(2024-01-02) So You Wanna Debog Yourself

Adam Mastroianni: So you wanna de-bog yourself. Strangers sometimes ask me for advice, which is both flattering and alarming. These folks have something in common: they're stuck. They’re looking for advice less in the sense of “any good restaurants around here?” and more in the sense of “everything kinda sucks right now and I’d like to change that but I don’t know how?”

Being stuck is the psychological equivalent of standing knee-deep in a fetid bog, bog in every direction, bog as far as the eye can see.

no matter how you ended up there... the forces that keep you in the bog are always the same. There are, in fact, only three, although they each come in a variety of foul flavors.

unsticking myself always seems to be a matter of finding a name for the thing happening to me

1. INSUFFICIENT ACTIVATION ENERGY

Most of my attempts to get unstuck look, from the outside, like I'm doing nothing at all. I'm standing motionless in the bog, crying, “THIS IS ME TRYING!”

There are few different ways to end up here.

Gutterballing

People will sometimes approach me with projects I don't really want to do.

*I often end up signing on to these projects, feeling resentful the whole time, cursing myself for choosing—freely!—to work hard on things I don't care about.

This is gutterballing: excelling, but in slightly the wrong direction.*

Waiting for jackpot

Sometimes when I'm stuck, someone will be like, “Why don't you do [reasonable option]?” and I'll go, “Hold on there, buddy! Don't you see this option has downsides? Find me one with only upsides, and then we'll talk!”

Strangely, this never seems to happen.

Declining the dragon

this is a version of waiting for jackpot, but it's so common that it deserves its own entry.

I'll know exactly what I need to do in order to leave the bog, but I'm too afraid to do it. I'm afraid to tell the truth, or make someone mad, or take a risk.

Whenever you chicken out, you don't just feel the pain of cowardice; you miss out on the pleasure of courage.
Medieval knights used to wander around hoping for honorable adventures to pop up so that they could demonstrate their bravery. They were desperate for big, scary dragons to appear. When I put off doing the brave thing, I am declining the dragon

The mediocrity trap

About half of my friends kind of hate their jobs, so they're moderately unhappy most of the time, but never unhappy enough to leave

Mediocre situations, long languished in, simply become Lost Years—boring to both live through and talk about, like you're sitting in a waiting room with no cell reception, no wifi, and no good magazines, waiting for someone to come in and tell you it's time to start living.

Stroking the problem

It looks like a good use of time, but it's just a form of socially acceptable anxiety, a way to continue your suffering indefinitely by becoming obsessed with it.

2. BAD ESCAPE PLAN

Even if you've worked up a big enough head of steam to launch yourself out of the bog, you still have to aim properly. (“I’m doing it! I'm doing it!” I shout as I crash land onto my launch pad.) Here are a few of my recurring bad escape plans:

The “try harder” fallacy

I behold my situation and conclude that, somehow, I will improve it in the future by just sort of wishing it to be different, and then I get indignant that nothing happens. Like, “Um, excuse me! I've been doing all of this very diligent desiring for things to be different, and yet they remain the same, could someone please look into this?”

The infinite effort illusion

the idea that you have this secret unused stock of effort that you can deploy in the future to get yourself unstuck. I'm always a week late responding to emails? No problem, I'll simply uncork my Strategic Effort Reserve and clear my correspondence debt.

Blaming God

if there were only 25 hours in the day,

Diploma problems and toothbrushing problems

Some problems are like getting a diploma: you work at it for a while, and then you're done forever. Learning how to ride a bike is a classic diploma problem. But most problems aren’t like that. They’re more like toothbrushing problems: you have to work at them forever until you die.

When I had a skull full of poison, I assumed feeling good again was a diploma problem.

I only started making progress when I realized I was facing a toothbrushing problem: feeling normal again would probably require me to do stuff every day for the rest of my life.

Fantastical metamorphosis

Here’s one of my favorite bad escape plans: I’ll just be a different person in the future.

Puppeteering

it feels like the only solution is to get other people to act differently. I'm only stuck because other people are unreasonable!

3. A BOG OF ONE'S OWN

A confession: most of my bogs are imaginary. The world doesn’t stick me there; I stick me there. These are, paradoxically, the most difficult bogs to escape, because it requires realizing that my perception of reality is not reality, and a lot of the mind is dedicated to preventing that exact thought.

Floor is lava

very early on, we acquire the ability to pretend that fake problems are real. We then spend the rest of our lives doing exactly that.

Super surveillance

tracking every problem in the world as if they were all somehow, ultimately, my problems. Super surveillance is an express ticket to the bog, because the world is full of problems and you'd be lucky to solve even a single one.

Hedgehogging

Sometimes I get this feeling like, “Nothing will ever work out for me, I will always be unhappy, the rest of my life will be a sort of wandering twilight punctuated with periods of misery.”
And my wife will go, “You're hungry.”

refusing to be influenced by others, even when you should.

Personal problems growth ray

makes all of your own problems seem larger than life, while other people's stay actual size.

Obsessing over tiny predictors

It's scary to admit that you can't control the future; it's a lot easier to distract yourself by trying to optimize every decision, no matter how insignificant

Impossible satisfaction

Some people think the bog is life!

most of the people I know who feel this way haven’t survived any atomic bombings at all.

Their problem is they believe that satisfaction is impossible

WISHING YOU GOOD ALTITUDE

That's why having goofy names for them matters so much, because it reminds me not to believe the biggest bog lie of all: that I'm stuck in a situation unlike any I, or anyone else, has ever seen before