You may have heard of the poverty trap, where you have so little money that you’re not able to spend any money on the things you need to make more. Being broke is an attractor state.
You may have heard of the loneliness trap. You haven’t had much social interaction lately, which makes you feel bad and anxious. This anxiety makes it harder to engage in social interaction. Being lonely is an attractor state.
I think the latter is a close cousin of something that I’d like to call the irrelevance trap:
Lemma 1: having responsibilities is psychologically empowering. When others depend on your decisions, it is so much easier to make the right decision.
Lemma 2: being psychologically empowered makes it more likely for you to take on responsibility, and for others to give you responsibility, because you’re more able to handle it.
I speculate that some forms of depression (the dopaminergic type) are best understood as irrelevance traps. I’m pretty sure that that was the case for me.
How do you escape such a trap? Well you escape a loneliness trap by going against your intuition and showing up at a party. You escape an irrelevance trap by going against your intuition and taking on more responsibility than you feel you can handle.
I like this direction of thought. Note that for all of these traps, success is more often a matter of improvement rather than binary change or “escape from trap”. And persistence plays a large role—very few improvements come from a single attempt.
You may have heard of the poverty trap, where you have so little money that you’re not able to spend any money on the things you need to make more. Being broke is an attractor state.
You may have heard of the loneliness trap. You haven’t had much social interaction lately, which makes you feel bad and anxious. This anxiety makes it harder to engage in social interaction. Being lonely is an attractor state.
I think the latter is a close cousin of something that I’d like to call the irrelevance trap:
Lemma 1: having responsibilities is psychologically empowering. When others depend on your decisions, it is so much easier to make the right decision.
Lemma 2: being psychologically empowered makes it more likely for you to take on responsibility, and for others to give you responsibility, because you’re more able to handle it.
I speculate that some forms of depression (the dopaminergic type) are best understood as irrelevance traps. I’m pretty sure that that was the case for me.
How do you escape such a trap? Well you escape a loneliness trap by going against your intuition and showing up at a party. You escape an irrelevance trap by going against your intuition and taking on more responsibility than you feel you can handle.
I like this direction of thought. Note that for all of these traps, success is more often a matter of improvement rather than binary change or “escape from trap”. And persistence plays a large role—very few improvements come from a single attempt.
Sounds very close to what Peterson says
He does influence my thinking