I think the "maybe you're not actually trying" framing is not very constructive. The author did try, making decisions and taking actions that seemed appropriate for her situation at the time. The problem was that because her attempts to solve the problem failed -- again and again and again -- she stopped trying. Which is a not-entirely-unreasonable thing to do.
I would frame it more like: just because you have tried and failed doesn't mean you can't succeed, even if you have failed again and again and again. Circumstances change. New solutions become available. New resources or new insights present themselves. Sometimes just doing nothing and letting time pass actually produces progress. But the only thing that guarantees failure is to give up altogether.
That’s a great point, and was how I felt about it, after reading the article.
She did ask for help (more accurately, she accepted help from a trusted source). That was what made the difference. Someone came in with a new approach vector.
She sounds like a fairly remarkable person, so failure isn’t necessarily an indication of incompetence. Rather, it can be an issue of approach. We can get fixated on a particular workflow.
Humans are a social animal. We’re not built to “go it alone,” and that’s really our “secret sauce.” The whole can be greater than the sum of the parts.
It seems that the author balked at a rather specific level of action: getting government agencies involved. I feel there might be more the author could say about this aspect of the event, though she is not, of course, under any obligation to do so.
This is an idea that philosophers have played with in countless varieties, perhaps the one closest to the author's wording is Jean-Paul Sartre's concept of bad faith. Faced with anxiety, guilt or overwhelming weight of responsibility, it's often easier to subconsciously sidestep the problem and pretend you don't have a choice, even if you do. This is not even a conscious decision, it's hard to be aware of our own quirks and biases.
I 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.
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.
Sounds to me like this "bad faith" mechanism has been weaponized, and is literally how the public is controlled in the United States, maintained in a state of apathy towards the violation of everything the nation claims as a core value.
When it’s adaptive (stepping around or over a pothole that you have neither the power nor incentive to fix), it’s what we do with 95%+ of all our input.
When it’s maladaptive (ignoring a serious red flag in a relationship, or not fixing that pinhole in the roof before it causes major damage in the house!), it leads to other serious problems and long term costs.
The biggest challenge in life is having the capacity to understand when it is going too far in the bad direction, and doing something about it before it tips over into overwhelm/overload.
Paradoxically some things with human bodies work like that: Back pain? One of the best ways of usually getting rid of it is using your back more and building muscle.
I once worked with a guy who was a grandmaster at finding rational explainations of why they needed to do the thing that clearly was bad for them. He was overweight, but every time he ate both extremely unhealthy and much next to us he would explain how his body needs that because he would get a bad mood etc. His excuse not to make sports was some sports accident he had 30 years ago as a 18 years old (a medical condition I happened to knew very well because my marathon-running brother had it as well). For every other sport he also had some excuse, be it cost, traffic, weather, other people doing it being douchebags or whatever. This went all the way to making up a medical condition that gave him a excuse why he cannot visit his estranged child.
This guy had an absolutely phenomenal skill level when it came to self deception. And it only became better when his overweight led to a medical condition and his doctor hammered home that he is going to die if he continues on at this path.
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?
> 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.
> 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...
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
This was sort of my takeaway too. The OP got help from someone else and thought to herself “if only I’d tried harder I could’ve done this on my own”. That doesn’t seem like a healthy takeaway.
I didn’t take it that way at all. I took it as “I was blinded from the actual solution because my vision was artificially narrow due to my past experiences with this person.” They didn’t ask for help, their partner intervened for them with a completely different and more direct approach.
I have a kid going thru this right now. It’s very disheartening and frustrating to see, because even with coaching and help, they don’t see the help and suggestions as solutions because they simply can’t see it. And as a parent you don’t want to have to intervene, you want them to learn how to dig their way out of it. But it’s tough to get them to dig when they don’t believe in shovels.
I guess I really don’t like this message because I am a disabled person. In the exercise that she describes where an instructor tells people to stand up from a position that they think they can’t stand up from, what if I actually can’t stand up? It might lead me to believe that perhaps I’m simply not trying enough.
You might think this contrived, but when people tell you over and over that you’re not trying hard enough because of things you can’t control, you internalize it.
To me — someone who has to ask for help — it seems like that she didn’t really notice that help was the thing that helped.
Upvoted because many people genuinely believe that agency is an illusion and therefore there's no point in trying. And the "therefore" part is wrong.
The state of believing that you can do it is a state that precedes actually doing it. This is true regardless of whether the universe is deterministic.
> 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.
As a person who would like to excuse my overeating on confirmed problems with blood sugar, I agree with you fully. We have different amount of willpower in different situations and in the same situation between different times of day. But we still have some agency, it's not fully predetermined. And like being overweight, training can help. I would even say that combating fat needs willpower and increases your available willpower too.
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?
I think the "maybe you're not actually trying" framing is not very constructive. The author did try, making decisions and taking actions that seemed appropriate for her situation at the time. The problem was that because her attempts to solve the problem failed -- again and again and again -- she stopped trying. Which is a not-entirely-unreasonable thing to do.
I would frame it more like: just because you have tried and failed doesn't mean you can't succeed, even if you have failed again and again and again. Circumstances change. New solutions become available. New resources or new insights present themselves. Sometimes just doing nothing and letting time pass actually produces progress. But the only thing that guarantees failure is to give up altogether.
That’s a great point, and was how I felt about it, after reading the article.
She did ask for help (more accurately, she accepted help from a trusted source). That was what made the difference. Someone came in with a new approach vector.
She sounds like a fairly remarkable person, so failure isn’t necessarily an indication of incompetence. Rather, it can be an issue of approach. We can get fixated on a particular workflow.
Humans are a social animal. We’re not built to “go it alone,” and that’s really our “secret sauce.” The whole can be greater than the sum of the parts.
It seems that the author balked at a rather specific level of action: getting government agencies involved. I feel there might be more the author could say about this aspect of the event, though she is not, of course, under any obligation to do so.
Also see
“It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not weakness, that is life.” Jean-Luc Picard
Also, not everything is a competition that needs to be won.
This is an idea that philosophers have played with in countless varieties, perhaps the one closest to the author's wording is Jean-Paul Sartre's concept of bad faith. Faced with anxiety, guilt or overwhelming weight of responsibility, it's often easier to subconsciously sidestep the problem and pretend you don't have a choice, even if you do. This is not even a conscious decision, it's hard to be aware of our own quirks and biases.
I 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.
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.
Sounds to me like this "bad faith" mechanism has been weaponized, and is literally how the public is controlled in the United States, maintained in a state of apathy towards the violation of everything the nation claims as a core value.
That word is having a moment, it seems.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=weaponized
When it’s adaptive (stepping around or over a pothole that you have neither the power nor incentive to fix), it’s what we do with 95%+ of all our input.
When it’s maladaptive (ignoring a serious red flag in a relationship, or not fixing that pinhole in the roof before it causes major damage in the house!), it leads to other serious problems and long term costs.
The biggest challenge in life is having the capacity to understand when it is going too far in the bad direction, and doing something about it before it tips over into overwhelm/overload.
Paradoxically some things with human bodies work like that: Back pain? One of the best ways of usually getting rid of it is using your back more and building muscle.
I once worked with a guy who was a grandmaster at finding rational explainations of why they needed to do the thing that clearly was bad for them. He was overweight, but every time he ate both extremely unhealthy and much next to us he would explain how his body needs that because he would get a bad mood etc. His excuse not to make sports was some sports accident he had 30 years ago as a 18 years old (a medical condition I happened to knew very well because my marathon-running brother had it as well). For every other sport he also had some excuse, be it cost, traffic, weather, other people doing it being douchebags or whatever. This went all the way to making up a medical condition that gave him a excuse why he cannot visit his estranged child.
This guy had an absolutely phenomenal skill level when it came to self deception. And it only became better when his overweight led to a medical condition and his doctor hammered home that he is going to die if he continues on at this path.
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?
> It seems like, by default, you are stuck with whatever level of resourcefulness you brought to a problem the first time you encountered it and failed to fix it.
Brilliant.
Reminded me of Einstein:
> We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them
This sounds a lot like Learned helplessness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness
> Most of the Group 3 dogs—which had previously learned that nothing they did had any effect on shocks—simply lay down passively and whined when they were shocked
What a cruel time for experimenting on animals the 1960s were...
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.
> 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.
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.
Definitely resonating with some of this right now, continuing on a journey of discovery of my self and my past. Thank you for sharing
Sounds a lot like the Baby Elephant Syndrome. Worth reading into if you're interested in the above.
> 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.
Hm.
Its an easy trap to fall into to say that people are in hard situations because They Arent Trying Hard Enough.
Your manager might think so.
Your company probably thinks youre not trying hard enough.
…but, there is a also reality, which is overloading people with impossible expectations and then watching them fail isnt helpful.
Its not a learning experience.
Its just mean, and selfish… even when those expectations are, perhaps, self imposed.
If youre in one of these situations, you should ask for help.
If you see someone in them, you should offer to help.
Its well documented that gifted children struggle as adults because they struggle under the weigh of expectations.
The soltuion to this is extremely rarey self reflection about not trying hard enough.
Geez. Talk about setting people up for failure.
The OP literally succeeded by asking for help, yet somehow, walked away with no appreciation of it.
This was sort of my takeaway too. The OP got help from someone else and thought to herself “if only I’d tried harder I could’ve done this on my own”. That doesn’t seem like a healthy takeaway.
I didn’t take it that way at all. I took it as “I was blinded from the actual solution because my vision was artificially narrow due to my past experiences with this person.” They didn’t ask for help, their partner intervened for them with a completely different and more direct approach.
I have a kid going thru this right now. It’s very disheartening and frustrating to see, because even with coaching and help, they don’t see the help and suggestions as solutions because they simply can’t see it. And as a parent you don’t want to have to intervene, you want them to learn how to dig their way out of it. But it’s tough to get them to dig when they don’t believe in shovels.
I guess I really don’t like this message because I am a disabled person. In the exercise that she describes where an instructor tells people to stand up from a position that they think they can’t stand up from, what if I actually can’t stand up? It might lead me to believe that perhaps I’m simply not trying enough.
You might think this contrived, but when people tell you over and over that you’re not trying hard enough because of things you can’t control, you internalize it.
To me — someone who has to ask for help — it seems like that she didn’t really notice that help was the thing that helped.
> People are not just high-agency or low-agency in a global sense, across their entire lives. Instead, people are selectively agentic.
Speaking of being agentic, you could probably just ask ChatGPT what to do next time you're not sure.
Also, people are made up of particles that behave deterministically. Agency is an illusion.
Upvoted because many people genuinely believe that agency is an illusion and therefore there's no point in trying. And the "therefore" part is wrong.
The state of believing that you can do it is a state that precedes actually doing it. This is true regardless of whether the universe is deterministic.
Sure and what precedes that is brain activity. You're not "willing" neurons into firing in such a way that will result in a thought to try harder.
> 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.
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).
As a person who would like to excuse my overeating on confirmed problems with blood sugar, I agree with you fully. We have different amount of willpower in different situations and in the same situation between different times of day. But we still have some agency, it's not fully predetermined. And like being overweight, training can help. I would even say that combating fat needs willpower and increases your available willpower too.
The original study was flawed I’m afraid https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41091803
Someone always brings that up. I guess you couldn't help it?
Sounds fun - I'd slap back!
> particles that behave deterministically
I'm not a physicist I'll admit, but this seems like a controversial statement.
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?
Freeze peach is an illusion.