Maybe You're Not Actually Trying to Solve Your Problems?

You are not giving yourself advice that you would have given other people?

Cate Hall has an interesting article about “agency¹”. She talks about a time when she had a stalker and how nothing she tried solved the problem. Later her husband convinced her to let him intervene and the problem was solved in a few months. The most interesting part of the solution was this:

One of the interesting things about all of this is that there was nothing particularly inventive about the strategies my husband deployed. They were more or less exactly the strategies I would have come up with if I’d been put in charge of a similar situation in someone else’s life. Why did it take another person getting involved for me to realize I wasn’t Actually Trying?

I think what happened is this: When the stalker entered my life, I was at a low point in personal capacity—broke, alone, addled, etc. My approach towards him at that point (ignore, hoping he’d stop) 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.

You might not have a stalker but the problem is common enough that it has a name: Solomon’s Paradox, named after King Solomon who was famous for giving others wise advice but often struggled with applying the same advice to his own problems.

You can verify this yourself quite easily. Take any problem you’re struggling with currently. Now, imagine that a friend of yours comes to you with the same problems. If you do it carefully enough, you’ll notice that you find it quite easy to give advice to your friend, but you have a bunch of “convincing” reasons why you can’t take that advice yourself. The solution, often, is to override those convincing reasons and take that advice.

An important corollary is the fact that we routinely solve problems in on area of life (e.g. work) but for some reasons, we are not able to bring the same agency to another area of our life (e.g. personal relationships). Of course, many corporate techniques do not belong in your personal life, but some do.

In my particular corner of the world, there are tons of high-achievers in work. These are ingenious people shaping the world through innovations in science, technology, and policy. But many of them haven’t applied the same ingenuity to their interior experience or relationships. 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.

It is as if we bring different personalities to the different aspects of our lives, and as a result, we aren’t solving the problems that we could solve if we just brought in the attitudes from one of the other personalities. In other words, we aren’t really trying.

Read the full article here.

What do you think?

1. “Agency” is an increasingly important concept as GenAI takes over the world, and I should write a full article about it one of these days, but it is still a little fuzzy in my head. So until then, I’ll keep referring to it without really defining it. If anyone has seen a good introduction to agency, please mention it in comments. (I’m aware of George Mack's HighAgency.com)