Recently I was feeling down about some stuff at work where I didn’t feel I had made progress. On the weekend I set work down and did family stuff, but I couldn’t get my head out of the problems, and the whole world seemed bad to me.
I tried to feel better by thinking about good things in my life. But I kept making them into things that are bad about the world in general.
I thought: “I have these nice children, I should enjoy this time with them.”
Which led to: “I know all these other people who want to have children and it’s not working out, so if I’m unhappy they must feel even worse.”
I thought: “Things are objectively going well in my life.”
Which would lead me to “Maybe things are about to get a lot worse because of AI or a war or another pandemic.” And to “A lot of my friends are working longer hours than I am on these big problems, and I’m letting them down if I don’t do better at my job. They’re probably working right now even though it’s a weekend.”
I hadn’t eaten much and remembered something I’d heard recently about how people argue with their partners more when their blood sugar is low.
Which led to: “So many people in the world are food-insecure, they probably argue with their partners more than they would if they had enough to eat. That’s so sad.”
Some of these aren’t even factually true — parents are typically a bit less happy than non-parents. Some of them are probably true.
But they’re just as true regardless of how I feel, and they were just as true the week before when I wasn’t paying much attention to them. Jeff lives in the same world as I do and has many of the same factual beliefs, but the negatives don’t lodge in his moods in the same way.
The next week I felt better. And I thought a lot less about things that are wrong in the world. It just wasn’t a topic that stuck naturally in my mind.
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Related: Nate Soares’ “Detach the grim-o-meter”. “Feeling grim or carefree in proportion to the aggregate disparity or well-being on the planet is difficult, impractical, and mostly useless.”
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There are several ways this post could end: choose your own adventure.
A: It’s kind of alarming that I just don’t think much about these problems when I’m feeling better. This seems like part of a big problem. Rich people don’t typically think that much about poor people. Those of us who eat meat typically don’t think that much about the lives of the animals we eat.
B: There is a firehose of sorrows, and I don’t want to stand in its blast.
I can’t see much pattern between soaking in problems and taking effective action on them. Slaughterhouse workers are much more exposed to animals’ suffering than I am, but they don’t tend to be vegetarians. Our own suffering doesn’t reliably make us more compassionate; often it just wears us down.
C: How to identify when feeling sad and uncomfortable about a problem is good?
Some large-scale problems make me feel sad (like people arguing with their partners) but I’m not realistically going to do anything to address them. Those are problems I shouldn’t spend time worrying about.
But other problems are more under my control, so maybe worth worrying about. In the area of my work, I can see some tangible results if I do more or better work. And if I’m feeling bad about people I know working long hours, maybe that’s a useful prompt to consider working harder too.
- But I usually endorse people not working weekends. And especially with young kids, I don’t want to.
- But! I know people who work long hours, including parents of young kids, because they think their work is important for the world. And I really respect that. Maybe feeling bad is pushing me in a useful direction overall, even if it’s not going to change how I spend this particular weekend?
- Or maybe that’s a self-destructive line of thought for me, one that results in me still not working weekends but feeling bad while doing so.
D: My guess is that the state where people do the most good is when they recognize problems but feel pretty good personally, like Jeff. It’s easier to do good work when you wake up ready to go enjoy your breakfast and face the day.
When your brain is telling you the world is a good and beautiful place, I think it’s important to sometimes deliberately look at the appalling parts. At least enough to find some places to make it better.
And when your brain is telling you the world is awful and you are awful, you’re unlikely to do your best work. At least for me, that’s probably when it’s time to be really sure to eat meals and take my meds and go outside and stuff, even though the only activity that feels suitable is crying in the shower.
You are heard.