6 ms·

Maybe you’re not trying

448 points by eatitraw 11mo ago

seedboot 11mo ago
Definitely resonating with some of this right now, continuing on a journey of discovery of my self and my past. Thank you for sharing
- discordance 11mo ago
  Sounds a lot like the Baby Elephant Syndrome. Worth reading into if you're interested in the above.
ssgodderidge 11mo ago
> 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.
- accrual 11mo ago
  Reminded me of Einstein: > We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them
  - mosesbp 11mo ago
    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-say-we-cannot-solve-our-problems-with-the-same-thinking-we-used-to https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/7751/did-einstein-sa...
    - accrual 11mo ago
      Interesting! Yeah, there appears to be a lot of discussion on the topic. My source indicating Einstein was no better. However, happy to attribute it to Ram Dass and/or Einstein, both were brilliant.
noodletheworld 11mo ago
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.
- jnovek 11mo ago
  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.
  - itsdavesanders 11mo ago
    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.
    - jnovek 11mo ago
      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.
h33t-l4x0r 11mo ago
[flagged]
- aloha2436 11mo ago
  > particles that behave deterministically I'm not a physicist I'll admit, but this seems like a controversial statement.
  - h33t-l4x0r 11mo ago
    Not unless you're talking about quantum indeterminacy, do you think that's where OP's agency comes from? Or what about the Indian stalker's agency, should they "try harder" to reverse the genetics, pre-natal nutrition, toxin exposure, and gut biome that led them down the path of mental illness?
  - throwpoaster 11mo ago
    Also not a physicist, but yeah -- seems equivalent to saying, "entropy does not exist."
- yetihehe 11mo ago
  > Also, people are made up of particles that behave deterministically. Agency is an illusion. I like to slap people talking this to my face. Why? I was predetermined to slap them, the universe was set up that way. But I had only one occasion to really do this. The guy was thinking about this for two days. And when I say about this every proponent of "Agency is an illusion" then has some cop-out about responsibility, because in truth they use "no agency" as an excuse to explain their bad behavior.
  - balamatom 11mo ago
    Sounds fun - I'd slap back!
  - h33t-l4x0r 11mo ago
    Most people will accept a brain tumor as an excuse for bad behavior, but not low blood sugar. I have successfully convinced people that hungry judges have less agency than full ones, though. (google hungry judge effect if you're curious).
Etheryte 11mo ago
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.
- pwillia7 11mo ago
  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.
- lazide 11mo ago
  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.
- throw-qqqqq 11mo ago
  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.
  - 11mo ago
lisper 11mo ago
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.
- gyomu 11mo ago
  Also see “It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not weakness, that is life.” Jean-Luc Picard
  - 8bitbeep 11mo ago
    Also, not everything is a competition that needs to be won.
    - billy99k 11mo ago
      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.
      - fao_ 11mo ago
        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).
danybittel 11mo ago
This sounds a lot like Learned helplessness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness
- tetris11 11mo ago
  > 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...
  - mahogany 11mo ago
    Animal cruelty is alive and well in the factory farming industry, at a yearly scale orders of magnitude higher than the sum of all research experimentation in science during the 1960s.
dsego 11mo ago
> 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.
ekjhgkejhgk 11mo ago
> 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.
- DecoySalamander 11mo ago
  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.
- mistersquid 11mo ago
  > > 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".)
  - pastor_williams 11mo ago
    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.
    - BurningFrog 11mo ago
      "old friend of HIS" is not ambiguous.
    - breakingcups 11mo ago
      It clearly says "an old friend of his"
deleted 11mo ago
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zkmon 11mo ago
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.
alentred 11mo ago
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?
throwpoaster 11mo ago
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.
- breakingcups 11mo ago
  How long have you been on your medication?
  - throwpoaster 11mo ago
    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.
    - xyzzy_plugh 11mo ago
      > with a dosage pattern that mitigates this long term falloff in most people. And what is such a pattern, if you could be so kind?
- throwpoaster 11mo ago
  For clarity, prayed worked and was unfortunately one of the last things I tried.
jhanschoo 11mo ago
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.
nicbou 11mo ago
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.
- codingrightnow 11mo ago
  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.
- sn 11mo ago
  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.
- Yoric 11mo ago
  > 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.
cm2012 11mo ago
This is a really well written article. Everyone does ignore some aspects of their lives.
yousif_123123 11mo ago
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..
- Yoric 11mo ago
  Apparently, it's a common symptom of ADHD. Probably of other sources of anxiety, too.
- Veliladon 11mo ago
  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.
- blastro 11mo ago
  Golden rule - treat others as you would like to be treated. Applies externally and internally - IMO. ie. "Treat yourself as you would treat others"
- CoffeeTails 11mo ago
  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)
  - lobsterthief 11mo ago
    Your English is great, by the way.
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73189822 11mo ago
nice!
oars 11mo ago
Great read and definitely something I can resonate with in my own life.
20k 11mo ago
>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
analog8374 11mo ago
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.
- aspenmayer 11mo ago
  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://youtube.com/watch?v=FPb-eTI5jZE&t=597s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catching_the_Big_Fish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catching_the_Big_Fish
xivzgrev 11mo ago
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.
- tayo42 11mo ago
  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
- Aurornis 11mo ago
  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.
  - deleted 11mo ago
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kamranjon 11mo ago
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.
sn 11mo ago
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.
BeFlatXIII 11mo ago
> 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).
- dpark 11mo ago
  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.
  - BeFlatXIII 11mo ago
    Yes, they're both necessary, but they're not useful to someone who is stuck. They're both vague blow-off statements. If someone isn't working hard, suggest they spend more time on the issue; if they're stuck suggesting somewhere in the process to try something else.
0xRake 11mo ago
Jesus - lotta free time
muzani 11mo ago
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-middle-with-bruce/ 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.
righthand 11mo ago
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.
fluxusars 11mo ago
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.
abhaynayar 11mo ago
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.
- vhiremath4 11mo ago
  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.
- Kerrick 11mo ago
  > 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.
- 11mo ago
renewiltord 11mo ago
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.
deleted 11mo ago
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coolThingsFirst 11mo ago
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.
b_e_n_t_o_n 11mo ago
"I can't do this" "Are you sure you aren't just having trouble?" Similar concept imo.
oehpr 11mo ago
If there has anything I have learned in my life it is this: "the world is just. solutions are easy. and if people are suffering, then they deserve it. if they would just try to solve their problems then their problems would be solved." Is deep in the thoughts of most people, and it leaks out in all kinds of ways. you DESERVE misery. If you are suffering, then you are the cause. I feel I should hate this line of thinking... But it's too common. I can't hate all of humanity. Instead, I know to fear others. I know to never ask for help. This belief is so common that to do otherwise is self destructive. If you had gone to the police they would have blamed you. Your husband resolved it because it wasn't "his" problem. He didn't "cause" it so could not be blamed. Because as far as everyone else is concerned, the reason you had that problem was because "you weren't trying" it's not true.
- Edman274 11mo ago
  I know, the takeaway is so funny, because it's not actually up to the author whether or not the solution she took would've worked. To her, "Actually Trying" and "not trying" both hinged on the success of other people helping her out. To a more hard hearted individual, the only thing that would've qualified as "Actually Trying" would've been flying out to India in person and then finding the guy first when he'd least expect it. "Actually Trying" was only determined after the fact when the result was that there was a success. If the husband coordinating with a friend hadn't worked, what then? Did he "Actually Try" if the FBI, the Consulate, and the friend were all like "we don't give a shit about this random little troll sending death threats. Did you know everyone gets death threats all the time on the Internet? Log off." What then? Is that still Actually Trying, or do we only determine that after a success? Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy, friends. The husband was the social proof that this random junkie woman who's complaining about a guy on the opposite side of the planet was worth taking seriously. She might not have wanted to go to the cops because she didn't want to go to them, have them laugh it off and then feel both powerless and humiliated, and the conclusion is that another person who then manages the difficulty isn't even trying? Maybe not, but that's a different think from deciding that they aren't doing it because they're stuck in some old mindset. The other example she gives is this: "These are people who could successfully launch a product in a foreign country with little instruction, but who complain that there aren’t any fun people to meet on the dating apps." Like, girl, it's not up to you whether or not there are any cool people on dating apps. There's a selection bias of who gets on dating apps going on here. You can do everything within your power and Actually Try all you want to have it be another way, but you can't really force cool people to socialize in the way that you want them to. It could be the case that there really is no one cool on those dating apps, because social climate being the way that it is means that no one feels comfortable showing their whole, unvarnished, "cool" selves and the coolest people are hidden. At what point is someone "Actually Trying"? Is it once they've succeeded? This feels like the self help, "The Secret", "Girl, Wash Your Face" of previous eras but dressed up in the language of people who use terms like "non-zero probability", "priors", and "local optimum". The takeaway should not be that someone shouldn't try, but that the serenity prayer's most difficult part is the "wisdom to know the difference". She had the power to change this, but the wisdom to know the difference here was not guaranteed. It would be a kinder message to everyone who is in a tough spot to at least acknowledge that having a husband to vouch for her, with connections, free time, and a motivated reason to help out kind of changes to what extent she personally could be responsible for Actually Trying.
m463 11mo ago
I've been kind of hoping that one thing to come out of AI is a way to get it to ... tell me what to do. "What is the best thing to work on?" "What is the next thing I should do?" It seems ridiculous and sort of passive. It's like "a goal without a plan is just a wish"... Well I have wishes, and I need a plan.
vsharma-next 11mo ago
Scaling this to organizational psychology, I think this can partly explain why consultants exists and why consulting is a viable business.
lubujackson 11mo ago
An interesting side-note about this post: the use of "agentic" in the context of human behavior. It is an interesting shift in how we view ourselves. This happened with the advent of computers, viewing everything we do in the context of information processing and retrieval; with the advent of social media, viewing our social interactions as signals with pass/fail results. It is reductive, but also a new perspective from which to see ourselves.
sindoc 11mo ago
Good points. Thanks for sharing. The main point I glean from this read is: don’t let productivity at work mask other aspects of your life. There are irreducible dimensions of life where one shouldn’t accumulate debt, otherwise they come bite you when you’re vulnerable or they could make you vulnerable, which will end up affecting your productivity at work to say the least.
k1rd 11mo ago
I think about this a lot.

448 points by eatitraw 11mo ago

Definitely resonating with some of this right now, continuing on a journey of discovery of my self and my past. Thank you for sharing

discordance 11mo ago
Sounds a lot like the Baby Elephant Syndrome. Worth reading into if you're interested in the above.

ssgodderidge 11mo ago

> 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.

accrual 11mo ago
Reminded me of Einstein: > We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them
- mosesbp 11mo ago
  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-say-we-cannot-solve-our-problems-with-the-same-thinking-we-used-to https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/7751/did-einstein-sa...
  - accrual 11mo ago
    Interesting! Yeah, there appears to be a lot of discussion on the topic. My source indicating Einstein was no better. However, happy to attribute it to Ram Dass and/or Einstein, both were brilliant.

noodletheworld 11mo ago

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.

jnovek 11mo ago
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.
- itsdavesanders 11mo ago
  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.
  - jnovek 11mo ago
    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.

h33t-l4x0r 11mo ago

[flagged]

aloha2436 11mo ago
> particles that behave deterministically I'm not a physicist I'll admit, but this seems like a controversial statement.
- h33t-l4x0r 11mo ago
  Not unless you're talking about quantum indeterminacy, do you think that's where OP's agency comes from? Or what about the Indian stalker's agency, should they "try harder" to reverse the genetics, pre-natal nutrition, toxin exposure, and gut biome that led them down the path of mental illness?
- throwpoaster 11mo ago
  Also not a physicist, but yeah -- seems equivalent to saying, "entropy does not exist."
yetihehe 11mo ago
> Also, people are made up of particles that behave deterministically. Agency is an illusion. I like to slap people talking this to my face. Why? I was predetermined to slap them, the universe was set up that way. But I had only one occasion to really do this. The guy was thinking about this for two days. And when I say about this every proponent of "Agency is an illusion" then has some cop-out about responsibility, because in truth they use "no agency" as an excuse to explain their bad behavior.
- balamatom 11mo ago
  Sounds fun - I'd slap back!
- h33t-l4x0r 11mo ago
  Most people will accept a brain tumor as an excuse for bad behavior, but not low blood sugar. I have successfully convinced people that hungry judges have less agency than full ones, though. (google hungry judge effect if you're curious).

Etheryte 11mo ago

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.

pwillia7 11mo ago
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.
lazide 11mo ago
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.
throw-qqqqq 11mo ago
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.
- 11mo ago

lisper 11mo ago

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.

gyomu 11mo ago
Also see “It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not weakness, that is life.” Jean-Luc Picard
- 8bitbeep 11mo ago
  Also, not everything is a competition that needs to be won.
  - billy99k 11mo ago
    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.
    - fao_ 11mo ago
      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).

danybittel 11mo ago

This sounds a lot like Learned helplessness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness

tetris11 11mo ago
> 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...
- mahogany 11mo ago
  Animal cruelty is alive and well in the factory farming industry, at a yearly scale orders of magnitude higher than the sum of all research experimentation in science during the 1960s.

dsego 11mo ago

> 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.

ekjhgkejhgk 11mo ago

> 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.

DecoySalamander 11mo ago
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.
mistersquid 11mo ago
> > 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".)
- pastor_williams 11mo ago
  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.
  - BurningFrog 11mo ago
    "old friend of HIS" is not ambiguous.
  - breakingcups 11mo ago
    It clearly says "an old friend of his"

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

zkmon 11mo ago

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.

alentred 11mo ago

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?

throwpoaster 11mo ago

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.

breakingcups 11mo ago
How long have you been on your medication?
- throwpoaster 11mo ago
  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.
  - xyzzy_plugh 11mo ago
    > with a dosage pattern that mitigates this long term falloff in most people. And what is such a pattern, if you could be so kind?
throwpoaster 11mo ago
For clarity, prayed worked and was unfortunately one of the last things I tried.

jhanschoo 11mo ago

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.

nicbou 11mo ago

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.

codingrightnow 11mo ago
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.
sn 11mo ago
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.
Yoric 11mo ago
> 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.

cm2012 11mo ago

This is a really well written article. Everyone does ignore some aspects of their lives.

yousif_123123 11mo ago

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..

Yoric 11mo ago
Apparently, it's a common symptom of ADHD. Probably of other sources of anxiety, too.
Veliladon 11mo ago
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.
blastro 11mo ago
Golden rule - treat others as you would like to be treated. Applies externally and internally - IMO. ie. "Treat yourself as you would treat others"
CoffeeTails 11mo ago
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)
- lobsterthief 11mo ago
  Your English is great, by the way.
- 11mo ago

73189822 11mo ago

nice!

oars 11mo ago

Great read and definitely something I can resonate with in my own life.

20k 11mo ago

>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

analog8374 11mo ago

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.

aspenmayer 11mo ago
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://youtube.com/watch?v=FPb-eTI5jZE&t=597s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catching_the_Big_Fish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catching_the_Big_Fish

xivzgrev 11mo ago

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.

tayo42 11mo ago
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
Aurornis 11mo ago
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.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]

kamranjon 11mo ago

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.

sn 11mo ago

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.

BeFlatXIII 11mo ago

> 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).

dpark 11mo ago
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.
- BeFlatXIII 11mo ago
  Yes, they're both necessary, but they're not useful to someone who is stuck. They're both vague blow-off statements. If someone isn't working hard, suggest they spend more time on the issue; if they're stuck suggesting somewhere in the process to try something else.

0xRake 11mo ago

Jesus - lotta free time

muzani 11mo ago

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-middle-with-bruce/ 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.

righthand 11mo ago

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.

fluxusars 11mo ago

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.

abhaynayar 11mo ago

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.

vhiremath4 11mo ago
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.
Kerrick 11mo ago
> 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.
11mo ago

renewiltord 11mo ago

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.

deleted 11mo ago

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coolThingsFirst 11mo ago

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.

b_e_n_t_o_n 11mo ago

"I can't do this" "Are you sure you aren't just having trouble?" Similar concept imo.

oehpr 11mo ago

If there has anything I have learned in my life it is this: "the world is just. solutions are easy. and if people are suffering, then they deserve it. if they would just try to solve their problems then their problems would be solved." Is deep in the thoughts of most people, and it leaks out in all kinds of ways. you DESERVE misery. If you are suffering, then you are the cause. I feel I should hate this line of thinking... But it's too common. I can't hate all of humanity. Instead, I know to fear others. I know to never ask for help. This belief is so common that to do otherwise is self destructive. If you had gone to the police they would have blamed you. Your husband resolved it because it wasn't "his" problem. He didn't "cause" it so could not be blamed. Because as far as everyone else is concerned, the reason you had that problem was because "you weren't trying" it's not true.

Edman274 11mo ago
I know, the takeaway is so funny, because it's not actually up to the author whether or not the solution she took would've worked. To her, "Actually Trying" and "not trying" both hinged on the success of other people helping her out. To a more hard hearted individual, the only thing that would've qualified as "Actually Trying" would've been flying out to India in person and then finding the guy first when he'd least expect it. "Actually Trying" was only determined after the fact when the result was that there was a success. If the husband coordinating with a friend hadn't worked, what then? Did he "Actually Try" if the FBI, the Consulate, and the friend were all like "we don't give a shit about this random little troll sending death threats. Did you know everyone gets death threats all the time on the Internet? Log off." What then? Is that still Actually Trying, or do we only determine that after a success? Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy, friends. The husband was the social proof that this random junkie woman who's complaining about a guy on the opposite side of the planet was worth taking seriously. She might not have wanted to go to the cops because she didn't want to go to them, have them laugh it off and then feel both powerless and humiliated, and the conclusion is that another person who then manages the difficulty isn't even trying? Maybe not, but that's a different think from deciding that they aren't doing it because they're stuck in some old mindset. The other example she gives is this: "These are people who could successfully launch a product in a foreign country with little instruction, but who complain that there aren’t any fun people to meet on the dating apps." Like, girl, it's not up to you whether or not there are any cool people on dating apps. There's a selection bias of who gets on dating apps going on here. You can do everything within your power and Actually Try all you want to have it be another way, but you can't really force cool people to socialize in the way that you want them to. It could be the case that there really is no one cool on those dating apps, because social climate being the way that it is means that no one feels comfortable showing their whole, unvarnished, "cool" selves and the coolest people are hidden. At what point is someone "Actually Trying"? Is it once they've succeeded? This feels like the self help, "The Secret", "Girl, Wash Your Face" of previous eras but dressed up in the language of people who use terms like "non-zero probability", "priors", and "local optimum". The takeaway should not be that someone shouldn't try, but that the serenity prayer's most difficult part is the "wisdom to know the difference". She had the power to change this, but the wisdom to know the difference here was not guaranteed. It would be a kinder message to everyone who is in a tough spot to at least acknowledge that having a husband to vouch for her, with connections, free time, and a motivated reason to help out kind of changes to what extent she personally could be responsible for Actually Trying.

m463 11mo ago

I've been kind of hoping that one thing to come out of AI is a way to get it to ... tell me what to do. "What is the best thing to work on?" "What is the next thing I should do?" It seems ridiculous and sort of passive. It's like "a goal without a plan is just a wish"... Well I have wishes, and I need a plan.

vsharma-next 11mo ago

Scaling this to organizational psychology, I think this can partly explain why consultants exists and why consulting is a viable business.

lubujackson 11mo ago

An interesting side-note about this post: the use of "agentic" in the context of human behavior. It is an interesting shift in how we view ourselves. This happened with the advent of computers, viewing everything we do in the context of information processing and retrieval; with the advent of social media, viewing our social interactions as signals with pass/fail results. It is reductive, but also a new perspective from which to see ourselves.

sindoc 11mo ago

Good points. Thanks for sharing. The main point I glean from this read is: don’t let productivity at work mask other aspects of your life. There are irreducible dimensions of life where one shouldn’t accumulate debt, otherwise they come bite you when you’re vulnerable or they could make you vulnerable, which will end up affecting your productivity at work to say the least.

k1rd 11mo ago

I think about this a lot.