spreadsheet of all of the things I really want (like, spent years wanting) and their costs, adding them up, buffering it a little and saying "that's my target number, and I'm sticking to it." Last time I did this, I calculated that $5M is my number. This would generate about $200k/year with 4% return and withdrawal rate. Everything I do in my career is centered around getting to this number before I'm 45, so that I can decide whether I want to retire or not then. (I probably won't, but life isn't static.) The way I manage it in the short-term is the two-week test. If I want a thing, and that thing is >10% of my remaining disposable income (which I budget every two weeks), I tell myself "if I still want this in two weeks, I will buy it or start saving for it then." Example: I really wanted the custom truly-wireless IEMs that Bragi makes. However, they are $599; not a cheap purchase at about 50% my two-week disposable. Instead of buying them outright (I could, but that would affect disposable income for going out and stuff), I sat on it for several months while I tried other headphones. The urge to get them didn't go away, so I got them. What would have been an impulse purchase became a planned and extremely-worthwhile purchase. My self-control isn't bulletproof, however. Our five-year old vacuum stopped working the other day. I tried repairing it several times, all to no avail. I got tired of having dirty carpet (our apartment is all carpet except for wet areas), so I went to Best Buy and got a new one. While I was there, I saw a Bissell Carpet Cleaner that looked really useful, as our carpets haven't been cleaned since we moved in three years ago. Both combined were about $500, but I impulse-bought it because dirty flooring drives me nuts. While I'm really happy with this purchase (there are few things more satisfying than seeing all of the gunk in your carpet vacuumed up), it was definitely impulsive, and my more responsible self should have waited on it.
  - sokoloff 8y ago
    Aren’t those carpet cleaner rentals only $30 for 24-hours and at most home centers and grocers? I get wanting to have clean carpets, but I’d much rather rent and not have to deal with storing the thing, let alone buying it.
    - nunez 8y ago
      This machine works better than carpet cleaner rentals, can be used whenever I want (I used it this morning to quickly pick up cat vomit residue :( ) and I can install a tool that allows it to work on bare floors
- Yen 8y ago
  I haven't solved this for video games, youtube, etc. I'd be interested in a solution! For disposable income purchases, we budgeted out income, necessary expenses, savings, travel, etc., everything that requires long-term planning. The surplus (a fairly small portion) we then divided out into a per-person, per-day allowance. I use a simple Google Form to record discretionary purchases, tracking the results in a Sheet, to account for whether this discretionary budget has a positive balance. This has the nice effect of translating dollar values into time values, and giving a reference point for trading off the relative hedonic value of small frequent purchases vs. large infrequent purchases.
damnhungry 8y ago
That really echoes with me. Great that you are making improvement.
leoedin 8y ago
I think the very fact that people in wildly different circumstances are living paycheck to paycheck is a huge flag that this isn't as simple a problem as "they don't get paid enough". Income and expenses are intricately linked by psychology. It's almost irrelevant what your paycheck is, if you're prone to this problem then somehow expenses will always rise to meet it. If expenses weren't actually determined by paycheck, the number of people living paycheck to paycheck would be a really small number. Everyone else would either be building a surplus each month or going further into debt.
- JoeAltmaier 8y ago
  Except when it is. Generalities aren't helpful to the single parent working retail. Expenses aren't always optional.
  - sharemywin 8y ago
    Don't forget the guilt when kids are involved.
  - imustbeevil 8y ago
    In the vast majority of cases having a child is optional. This perfectly illustrates the problem the GP brings up. People have no concept of what agency is.
    - JoeAltmaier 8y ago
      Oh for God's sake. Have a child, get dumped/divorced, now you're a single parent. Parents are supposed to be omniscient? God already has a job (and parenting didn't work out so good then either)
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - eyko 8y ago
        Or your partner has a fatal disease or accident.
sjg007 8y ago
It is an interesting argument to blame people for their own problems that are largely structural and as the article indicates, effect a large swath of society. It's the same argument for blaming the homeless who say own an iPhone.
- sharemywin 8y ago
  The problem is it's both structural and personal decisions though.
- perfmode 8y ago
  In my case, the systemic root cause was a lack of opportunity stemming from immigration status.
- Aeolun 8y ago
  If you’ve recently become homeless, it’s very likely you still have an iPhone (and you better hold onto it).
  - scarejunba 8y ago
    The efficient decision would be to swap out into an Android phone of similar vintage and sell the iPhone. You’ll come out positive because iPhones hold value better.
    - pixl97 8y ago
      Um, no. iPhones hold value for multiple reasons. One of which is they last longer. >This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness
      - sjg007 8y ago
        Yep.. buying the iPhone is the better economic decision if you need a smart phone.
      - zozbot123 8y ago
mAEStro-paNDa 8y ago
This is an extremely important point. Everyone deals with these kinds of intrapersonal conflicts and issues on a different breadth and scale, one way or another. It's this coupled with economic distress or anxiety, in addition to a massive income and wealth inequality, that produces the kind of conditions and struggle that people and families go through, like those described in this short article. Sure, there are varying degrees of this issue. You have costs of living which vary depending on location, wages and salaries which vary by location as well as the occupation itself. Despite this, it's still a grave mistake to simply pass many of this off as "they should get a better-paying job" or "they are living beyond their means" as some of the comments on the WaPo article itself suggests. For the former, anyone who uses such an argument has in some form or fashion accepted the belief that some jobs should not pay a livable wage. It does not make any sense that anyone working a wage job full-time is still financially in poverty. This has nothing to do with the individual, but instead has everything to do with economic policy. That is not to say that, for example, fast food workers should not make as much as teachers. OK, then pay the teachers more. The bottom line is that no one who works a full-time job should be in poverty. For the latter argument, this is mostly part of an ongoing cultural trend of laying all responsibility on the individual, regardless of systemic variables. The idea that in such an unequal society, where people exist who literally make more in a single day than others in an entire lifetime, we should instead scrutinize the people struggling economically, is just plain disingenuous. The economy is broken and getting worse. More and more people are realizing it.
- pdimitar 8y ago
  Many people are very easily falling for the schadenfreude approach to others. It's not helping at all when a teacher who works two jobs gets bashed by their neighbours for not working hard enough. Somehow, along the way, many people lost all compassion. I am really not sure what do they have to gain from being a-holes to genuinely struggling people. (Not everybody wants to change profession at 40-50 and they should not be forced to.) As you said, nobody who is working full-time should be below the poverty line. Nobody.
- zozbot123 8y ago
  > For the former, anyone who uses such an argument has in some form or fashion accepted the belief that some jobs should not pay a livable wage... What's a "livable wage"? The whole point of assessing whether people are "living beyond their means" is precisely to figure out if they're keeping their expenses within that 'livable wage' threshold. I think you'll find that most people with money-related issues ("poverty" in this context should be reserved for actual, true deprivation, which is vanishingly rare in the US! Social exclusion/marginalization is real, but it's a very different problem, with different ways of addressing it) are in fact not doing enough to keep their expenses in check.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Balgair 8y ago
This is very similar to the Allegory of the Chariot [0] from Plato's Phaedrus (370 BC) [1]. The Greeks were sometimes a keen bunch and Plato was one of the few of them that survived to the modern day. In this allegory, the person (really only males back then) had a soul divided into 3 parts: The charioteer, a base and somewhat evil pegasus, and a noble and good pegasus, with each of the pegasuses harnessed to the chariot. In life, the goal was to rise above the clouds to view heaven (more strictly, the 'forms' of Beauty, Reason, etc). The charioteer had to guide the base and the noble pegasuses and keep them from attacking each other, rioting, and generally distracting from the goal of reaching heaven. In the allegory, the charioteer is the reasoning part of a person, the base pegasus was the 'appetites'/greed/hedonistic and the more 'limbic' parts of the person, the noble pegasus was the thumos of the person. Thumos is a very different mental model for us moderns, but was common for the ancient greeks. Think of it as 'spiritedness', but the word as used by Plato had elements of victory/political/hotheadedness/manliness baked into it [2]. The pegasuses weren't just 'good vs. evil', as even the thumos pegasus could get out of hand for the 'reasoning' charioteer, and the base pegasus was needed to tell the person to eat, to have intercourse, to react to danger, etc. I point this out to give the parent commentor another mental model to help process things in life. We're MUCH more than just the 'higher' and 'lower' parts of ourselves. Plato thought of himself as a tripartite soul, and in typical Plato fashion, totally forgets about things like humor that can't be included in his Chariot Allegory. I'd encourage others to look into other traditions and philosophies to see of any other mental models work for them. 'Eudamonia'[3] is something we all should reach for; not every mental tool is one-size-fits-all. [0] https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/what-is-a-man-the-allegory-of-the-chariot/ https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/what-is-a-man-the-al... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaedrus_(dialogue) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaedrus_(dialogue) [2] https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/got-thumos/ https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/got-thumos/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudaimonia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudaimonia
eli_gottlieb 8y ago
>Most people are slaves to their limbic systems. Excuse me, but would you mind not repeating this meme in the future? The "limbic system" is actually at the core of human consciousness and cognition, and at the core of what "reasoning" really is. The story of the brain as having a "rational human part" and an "emotional animal part" is a myth and a canard. If you could rephrase or reconsider, you'd have the thanks of everyone in the neuroscience lab where I work ;-).
- throwaway_98554 8y ago
  We all understood what he meant. But if you can provide a superior alternative conveying the same meaning succinctly, please do.
  - whatshisface 8y ago
    It would be more accurate to describe it with words less scientifically specific than "limbic system," because what everyone is talking about is a partition of motivations, not a partition of individual nerve cells. You could just call it the "flesh" and the "spirit," those are the Bible's terms. People have known that there is a tension between what they want to do and what they actually do for a long time.
dv_dt 8y ago
While there are many people who do make non-optimal choices, the increasing rate of this, IMHO points to systemic economic fairness issues much more than systemic self-sabotage.
usgroup 8y ago
Thanks for sharing these thoughts. I appreciate you.
marcoperaza 8y ago
Both perspectives need to coexist. Yes, human beings are partially products of their environment. But that environment includes the moral disapproval of others, and people do respond to internalized moral sentiments. Those moral sentiments can be undermined by too many excuses accepted or made on their behalf. Some people are naturally more conscientious than others. Their moral burden is lighter. Life is unfair like that, but the answer isn’t to exonerate the rest of us from moral responsibility for managing our own affairs. On the contrary, those moral sentiments are most important for those who struggle with self-discipline. Which is not to say that it’s wrong to try to organize society to give people a better chance at succeeding in their moral struggles. But at the end of it all, every man must carry his own cross.
bfuller 8y ago
Wow thank you for this deeply personal comment

spidey1 8y ago

How do you manage this conflict? I think a lot of us suffer from this at different scales. I've always found it difficult to work on things that will pay off in the future, even if I plan something I just don't seem to be able to carry through a long term project to the end unless I'm in an environment where there's accountability such as deadlines on projects at work. I'm very prone to instant gratification, which is why I can easily lose most of my spare time in video games, netflix, youtube etc.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
throwaway914472 8y ago
You may want to look into how to use hardware to implement a sort of Ulysses pact - depending on the nature of the behavior(s) that you want to control, a time-locking safe can work wonders.
nunez 8y ago
The way I "managed" it long-term was by creating a spreadsheet of all of the things I really want (like, spent years wanting) and their costs, adding them up, buffering it a little and saying "that's my target number, and I'm sticking to it." Last time I did this, I calculated that $5M is my number. This would generate about $200k/year with 4% return and withdrawal rate. Everything I do in my career is centered around getting to this number before I'm 45, so that I can decide whether I want to retire or not then. (I probably won't, but life isn't static.) The way I manage it in the short-term is the two-week test. If I want a thing, and that thing is >10% of my remaining disposable income (which I budget every two weeks), I tell myself "if I still want this in two weeks, I will buy it or start saving for it then." Example: I really wanted the custom truly-wireless IEMs that Bragi makes. However, they are $599; not a cheap purchase at about 50% my two-week disposable. Instead of buying them outright (I could, but that would affect disposable income for going out and stuff), I sat on it for several months while I tried other headphones. The urge to get them didn't go away, so I got them. What would have been an impulse purchase became a planned and extremely-worthwhile purchase. My self-control isn't bulletproof, however. Our five-year old vacuum stopped working the other day. I tried repairing it several times, all to no avail. I got tired of having dirty carpet (our apartment is all carpet except for wet areas), so I went to Best Buy and got a new one. While I was there, I saw a Bissell Carpet Cleaner that looked really useful, as our carpets haven't been cleaned since we moved in three years ago. Both combined were about $500, but I impulse-bought it because dirty flooring drives me nuts. While I'm really happy with this purchase (there are few things more satisfying than seeing all of the gunk in your carpet vacuumed up), it was definitely impulsive, and my more responsible self should have waited on it.
- sokoloff 8y ago
  Aren’t those carpet cleaner rentals only $30 for 24-hours and at most home centers and grocers? I get wanting to have clean carpets, but I’d much rather rent and not have to deal with storing the thing, let alone buying it.
  - nunez 8y ago
    This machine works better than carpet cleaner rentals, can be used whenever I want (I used it this morning to quickly pick up cat vomit residue :( ) and I can install a tool that allows it to work on bare floors
Yen 8y ago
I haven't solved this for video games, youtube, etc. I'd be interested in a solution! For disposable income purchases, we budgeted out income, necessary expenses, savings, travel, etc., everything that requires long-term planning. The surplus (a fairly small portion) we then divided out into a per-person, per-day allowance. I use a simple Google Form to record discretionary purchases, tracking the results in a Sheet, to account for whether this discretionary budget has a positive balance. This has the nice effect of translating dollar values into time values, and giving a reference point for trading off the relative hedonic value of small frequent purchases vs. large infrequent purchases.

damnhungry 8y ago

That really echoes with me. Great that you are making improvement.

leoedin 8y ago

I think the very fact that people in wildly different circumstances are living paycheck to paycheck is a huge flag that this isn't as simple a problem as "they don't get paid enough". Income and expenses are intricately linked by psychology. It's almost irrelevant what your paycheck is, if you're prone to this problem then somehow expenses will always rise to meet it. If expenses weren't actually determined by paycheck, the number of people living paycheck to paycheck would be a really small number. Everyone else would either be building a surplus each month or going further into debt.

JoeAltmaier 8y ago
Except when it is. Generalities aren't helpful to the single parent working retail. Expenses aren't always optional.
- sharemywin 8y ago
  Don't forget the guilt when kids are involved.
- imustbeevil 8y ago
  In the vast majority of cases having a child is optional. This perfectly illustrates the problem the GP brings up. People have no concept of what agency is.
  - JoeAltmaier 8y ago
    Oh for God's sake. Have a child, get dumped/divorced, now you're a single parent. Parents are supposed to be omniscient? God already has a job (and parenting didn't work out so good then either)
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - eyko 8y ago
      Or your partner has a fatal disease or accident.

sjg007 8y ago

It is an interesting argument to blame people for their own problems that are largely structural and as the article indicates, effect a large swath of society. It's the same argument for blaming the homeless who say own an iPhone.

sharemywin 8y ago
The problem is it's both structural and personal decisions though.
perfmode 8y ago
In my case, the systemic root cause was a lack of opportunity stemming from immigration status.
Aeolun 8y ago
If you’ve recently become homeless, it’s very likely you still have an iPhone (and you better hold onto it).
- scarejunba 8y ago
  The efficient decision would be to swap out into an Android phone of similar vintage and sell the iPhone. You’ll come out positive because iPhones hold value better.
  - pixl97 8y ago
    Um, no. iPhones hold value for multiple reasons. One of which is they last longer. >This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness
    - sjg007 8y ago
      Yep.. buying the iPhone is the better economic decision if you need a smart phone.
    - zozbot123 8y ago

mAEStro-paNDa 8y ago

This is an extremely important point. Everyone deals with these kinds of intrapersonal conflicts and issues on a different breadth and scale, one way or another. It's this coupled with economic distress or anxiety, in addition to a massive income and wealth inequality, that produces the kind of conditions and struggle that people and families go through, like those described in this short article. Sure, there are varying degrees of this issue. You have costs of living which vary depending on location, wages and salaries which vary by location as well as the occupation itself. Despite this, it's still a grave mistake to simply pass many of this off as "they should get a better-paying job" or "they are living beyond their means" as some of the comments on the WaPo article itself suggests. For the former, anyone who uses such an argument has in some form or fashion accepted the belief that some jobs should not pay a livable wage. It does not make any sense that anyone working a wage job full-time is still financially in poverty. This has nothing to do with the individual, but instead has everything to do with economic policy. That is not to say that, for example, fast food workers should not make as much as teachers. OK, then pay the teachers more. The bottom line is that no one who works a full-time job should be in poverty. For the latter argument, this is mostly part of an ongoing cultural trend of laying all responsibility on the individual, regardless of systemic variables. The idea that in such an unequal society, where people exist who literally make more in a single day than others in an entire lifetime, we should instead scrutinize the people struggling economically, is just plain disingenuous. The economy is broken and getting worse. More and more people are realizing it.

pdimitar 8y ago
Many people are very easily falling for the schadenfreude approach to others. It's not helping at all when a teacher who works two jobs gets bashed by their neighbours for not working hard enough. Somehow, along the way, many people lost all compassion. I am really not sure what do they have to gain from being a-holes to genuinely struggling people. (Not everybody wants to change profession at 40-50 and they should not be forced to.) As you said, nobody who is working full-time should be below the poverty line. Nobody.
zozbot123 8y ago
> For the former, anyone who uses such an argument has in some form or fashion accepted the belief that some jobs should not pay a livable wage... What's a "livable wage"? The whole point of assessing whether people are "living beyond their means" is precisely to figure out if they're keeping their expenses within that 'livable wage' threshold. I think you'll find that most people with money-related issues ("poverty" in this context should be reserved for actual, true deprivation, which is vanishingly rare in the US! Social exclusion/marginalization is real, but it's a very different problem, with different ways of addressing it) are in fact not doing enough to keep their expenses in check.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

Balgair 8y ago

This is very similar to the Allegory of the Chariot [0] from Plato's Phaedrus (370 BC) [1]. The Greeks were sometimes a keen bunch and Plato was one of the few of them that survived to the modern day. In this allegory, the person (really only males back then) had a soul divided into 3 parts: The charioteer, a base and somewhat evil pegasus, and a noble and good pegasus, with each of the pegasuses harnessed to the chariot. In life, the goal was to rise above the clouds to view heaven (more strictly, the 'forms' of Beauty, Reason, etc). The charioteer had to guide the base and the noble pegasuses and keep them from attacking each other, rioting, and generally distracting from the goal of reaching heaven. In the allegory, the charioteer is the reasoning part of a person, the base pegasus was the 'appetites'/greed/hedonistic and the more 'limbic' parts of the person, the noble pegasus was the thumos of the person. Thumos is a very different mental model for us moderns, but was common for the ancient greeks. Think of it as 'spiritedness', but the word as used by Plato had elements of victory/political/hotheadedness/manliness baked into it [2]. The pegasuses weren't just 'good vs. evil', as even the thumos pegasus could get out of hand for the 'reasoning' charioteer, and the base pegasus was needed to tell the person to eat, to have intercourse, to react to danger, etc. I point this out to give the parent commentor another mental model to help process things in life. We're MUCH more than just the 'higher' and 'lower' parts of ourselves. Plato thought of himself as a tripartite soul, and in typical Plato fashion, totally forgets about things like humor that can't be included in his Chariot Allegory. I'd encourage others to look into other traditions and philosophies to see of any other mental models work for them. 'Eudamonia'[3] is something we all should reach for; not every mental tool is one-size-fits-all. [0] https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/what-is-a-man-the-allegory-of-the-chariot/ https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/what-is-a-man-the-al... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaedrus_(dialogue) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaedrus_(dialogue) [2] https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/got-thumos/ https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/got-thumos/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudaimonia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudaimonia

eli_gottlieb 8y ago

>Most people are slaves to their limbic systems. Excuse me, but would you mind not repeating this meme in the future? The "limbic system" is actually at the core of human consciousness and cognition, and at the core of what "reasoning" really is. The story of the brain as having a "rational human part" and an "emotional animal part" is a myth and a canard. If you could rephrase or reconsider, you'd have the thanks of everyone in the neuroscience lab where I work ;-).

throwaway_98554 8y ago
We all understood what he meant. But if you can provide a superior alternative conveying the same meaning succinctly, please do.
- whatshisface 8y ago
  It would be more accurate to describe it with words less scientifically specific than "limbic system," because what everyone is talking about is a partition of motivations, not a partition of individual nerve cells. You could just call it the "flesh" and the "spirit," those are the Bible's terms. People have known that there is a tension between what they want to do and what they actually do for a long time.

dv_dt 8y ago

While there are many people who do make non-optimal choices, the increasing rate of this, IMHO points to systemic economic fairness issues much more than systemic self-sabotage.

usgroup 8y ago

Thanks for sharing these thoughts. I appreciate you.

marcoperaza 8y ago

Both perspectives need to coexist. Yes, human beings are partially products of their environment. But that environment includes the moral disapproval of others, and people do respond to internalized moral sentiments. Those moral sentiments can be undermined by too many excuses accepted or made on their behalf. Some people are naturally more conscientious than others. Their moral burden is lighter. Life is unfair like that, but the answer isn’t to exonerate the rest of us from moral responsibility for managing our own affairs. On the contrary, those moral sentiments are most important for those who struggle with self-discipline. Which is not to say that it’s wrong to try to organize society to give people a better chance at succeeding in their moral struggles. But at the end of it all, every man must carry his own cross.

bfuller 8y ago

Wow thank you for this deeply personal comment