Annoyingly, this exchange feels like it’s starting to get somewhere interesting now.
My response to “what of it” would kind of along those lines, but rather than having some sort of binary state of crisis/not-crisis, there are ongoing areas or subjects in one’s life that are cognitively expensive to think about. These subjects might popularly be called “unresolved issues”, but that carries a lot of unnecessary connotations.
An especially banal personal example is a task I have to occasionally do at work, which involves dealing with a particularly counterintuitive data structure that we haven’t automated yet. It’s horrible to think about, and as a result I find it very draining to work with (cf. ego depletion), and this influences decisions I make regarding it. I avoid dealing with it even though it’s quite important, and my distress at dealing with it, coupled with its generally perverse structure, means I make a lot of mistakes when doing so.
If I had a good way of thinking about this data structure, it wouldn’t be so exhausting or unpleasant to work with. But the process of coming up with a good way of thinking about it is itself exhausting and unpleasant. This would be me “coming to terms with”, “working through”, “seeking closure” or “processing” the general problem of my evil data structure, but it’s laborious and nasty, so I can’t just do it. There’s a cost involved.
If you don’t acknowledge that cost (such as not believing in something like ego depletion, as some people don’t), it would be easy to say “just update already”, but updating isn’t free. It’s work, and that work can’t necessarily be carried out in one go.
Annoyingly, this exchange feels like it’s starting to get somewhere interesting now.
My response to “what of it” would kind of along those lines, but rather than having some sort of binary state of crisis/not-crisis, there are ongoing areas or subjects in one’s life that are cognitively expensive to think about. These subjects might popularly be called “unresolved issues”, but that carries a lot of unnecessary connotations.
An especially banal personal example is a task I have to occasionally do at work, which involves dealing with a particularly counterintuitive data structure that we haven’t automated yet. It’s horrible to think about, and as a result I find it very draining to work with (cf. ego depletion), and this influences decisions I make regarding it. I avoid dealing with it even though it’s quite important, and my distress at dealing with it, coupled with its generally perverse structure, means I make a lot of mistakes when doing so.
If I had a good way of thinking about this data structure, it wouldn’t be so exhausting or unpleasant to work with. But the process of coming up with a good way of thinking about it is itself exhausting and unpleasant. This would be me “coming to terms with”, “working through”, “seeking closure” or “processing” the general problem of my evil data structure, but it’s laborious and nasty, so I can’t just do it. There’s a cost involved.
If you don’t acknowledge that cost (such as not believing in something like ego depletion, as some people don’t), it would be easy to say “just update already”, but updating isn’t free. It’s work, and that work can’t necessarily be carried out in one go.