There’s a really good point there, I’ll restate it: People act like the difficult problems in front of them are the reason for the low moods they are having. As a result of misidentifying the source of the their low mood, they try to solve the mood problem by pouring themselves into working on the issue, but this often just wont work.
I think this is resting on a common myth about human psychology. There actually doesn’t need to be a relationship between the difficulty of the problems in front of us and our emotional affect, or energy levels. It’s a nonsequitur. No matter what problem is in front of you, there’s always something you can do, some next step to take (if you don’t know what the next step is then the next step is figuring out the next step!), and if you are walking forward as well as you can, you should be able to take satisfaction in that. If not, it’s a health thing.
Here’s a separate error that I’ve made many times: People believe that their intellectual knowledge of the world’s problems causes them to act a certain way, when in reality they act that way because of their mood.
I should elaborate the model a little: I think it’s common to be have your mood influenced by the difficulty of problems (I’ve experienced that a lot), but it doesn’t need to be, and this is usually a result of not respecting the problems enough to acknowledge that every small step towards solving them counts for a lot, or not having enough faith that you’ll be able to continue making progress, or believing too much that you are trapped on a particular course.
There’s a really good point there, I’ll restate it: People act like the difficult problems in front of them are the reason for the low moods they are having. As a result of misidentifying the source of the their low mood, they try to solve the mood problem by pouring themselves into working on the issue, but this often just wont work.
I think this is resting on a common myth about human psychology. There actually doesn’t need to be a relationship between the difficulty of the problems in front of us and our emotional affect, or energy levels. It’s a nonsequitur. No matter what problem is in front of you, there’s always something you can do, some next step to take (if you don’t know what the next step is then the next step is figuring out the next step!), and if you are walking forward as well as you can, you should be able to take satisfaction in that. If not, it’s a health thing.
Sometimes this is true! In which case I recommend contemplating “Detach the grim-o-meter.”
Here’s a separate error that I’ve made many times: People believe that their intellectual knowledge of the world’s problems causes them to act a certain way, when in reality they act that way because of their mood.
I should elaborate the model a little: I think it’s common to be have your mood influenced by the difficulty of problems (I’ve experienced that a lot), but it doesn’t need to be, and this is usually a result of not respecting the problems enough to acknowledge that every small step towards solving them counts for a lot, or not having enough faith that you’ll be able to continue making progress, or believing too much that you are trapped on a particular course.