How to Pick Better Problems
The reality is that you’re never going to solve all of your problems. That’s a good thing - the problems that we engage in are what helps us decide what’s meaningful in life. On the flip-side, avoiding problems makes us feel depressed and dead inside. With this in mind, how do we pick our problems? How do we know we’re spending our time on things that are worthwhile?
I’d like to start off by classifying different types of problems since that’ll make it easier to pick which ones to solve. One thing I want to emphasize is that finding a fix for a problem doesn’t necessarily mean that the problem will be solved, as we’ll see for certain classes of problems.
Problems Avoided - Oftentimes, we invent tasks that are meant to distract us from a more painful underlying problem. The classic example would be a workaholic spending long hours at work in order to avoid his marriage. His preoccupation with work allows him to avoid the more difficult problem waiting at home. The workaholic probably doesn’t even need to be putting in as many hours as he does into his job. His mind operates in a way that allows him to bring these artificially generated problems to the front and center of his mind while pushing the problem of his deteriorating marriage into the recesses of his subconscious.
Problems Undiscovered - These are problems that lay dormant within the subconscious. They tend to be the root cause of the other two classes of problems, but unlike the avoided ones, are not consciously recognized by the individual. Building off of the workaholic example above, the individual has the deteriorating marriage as the problem avoided, but further down they may have childhood trauma that has been long forgotten, waiting to be rediscovered.
Problems Acted Upon - These are the problems that we bring to the forefront of our consciousness and spend our time thinking about them. Our internal monologue typically consists of statements about these kinds of problems. I have two subcategories for these kinds of problems.
Illegitimate problems - These are the problems created in response to the existence of an avoided problem.
Legitimate problems - These are problems that we truly believe are important to us. They are not the result of any kind of avoidance.
Say we have person A with a set of problems {a}. If they manage to solve a problem from {a}, but it’s an illegitimate problem, then the person will stay not grow and end up with set of problems {a’} since the avoided problem creates a new illegitimate problem to fill the void. If this person deals with a different problem, a legitimate problem, then they end up growing and have a set of problems {b}. If the person decides to do some reflection and find more problems that lay undiscovered, they’ll still be the same person but have set of problems {c}, which gives them more information as to what they need to do. We begin to see how one may navigate through their sets of problems if they want to get to a better place in life. Dealing with illegitimate problems, something psychologists term as avoidance, keeps the person stuck in state A with the illusion of progression. This illusion can be so powerful that they have just enough energy to mask the underlying depression that entails avoidance and convince themselves that they are going on the right path. Eventually, no illegitimate problem can provide enough distraction from the problem the individual is avoiding, and the person crashes and burns out.
Now that we know we shouldn’t give in to avoidance and make sure that the problems that we’re acting upon are legitimate, where do undiscovered problems fit into all of this? These problems that remain undiscovered are important since discovering them can render problems that we spend time thinking about unnecessary. I believe that most of the personal problems that we find to be legitimate are rooted from problems within the subconscious. The subconscious sees solving a certain problem as the equivalent to solving the problem buried within the subconscious. However, there is an issue that achieving some external outcome rarely satisfies the root problem. I’ve written about this topic in Debugging Cognition As Though It's Software and Language and Mindfulness - Understanding Psychodynamics and The Internal Monologue.
I make use of this system by doing a brain dump every day or two and writing out what things are bothering me and framing each of these as problems. I then go through and categorize these problems as legitimate or illegitimate, and if something gets categorized as illegitimate, I write down what I’m running away from that is the underlying issue. After that, I’ll take some time to question whether the problems I’ve marked as legitimate may have some deeper undiscovered root that I haven’t become conscious of yet using meditation and the techniques described in those two links above. This whole process allows me to make sure I’m not wasting my time and brings back perspective onto what’s important and what values I actually stand for.